The Storyteller's Secret

“I’m lying. It wasn’t a decision. Instead, it was years of my crying and his stepping further and further away until he couldn’t hear me.”

As Jaya’s marriage falls apart following her third miscarriage, Jaya admits that she and Patrick have been growing distant for years. The depression and desperation she feels at not being able to carry a baby to term isolate her from Patrick.

“To share my sorrow meant reliving the past with the one person who had already experienced it. I was too weak to carry his grief atop mine, so it seemed safer to stop sharing.”

At the beginning of the narrative, Jaya’s separation from Patrick is largely due to the emotional distance she creates between them. Unable to reconcile her loss, Jaya withdraws from Patrick as a way to protect herself, but this damages them both. Once Jaya gets to India, she realizes how little she has shared with her husband in recent years.

“The bird’s course was set from the start. He wasted time in trying to be different.”

In response to a story Amisha tells Deepak on their wedding night, Deepak reaffirms their culture’s gender expectations by stating that the bird in Amisha’s story is foolish for attempting to find a different path in life. This reflects Deepak’s deep traditionalism and his continual suppression of Amisha’s independence.