She grasped the body, lined with inky streaks, at either end, and notched it at intervals against the blade.” (127) She tucked a ginger under the gills, a red so bright they made her vermilion seem pale. With a pair of scissors she clips the fins. She stroked the tails, prodded the bellies, pried apart the gutted flesh. One by one she drew them form the paper wrapping, wrinkled and tinged with blood. “She pulled the blade out of the cupboard, spread newspaper across the carpet, and inspected her treasures. Sen chopping one of the rare fresh fish she finds in a flamboyant manner:

Sen’s focus on the ritual process of chopping more than the meal itself and her persistence of chopping despite the fact that it “was never a special occasion, nor was she ever expecting company”(117) convey her elaborate desire to connect to India. Sen isolated life in America where “she cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence” (115). Sen’s longing for those nights when ‘it is impossible to fall asleep…listening to their chatter” by contrasting them to Mrs. Sen chops the spinach, she recalls the evenings when “all the neighborhood women…bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle…laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night” (115). The bonti brought from India is a recurrent motif of the community she lost (Mitra 185). Sen occupies herself with ‘chopping’ abundant ingredients with her bonti. Her eloquent and formal manner of wearing her sari with a different pattern but “all identical, embedded in a communal expanse of log chips” (119) emphasize her longing for a sense of unity and community she finds in her hometown. Sen first appears wearing “a shimmering white sari patterned with orange paisleys” (112), which she ‘neatened’ upon hearing the word ‘India’. Sen with India” (459), her ritual also emphasizes her loneliness from being distant from home and from her isolation in America. Sen’s “daily ritual or routine connects Mrs. While Noelle Brada-Williams suggested that Mrs. Sen said home, she meant India, not the apartment where she sat chopping vegetables” (116).

Sen maintains rituals that resemble her lifestyles in India because she misses her home.

Mrs sen interpreter of maladies