When Mala arrives in Boston after receiving her green card approval, she brings the narrator gifts from home, including tea and drawstring pajamas. She has also taken the time to knit him two sweaters in a bright blue wool yarn. These sweaters are both a bit too small; they’re “tight under the arms.” This is a small symbol of how the narrator feels constricted by and a bit uncomfortable in his marriage, which has been arranged by his family as is customary in India at the time. Earlier in the story, he has noted that he feels Mala’s arrival is “something inevitable, but meaningless.” He is used to Boston, to his work, to his routine as a border living at Mrs. Croft’s, but not to Mala. The tightness of the area of the sweater, under the arm, would restrict movement much as the narrator initially sees Mala’s arrival as restricting his future. Eventually, as the narrator changes his feelings and expectations about his wife and marriage, this fear and feeling disappears, and he grows comfortable in his new life in marriage and America as he grows to know and love his wife.
Sweaters Symbol Timeline in The Third and Final Continent
