Trials and Tribulations: Sita's Difficult Life

Sita’s childhood was not a normal one. She grew up without a mother to care for and a father who is unaware of her being, and is forced to isolate herself and create a world of her own. Her father was a freedom fighter and a social activist who had an incestuous relationship with her elder sister. Deprived of the love of her father, she could also not get the love of her mother as her mother had left the family long ago.

Moreover, she was also not satisfied with her married life. Thus due to all this pessimism, there developed a negative attribute in her personality. “The text presents her over wrought mental condition as the cumulative outcome of a difficult childhood followed by a stressful marriage.”

Her life was not infected by the problems

In childhood, it’s her Father and brother Jivan who control her; in youth she lives under her husband’s will and later, it is her children who dictate her life. She rarely gets to be herself. And no, her husband, Raman, is not at all an evil man—he’s not a wife-beater like Pappachi of The God of Small Things nor does he cheat on her. The problem is their incompatibility. He is totally prosaic in his approach to life – practical to the core. On the other hand, Sita is deliriously romantic. The problem here is that Sita and Raman are more like strangers living under the same roof. And the society ordains that in a marriage, the individuality of the husband reigns supreme.

In Where Shall We Go This Summer? the protagonist Sita who in the beginning is a victim of loneliness and alienation and lacks identity, changes and recognizes her true- self with the course of time. Sita is an over-sensitive middle- aged woman who feels alienated from her family due to her emotional attitude towards day today happenings. She is inflexible and incapable of adjusting to her family and also to