Chapters 4 to 6: family stories, Diwali, the fair and Sunil — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Chapters 4 to 6: family stories, Diwali, the fair and Sunil
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Papa's musical evenings and the aunties' and uncles' stories of India and Partition, the car rolling back at the traffic lights and the old woman's insult, Diwali in a village that ignores it,
the travelling fair with Anita, Sherrie and Fat Sally, Sunil's birth and Mama's exhaustion, Meena's cousins Pinky and Baby, and the Wenches' Brigade.
Key quotations: 'Acha Kumar saab, let's go!', 'How could they have kept all this from me for so long?', 'blood red trains', 'Other parents did not behave like they did', 'deliberately exaggerated Tollington accent', 'sweet-faced elderly woman', 'welcome the goddess Lakshmi', 'nobody, not one person had wished me', 'flashing fairground lights', 'something about me so off-putting'.
Structure: moments of belonging and exclusion set side by side, as the warmth of the musical evenings and Diwali at home meets indifference and insult outside it.
Context: Partition remembered by the elders, Diwali as 'Our Christmas' to Meena, and the travelling fair's families, whom the village distrusts and Meena envies.
OCR's 2022 comparison: the car rolling back at the traffic lights, where Meena's charm and Black Country voice head off the hostility she fears, before the insult that follows.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
