ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how language translates the idea of lament as the expression of loss and pain into a fictional format that encourages empathy and exorcises grief in Indian English fiction. The case studies under scrutiny here are Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020) and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (2020, originally published in India as Girl in White Cotton). Combining theories and tools borrowed from narratology and cognitive stylistics, and adapting them to the postcolonial scenario, the chapter investigates the way in which the two authors organise the point of view of the narrative, which is responsible for the effects generated in the reader such as empathetic identification or resistance, respectively exemplified by the depiction of the miserable life of slum children, in the first case, and the disturbing image of hostile maternal relations that emerges from the textual construction of memory in the second.