Just Below the Surface

Analytical essay

Just below the surface

It can be difficult to move from one place to another. From a neighbourhood where there are fixed standards to a whole new place where you have to adapt again. This is hard enough already, but if you do not feel welcome, for example, because ot the colour of your skin, it becomes even more difficult. Especially if you take some of the slum with you, even if it is unconscious.

Some of these themes are portrayed in the short story just below the surface by Kate Nivison.

This story story present Indrani, who was moved to Wanstead a suburb with her husband and their two children. They now live on Broadmead, and has moved from a how-class neighbourhood to a high-class neighbourhood with white dominated suburb. A place “where the suburbs are green and leafy and the houses expensive^[1]”  The time setting is not mentioned by neither the author or the characters but we can assume that it is present time. The social setting is very important, because it presents the way in which society tends to display racist and their views on immigrants. One day Indrani finds a rat hole, and is ashamed to tell her husband.  Eventually he also finds out that they have rats in their new house. The story is mostly about how to get rid of these rats, but also about how big embarrassment Indrani feel facing this problem, and how the outside world reacts to it. It is told in first person narrator, seen from Indrani´s perspective which means that we only know what she knows, therefore we can be sure that the people around her is felling the same about different situations.

The main characters in the story is Indrani and her husband Kumar. Their children are only mentioned and are not relevant. The others character’s that Indrani meats like the people in the shop and the two men from council are very important for the theme of this short story because they illustrate racist views an almost see her and her family as rats who has to go back where they came from. The characters Indrani helps to substantiate some of the prejudices that people might have about immigrants. It seems to be her husband who decides, and she does not seem to have particularly good self-esteem and confidence. But she believes her husband is much better than her. It seems like he defines her world “I got out the Pears Cyclopaedia which Kumar had bought on recommendation to help me learn about things” and Kumar are afraid that she will lose his culture, and therefore he isolates his wife “So he said I would soon be wearing trousers and eating roast beef.