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Similes
Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Mr. Pirzada's Daughters:
“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” uses situational irony when Lilia obsessively anticipates the loss she thinks will befall Mr. Pirzada. Lilia’s journey towards greater maturity and awareness comes with uneasy bouts of foreboding. As the news pours in through the TV one night, she worries on behalf of Mr. Pirzada:
My stomach tightened as I worried whether his wife and seven daughters were now members of the drifting crowd that flashed at intervals on the screen.
This new knowledge sets in motion a self-reinforcing cycle of ritual and guilt. Lilia feels compelled to pray for Mr. Pirzada but cannot stop imagining disaster, either. The more she frets over Mr. Pirzada, the more she feels certain "that Mr. Pirzada’s family [is] in all likelihood dead." Afraid to articulate tragedy but compelled to imagine it, Lilia prompts the reader to expect disaster. Trick-or-treating with Dora, she accidentally suggests that Mr. Pirzada’s daughters have gone “missing” and recoils at the thought of somehow having made this come true by saying it. By dissolving the boundaries between her imagination and the events around her, Lilia seeds the expectation of tragedy and, in doing so, braces readers for the approaching calamity.
Lilia, as it turns out, is mistaken—Mr. Pirzada’s daughters do not die. Far from it: they have actually retreated to the mountains of Shillong and grown taller in the interim. The story’s irony is not that Mr. Pirzada loses his family, but that Lilia ultimately loses him. Mr. Pirzada returns to Pakistan, where he reunites with his children and leaves Lilia behind, spotlighting instead the fragility and transience of diasporic connections.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Thank You:
Mr. Pirzada satirizes the failings of the English language and U.S. culture by lamenting how often Americans say "thank you" when they don't mean it. Over dinner one night, he explains to Lilia his confusion about the expression:
“‘What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me as the tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.’”
Mr. Pirzada pokes fun at his own struggle to understand American conventions. In doing so, he criticizes its hollowness. His speech takes on a slightly morbid turn as he imagines his own funeral, and the hyperbolic speech points to something more troublesome than a purely lighthearted attempt at cultural initiation. “Thank you,” as Mr. Pirzada suggests, has become a catch-all for every circumstance, to the point where it crudely trivializes matters of death and suffering. Used for bank deposits, missed phone calls, and people in caskets, the phrase has lost its meaning.
Mr. Pirzada takes this logic to its absurd extremes in order to expose the problem beneath this twisted language. By muddling words and their contexts, Americans do injury with their ignorance. Superficial mannerisms fail to do justice to the gravity of the weight of lost lives, and neither will they resolve the geopolitical conflict. And yet, Americans can afford this linguistic sloppiness because they have been granted the luxury of obliviousness. Mr. Pirzada’s critique takes issue with the country’s easygoing detachment from global affairs.
The irony is that Mr. Pirzada ends up adopting the phrase himself. When Lilia receives his letter following his return to Pakistan, she notices that:
At the end of the letter he thanked us for our hospitality, adding that although he now understood the meaning of the words ‘thank you’ they still were not adequate to express his gratitude.
This moment is situationally ironic, as Mr. Pirzada uses the very phrase he satirized earlier in the story. His use of the phrase hints at his newfound familiarity with America, and in this context, it makes the story’s conclusion still more jarring. Colored by lazy bank tellers and librarians, “thank you” injects a faux-formality between him and Lilia’s family. In turn, his use of the phrase comes to signify his emotional removal and departure from Lilia and her family.
