Comparisons Between “The Tenant” and “Lust”

In Mukherjee’s story “The Tenant”, Maya is an Indian woman who immigrates to the United States at the age of nineteen. She only remembers a little of her childhood, but what happens to her grandmother and her great-aunt still has impact on her. She recalls “her grandmother had been married off at the age of five in a village now in Bangladesh. Her great-aunt had been burned to death over a dowry problem” (102). These …

…other. For example, “she, mistaking the brief breathlessness of sex for love, had married” her ex-husband (103). Ironically, she finally comes to a realization of what love really is when he ultimately meets an Indian man. She finds herself that she has never true fully fallen in love with anybody until she sees this Indian man. She realizes “she has accomplished nothing” but sex (107). “She feels ugly an unworthy” of the fact she is facing now (107).