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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mrs. Sen’s, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Isolation and Loneliness
Assimilation and Foreignness
Femininity, Gender Roles, and Culture
Summary
Analysis
The year before Eliot started going to Mrs. Sen’s after school, a college student looked after him until she eventually graduated and moved away. Then, an older woman named Mrs. Linden took over—until Eliot’s mother discovered that she was drinking on the job. After this, Eliot’s mother finds Mrs. Sen’s advertisement on a bulletin board at the supermarket: “Professor’s wife, responsible and kind, I will care for your child in my home.” When she calls Mrs. Sen, Eliot’s mother explains that Eliot is 11 and that he just needs an adult present in case of an emergency. She tells Mrs. Sen that the previous babysitters came to their house—but Mrs. Sen can’t, because she doesn’t know how to drive.
Eliot’s string of babysitters over the past year clues readers into the fact that Eliot’s mother is likely a working woman who isn’t available to take care of Eliot after school. Notably, Eliot is babysat by strangers (and not particularly trustworthy ones, judging by the woman who drank while looking after him) rather than relatives or family friends. This hints that Eliot and his mother may be isolated from their extended family, and that they perhaps struggle to find people with whom they can form close, trusting relationships. Meanwhile, Mrs. Sen’s description of herself as a “Professor’s wife, responsible and kind” immediately characterizes her as someone who centers her identity around her role as a housewife—and someone who may be able to give Eliot the maternal care that his other babysitters (and perhaps his own mother) have failed to provide him with. Mrs. Sen’s inability to drive, however, subtly hints that she may struggle with isolation and loneliness as well.
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Eliot and his mother go to meet Mr. and Mrs. Sen at their university apartment, which is clean but old and shabby, with mismatched carpet squares and furniture wrapped in protective plastic. The Sens both take off their shoes inside and wear flip flops around the house. Mrs. Sen introduces Mr. Sen by saying that he teaches mathematics at the university, “as if they were only distantly acquainted.” Eliot admires Mrs. Sen’s sari and traditional Indian makeup, and he thinks that his mother’s conservative outfit looks out of place in the apartment.
Mrs. Sen’s traditional Indian dress and makeup are clues that the Sens have only recently immigrated to the U.S. and haven’t fully assimilated into American culture. Mrs. Sen’s appearance, combined with the fact that the Sens wear flip-flops in the house, are small but significant cultural differences that set them apart from Americans like Eliot and his mother. Eliot doesn’t seem to mind this—he admires Mrs. Sen’s appearance and thinks that his mother is the one who looks odd in her typical American work clothes. The Sens’ small, shabby university apartment indicates that they aren’t particularly well-off, which begins to challenge the common notion that people who immigrate to North America are automatically met with prosperity and opportunity. Furthermore, the way Mrs. Sen introduces Mr. Sen—“as if they were only distantly acquainted”—hints that she does indeed feel lonely and isolated in her new life in the U.S., even though she has her husband.
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Mrs. Sen repeatedly offers Eliot’s mother some biscuits, but she refuses each time. She asks Mrs. Sen questions about her babysitting experience and how long she’s lived in this country. Above all, she’s concerned that Mrs. Sen can’t drive, since Eliot’s mother works 50 miles north and his father lives 2,000 miles away. Mr. Sen assures Eliot’s mother that he’s teaching Mrs. Sen, and that she should have her license by December. Mrs. Sen explains that they had a chauffeur when they lived in India. Looking around the modest apartment, Eliot’s mother seems skeptical of this.
Eliot doesn’t mind going to Mrs. Sen’s after school. The beach house that he and his mother live in is cold this time of year, and the beach is empty now that tourist season is over—there’s no one for him to play with. The Sens’ apartment, in contrast, is warm. Eliot likes watching Mrs. Sen chop up vegetables for dinner each evening, but she never lets him help. She uses a traditional Indian blade to prepare the food. One day, Mrs. Sen tells Eliot how her mother would have all the women in her neighborhood cook together before celebrations—during those times, it would be so loud that it was hard to sleep. Here, Mrs. Sen finds it hard to sleep in silence.
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On another day, Mrs. Sen asks Eliot if anyone would come to help her if she screamed. She says that in India, people would always come to help or celebrate if a neighbor made a noise of joy or distress, even though not everyone had telephones. This makes Eliot think of a time when his neighbors had a Labor Day party (which he and his mother weren’t invited to). This was one of the rare days his mother had off work, but they did chores all day rather than going anywhere. That evening, his mother had called the neighbors during their party and asked them to quiet down. Presently, Eliot tells Mrs. Sen that someone might call, but it might just be to complain that she was making too much noise.
Mrs. Sen always hides all the evidence of her food preparation before Eliot’s mother comes to pick him up, which makes Eliot feel like they are disobeying a rule. When Eliot’s mother arrives, she hovers outside and tries to avoid coming in, but Mrs. Sen won’t allow this. She always serves Eliot’s mother traditional Indian food, but Eliot’s mother never eats much and says that she had a late lunch, which Eliot knows isn’t true. (She’s told Eliot that she doesn’t like the taste of Mrs. Sen’s food.) When they get home, she immediately drinks wine and eats bread and cheese. Then, she orders Eliot pizza for dinner and leaves him to clean up while she smokes a cigarette.
Every afternoon, Mrs. Sen waits for Eliot at the bus stop—she seems to arrive early, and she always brings Eliot a snack. Mrs. Sen then practices driving with Eliot in the car for 20 minutes. She says that she feels strange leaving Eliot alone in the apartment, but Eliot knows that she takes him along because she’s afraid to drive alone. She says that Mr. Sen tells her “everything will improve” once she gets her license, and she asks Eliot if he thinks so too. Eliot points out that she’d be able go places, but Mrs. Sen is only interested in going to Calcutta.
Driving practice makes Mrs. Sen nervous: she makes slow circles around the apartment complex and continuously gets distracted by pedestrians or birds in the road. Eliot tries to explain how to turn onto the main road with other cars, but she’s too afraid. He thinks how easy it looks when his mother drives. Seeing the other cars makes Mrs. Sen’s hands shake, and her English falters as she says, “Everyone, this people, too much in their world.”
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Eliot learns that two things make Mrs. Sen happy: the first is receiving letters from home. She has Eliot check the mail while she waits with great anticipation, and when Eliot finds a letter one day, she hugs him. When they get back to the apartment, Mrs. Sen quickly reads the letter and calls Mr. Sen to tell him what it says. She’s too excited to stay in the apartment, so she takes Eliot to the university to walk around campus.
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Mrs. Sen repeatedly takes the letter out of her purse, rereading it and sighing to herself. Finally, she tells Eliot that her sister has had a baby girl, and that she thinks the child will three years old by the time she meets her—she and her niece will be strangers. She asks Eliot if he misses his mother in the afternoons, but it’s never occurred to him to miss her. Mrs. Sen tells Eliot that he’s wiser than she was at his age, because he already knows that he’ll be separated from family one day.
The second thing that makes Mrs. Sen happy is a whole fish from the seaside. One evening, she tells Eliot’s mother that she finds it hard to get the fresh fish she likes in American supermarkets, so she gets it from a fish market instead. She wants the fish because she ate it twice a day when she was growing up in Calcutta. Every few days, Mrs. Sen calls the fish market to ask if there’s fresh fish—and if there is, she sends Mr. Sen to get it.
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One day, Mr. Sen tells Mrs. Sen that he can’t go to get the fish anymore because he needs to hold office hours for his students. Mrs. Sen cooks chicken instead for a few days—but soon, the market calls and tells her that they have fresh fish available for her. She calls Mr. Sen to go get it, but he refuses. Mrs. Sen is very upset, and she asks Eliot if it’s too much to ask of Mrs. Sen.
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Mrs. Sen then takes Eliot into her bedroom and shows him all the saris she has never worn in the U.S. and tells him that her family thinks she lives “the life of a queen” simply because she lives in America. Eventually, Mr. Sen calls back and agrees to take Mrs. Sen and Eliot to the fish market; he tries to get Mrs. Sen to drive there, but she refuses.
Mr. Sen takes the same roads that Eliot’s mother does when she drives them home in the evenings, but the usual route seems unfamiliar in the Sens’ car. When they arrive at the fish market, Mr. Sen waits in the car and tells Mrs. Sen and Eliot to hurry. Inside the store, Mrs. Sen chats and laughs with the man behind the counter; she asks him to confirm that the fish is fresh and requests that he leave the heads on. Later that evening, back at the apartment, Mrs. Sen carefully cuts the fish and divides it up to get three meals out of it.
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In November, Mrs. Sen refuses to cook or practice driving for several days. She silently prepares Eliot peanut butter on crackers and then sits reading old letters from a shoebox. Eliot’s mother notices and asks Eliot if she’s been different lately. Eliot says that he hasn’t noticed a change, even though he has: Mrs. Sen paces the apartment, turns on the TV but doesn’t watch it, and makes herself tea that she doesn’t drink.
One day, Mrs. Sen plays a tape of her family’s voices for Eliot—it’s a recording of her relatives narrating things that happened in their village on the day that she and Mr. Sen left. She tells Eliot that she received a letter over the weekend telling her that her grandfather had died.
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Mrs. Sen starts cooking again a week later. One evening, as she’s preparing dinner, Mr. Sen calls and takes her and Eliot to the seaside. Mrs. Sen dresses up, and they buy a lot of fish from the market and eat at a seafood restaurant. When they’re done eating, they walk on the beach and take pictures together using the camera that Mrs. Sen brought along. Then, Mr. Sen insists that Mrs. Sen drive home, despite her objections. She drives for a while but panics and pulls over when there are too many other cars on the road.
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Mrs. Sen stops driving after this—when she wants fish, she avoids calling Mr. Sen and takes the bus instead. The bus stops at the university and at a nursing home; one day, Mrs. Sen and Eliot see some elderly women from the nursing home going to buy lozenges. Mrs. Sen asks Eliot if he’d put his mother in a nursing home, and he says that he might, but that he’d visit every day. Mrs. Sen tells Eliot that he’ll get busy with his own life, and eventually his mother will be like these women and have to take the bus to get lozenges.
Mrs. Sen and Eliot ride the bus to the market, pick up fish, and then take the bus home. A woman on the bus complains to the bus driver about the smell of the fish. The driver asks Mrs. Sen what’s in her bag, which startles her, and he asks if she speaks English. When she tells him that she has a fish, he asks Eliot to open the window.
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The next time the fish market calls, Mrs. Sen calls Mr. Sen to ask him to drive them to the market, but he doesn’t answer. She keeps trying to reach him, and when he still doesn’t answer, she decides to drive herself and Eliot there. But when Mrs. Sen tries to exit the apartment complex, she turns into oncoming traffic and has to swerve out of the way. A horn from a passing car startles her so much that she hits a telephone pole. A police officer soon arrives at the scene of the accident, but Mrs. Sen doesn’t have a driver’s license to show him, so she just tells him that Mr. Sen teaches at the university. Mrs. Sen and Eliot aren’t badly hurt (Mrs. Sen has a cut lip and Eliot’s ribs are sore), and the car isn’t seriously damaged.
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Mr. Sen picks Mrs. Sen and Eliot up. When they get back to the apartment, Mrs. Sen throws away the food she was preparing for dinner. She makes Eliot a snack and turns on the TV for him, and then she goes to her room and shuts the door. When Eliot’s mother arrives, Mrs. Sen doesn’t come out to speak to her. Instead, Mr. Sen reimburses Eliot’s mother for the month’s babysitting fee and apologizes on his wife’s behalf. He says that she’s resting, but Eliot hears Mrs. Sen crying.
This is the last day that Eliot spends with Mrs. Sen. On the way home that evening, Eliot’s mother tells him that she’s relieved he won’t be going back to the Sens’ anymore. Instead of hiring a new babysitter, she gives Eliot a key to the house and tells him to call the neighbors if there’s an emergency. The first day that Eliot stays home alone after school, his mother calls to make sure he’s okay. Gazing out the kitchen window at the dreary ocean waves, Eliot tells her that he’s fine.
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