How Syal explores friendship and its balance of power, from Meena's hero-worship of Anita to the truer friendships she finds with Nanima and Robert across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'privileged to be in her company', 'It stung, but I did not pull my legs back', 'Am yow comin' then, our Meena?', 'those you called friends could suddenly become tormentors', 'even in the darkness', 'most fun of all the Aunties', 'soul mate'.
Power in Meena and Anita's friendship: who tests whom, who rescues whom, and how the balance shifts from hero-worship to pity and then to Meena's freedom.
Truer friendships: Nanima, Robert and the notes and secret language he shares with Meena in hospital, and the Kumars' circle of aunties and uncles.
OCR's specimen question on the difficulties of teenage friendship and growing up, with a passage in which Meena feels betrayed by her best friend.
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.
