Chapters 7 to 10: the fete, Nanima and Anita's visit — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Chapters 7 to 10: the fete, Nanima and Anita's visit
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The elders' talk of India and Britain, the village fete and Sam Lowbridge's racist outburst, and Meena's sense afterwards of how different her family's life is,
Nanima's arrival from India and her stay, as Meena learns Punjabi and grows proud of her heritage, and Anita's visit to the Kumars' house.
Key quotations: 'I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach', 'My legs felt watery and a hot panic softened my insides to mush', 'I did not live under the same sky as most other people', 'reverence and adoration', 'small vessel', 'the ocean of longing', 'no regard to English body language rules'.
Structure: the fete as a turning point, when a village celebration turns into Sam's outburst, followed by Nanima's arrival, which begins to change how Meena sees herself.
Context: anger in a declining village about a planned motorway that will destroy parts of it, which Sam turns into racist abuse.
OCR's mark schemes suggest Sam's interruption of the fete, Nanima's first appearance on the doorstep and Anita's visit as moments for the second part (2024 and 2025).
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.
