Re-reading this iconic Ismat Chugtai story after years brought back many questions or perhaps they were new questions:
1. What's the relation between parental prohibition and homosexuality in the story?
2. How does heterosexual frustration that leads to a homosexual choice reflect on the event of sexuation here?
3. How does one read the narrator's aggressiveness as a little girl?
4. How does the quilt metaphor transform throughout the story, becoming the object as well as the site of both concealment and disclosure?
5. Do we read anything into the animal imagery of the elephant (and the frog at the end) or see it simply as a turn of phrase?
5. Is the quilt internalised as a censor at the end? what's the implication of the story ending on a note of repression apart from the irony of parental prohibition coming back?
6. Does the story not have a counter-intentional heteronormative strain where homosexuality is reduced to an effect of autistic isolation and seen as a compensation for heterosexual love?
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