How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
[…] Samad said he'd spent New Year's Eve at O'Connell's for eighteen years and he wasn't going to stop now. (19.115)
Spending time at a pub doesn't exactly go along with the Muslim traditions Samad is so concerned about, but Samad and Archie have their own traditions too. Now, if only Samad could see it this way.
Quote #8
Look at you, look at the state of you! Look how fat you are!" He grabbed a piece of her, and then released it as if it would infect him. "Look how you dress. Running shoes and a sari? And what is that?"
[…] "You do not even know what you are, where you come from. We never see family anymore—I am ashamed to show you to them. Why did you go all the way to Bengal for a wife, that's what they ask. Why didn't you just go to Putney?" (8.155-157)
Alsana doesn't totally dress traditionally, as Samad points out here. She's able to mix her Bengali traditions with elements from the English world around her, and this doesn't seem to torture her in the way it tortures Samad.
Quote #9
A very happy marriage. That summer of '76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans, things happened in a haze—sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real […] In an aimless, happy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles of adolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce. (12.5)
Joyce, despite all her Chalfen intellectualism, is very attached to a traditional notion of family. Though she is successful in her work, she can't help but want to be a wife and mother; she's pretty into traditional gender roles.