Nothing Must Spoil This Visit by Shauna Singh Baldwin and Everyday Use by Alice Walker

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Nothing Must Spoil This Visit by Shauna Singh Baldwin and Everyday Use by Alice Walker

In “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit” by Shauna Singh Baldwin and “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, two pairs of sisters are you’re average loveable sisters. Sisters can be blood related or by marriage. “Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of a sister?” Many sisters do feel this way about each other. However, Chaya and Janet in "nothing must spoil this visit, who are sister in laws, but are not the best of friends. In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker; Dee and Maggie are blood related sisters, but don’t really have a loving relationship that sisters would have.

Chaya and Janet seem to have a hostile relationship towards the end of “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit”.

In “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” the author tells a story of bi-racial marriage. Janet is the woman married to the man Chaya has loved for so many years. This is why Chaya does not like Janet. She feels that Janet stole the love of her life. Chaya envied everything about Janet:

“She had first held Arvind close and then scanned Janet with a curiosity that took in her travel-crumpled jeans, clear-plastic-rimmed spectacles and the remnant of a perm in her brown hair.”(108) Janet sees how “Chaya still held Arvind's arm.”(108)

It was as if Chaya was trying to get reacquainted with the body of someone she once lost a long time ago. One would think that Chaya reminisces in what she could have had a long time ago. Even his own brother can’t see what Arvind sees in this foreigner:

What did Arvind see in Janet? A woman who appeared not to need a man. These foreign women, though, they talk their heads off against male chauvinism, but they really like it, they like surrendering to a real man. Look at their movies --- full of gaunt red-lipped women thrusting their come-hither pelvises at every eye. No sweetness, no kindness, no softness. Unbroken fillies. (117)

Why would Arvind love this “white woman” so much with all these flaws she has to herself? At a later point in the story Janet is with Arvind in his grandfather’s house sees a picture of Chaya and Arvind: “And a later one in colour, Arvind looking about twenty-five and Chaya in a sari, smiling at him, smiling an adoring smile.

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