Games at Twilight

The author relies heavily on the use of imagery to convey emotions and ideas. Throughout the story, the sensory experience of the setting is closely connected to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. The story begins, for example, with a detailed description of what it feels like for the children to be inside the house on a hot summer afternoon:

[E]verything was still curtained and shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke (Paragraph 1).

The sensations described here evoke not only the physical experience of the stuffy house but also the emotional experience of being cooped up, trapped—literally in the house and figuratively in the frustrating powerlessness of childhood. The author also emphasizes the significant effects of the heat by describing how plants, animals, and birds are responding to it. Paragraph 6 says that “a band of parrots suddenly fell out of the eucalyptus tree, tumbled frantically in the still, sizzling air, then sorted themselves out into battle formation and streaked away across the white sky.” The sensory language used here makes the oppressive heat almost tangible, and it has such a wide-reaching effect on all living things throughout the text that it’s almost as if it becomes a character itself.

The concept of death is prevalent in this text and reflects the overall tone and mood of the story. Though its central event is a game played by children, there is a pervasive gloomy and somber mood woven throughout the story. The author emphasizes the dark mood by consistently repeating words and phrases that relate to death, dying, and funerals. After catching him in the first game, Raghu tells Manu, “You’re dead” (Paragraph 18). Death is also prominently featured in the description of the shed where Ravi hides, which he refers to as a “depressing mortuary” that has a “muffled smell, as of graves” (Paragraph 23). Even as the children play together toward the end of the text, with their parents relaxing around them in the twilight, their innocent rhyme quickly changes tone when the children continue, “Remember me / When I am dead, dead, dead” (Paragraph 36). The death imagery that pervades the children’s play signals their tacit awareness that childhood is fleeting, as is life, and that even as they yearn to become adults, they are hurtling toward death.