Walking Nightmares America Dimple Analysis

America. Dimple’s feelings of helplessness caused by the gap between life’s promises and day-today reality, find expression in ‘Walking nightmares’. Dimple, a very Americanized Indian friend, Ina Mullick, Washed up on an American beach as a dead body draped in Dimple’s own sari (103). At her feet lay Ina Mullick, in Dimple’s sari, a thin line of water spilling from her mouth (103). Her friend Mullick appears in her dream as dead, which properly interpreted could mean that Dimple fervently wishes herself dead. It is plain displacement contrived by dream - work: She thought of seven ways to commit suicide in Queens (102).

The effect of constant proximity of death begins to severely tell upon her psyche. She finds herself collapsing inwardly

was becoming the voice of madness’ (176) and then she went to bed and then conceives of an extravagant scheme, where she would kill Amit and hide his body in the freezer(195) thereby feeling. Dimple is conjured up as Kali, the death goddess, she owns responsibility for killing the cacti, “even the hardy little ivies and geraniums” (188). She feels “Very American somehow almost like a character in a T.V. Series’ (195). In the climax of the novel Dimple feels’ “something had torn loose and was hanging, in space”(208). Thus Dimple has been portrayed free and rebelling throughout the novel. She has no inhibition in expressing whatever she feels. Her husband Amit’s murder signifies how an innocent, duty conscious husband falls a prey to the neurotic madness of his wife. This can be understood as a part of herself learning her shattered within she is thus able to asses her own actions calmly comparing her role always to that of wives’ in operas” (211). The last scene depicts Dimple in kitchen of their rented home feeling “She was falling apart like a very old toy” (212) and stabbing Amit from behind in the neck, near the mole just under the hairline using a kitchen knife and made seven stabs in a row. Dimple seems to be indulging in her passion to become a ‘new woman’ and lead a very free, exciting life as the soap operas on T.V. shows. Obviously Dimple is a physically disturbed person; her psychic troubles centering around the syndrome of