Every thing in the description

Ayah’s Rape vs. Ranna’s Story

The text's silence about Ayah's story, moreover, has other ramifications. The rape of Ayah—absent and untold—occurs structurally at the center of the text, the point from which the narrative separates Lenny (in every way) from her erstwhile double. In fact, upon her disappearance, it shifts unexpectedly to a segment entitled "Ranna's Story." Ranna, a Muslim village boy and Lenny's cook's great-grandson, arrives suddenly to give his harrowing account of his escape from the mass violence perpetrated upon his family by Sikhs. While perhaps the most graphic section of the novel, it is structurally set aside from the main narrative. The only part of the novel not told in Lenny's voice, this oddly juxtaposed, artistically awkward device bespeaks a desire perhaps to bring in the horror in some other way, but not to bring it too close. Ranna and his lost women relatives appear briefly only to vanish quickly from the main narrative, as if their only function was to substitute for what happened to Ayah, who substitutes for Lenny. Interestingly, Lenny acquires another "ayah," who is a lower-class peasant Muslim woman in turn a victim from the other side. While the narrative's inclusion of Hamida here suggests an impulse to render equally the violence enacted upon Muslim women too, it does not attempt to grant her even the agency or centrality given to Ranna. Moreover, it solidifies the illusion that rape is a lower-class affair and serves to enhance the rehabilitatory generosity of the family that takes her in.