How Syal presents Meena Kumar, and how the character develops across the text: the lively, imaginative narrator who lies and steals to fit in, longs to belong in Tollington and to be like Anita, learns pride in her Punjabi heritage through Nanima, and leaves Tollington wiser and truthful.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'too Indian to be a real Tollington wench', 'I want fishfingers', 'I'd use it on her one day', 'Coz this ain't naff old Wolverhampton anymore', 'showed willing as a devoted sister', 'What A Mess But It's Not My Fault', 'I now knew I was not a bad girl', 'a girl with no name or no place'.
Form: Meena as both character and narrator, a child's voice ('scabby') alongside an adult's hindsight, and a liar whose imagination is also how she copes.
Context: Syal's description of Meena as 'a rebel and a square peg in a round hole', and the parallels with Syal's own childhood as a Punjabi girl in a West Midlands mining village.
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.
