The Bats By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Would you ever go back to someone who was abusive? In short story “The Bats,” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni presents a woman who is both a mother and wife who is attempting to manage all the verbal and physical abuse by her husband; she at that point leaves with her daughter, who just started to understand her pain, to her uncle’s house. But only there, the mother would regularly get gazed at and had to listen to whispers of the villagers everyday. She didn’t feel a feeling of belongingness at her own house nor at her uncle’s house. The mother is not strong enough mentally to stand being an outsider. Later on in the story, we figure out she had sent a letter to her husband only to get a letter back saying he promises he won’t do it again. In The Bats, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni uses the symbol of bats to show how the bats keep on coming back to the orchard
The mother keeps going back to her husband, thinking he still loves her. This starts to happen when she confronts to her daughter at her uncle’s house, “She said in answer to the question in our eyes ‘He wants us to come back. He promises it won’t happen again.” She had received this letter after she had sent one to him because she couldn’t stand “the loneliness of being without him.” While confronting to her daughter she also states, “I couldn’t stand it, the stares and whispers of the women, down in the marketplace.” Religion, culture and society is what brought her back to her husband’s house. The mother is not strong enough mentally to be an outsider. In India, women and men are organized to marry into an arranged marriage where the women is in the most helpless position because they don’t have any independence, little to no authority and