How Syal presents Nanima, and how the character develops across the text: Meena's grandmother from India, whose arrival, stories, Punjabi and mischief give Meena pride in her heritage and a new kind of friendship before she returns home.
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: 'Suddenly I was in the middle of a soft warm pillow', 'smelt of cardamom and sweet, sharp sweat', 'sparks fizzing from her fingertips', 'a lilting lullaby in a minor key', 'peacocks ululating on tiled flat rooftops', 'shrivel like slugs under salt', 'I was ten feet tall', 'like the goddess on top of the fridge', 'swathed in red and gold silk like a new bride'.
Nanima's Punjabi and the lessons that let Meena into the adults' conversations, and Meena's grief when Nanima goes home while she is in hospital.
Form: imagery of warmth, magic and India around Nanima, and the meeting with Sam's gang, when Meena feels Nanima's strength as her own.
OCR's mark schemes name Nanima's first appearance on the doorstep as a memorable description (2024) and the reverence the family shows her (2021).
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.
