feelings during ‘Dark’ hours. Four nights go by and on the fifth day, it’s announced that there’ll be no further one-hour power cut. In spite of no power cut, Shukumar keeps lights off at eight p. m. and keenly waits for the game. Shobha switches on the light after dinner and announces that she’s going to live separately. Shocked, Shukumar then thinks of telling her a grave secret he kept from her, that she had given birth to a dead child. Shukumar told her the secret of their born-dead child. Shobha gets confused, turns off the lights and comes back to the dining table. She’s then joined by Shukumar and the story ends with the words; they wept together, for the things they now knew’ (Page 22, IoM). The story reveals the lack of communication in a marriage of second-generation an expatriate couple which resulted in the state of alienation for both. For Indians, marriage is joining together of two families based on belief, dedication and sacrifice for each other, but, for Americans, individual freedom is much more important than an integrated family. The Americanised Bengali couple displays the tendency of typical Diaspora where the characters carry different geographical identities with them. The story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” also deals with the displacement and alienation in the native milieu. Bibi Haldar was an orphan since childhood and was diagnosed with epilepsy. She was staying with her relative in Calcutta, given a storage room on the roof that proves her pathetic condition as the text writes, ‘A space in which one could sit but not comfortably stand, featuring an adjoining latrine, curtain, one window without a grille, and shelves made from the panels of the old door’ (Page 159, IoM). The line, ‘When Mrs Sen said home, she meant India, not the apartment where she sat to chop the vegetables’(Page 116, IoM), tells it all. For Mrs Sen, India is the home. Also, her urge to get back to her homeland is clearly evident when she asks Eliot, ‘Could I drive all the way to Calcutta? How long would that take, Eliot?’ (Page 119, IoM). Mrs Sen clearly is homesick. She keeps on telling the stories of Indian marriage ceremonies to mentally relive those moments and feel home at the same time, tries to regain her cultural part in a foreign land. Mrs Sen is traumatised due to the crisis of identity. Her intention behind learning to drive a car isn’t to move around but to escape. Displaced from home and dazed, she finds American life very irritating. These are her means of claiming her cultural identity in an alien land. The other story, “This Blessed House,” talks about a young Indian immigrant trying to adjust to foreign land and culture. It records the emotional and cultural clash between a Hindu husband and his Christmas-artefact-fascinated wife. The cultural gap between the eastern and the western world is clearly penned through the understanding between Sanjeev and Twinkle. Sanjeev >