The Thousand Faces of Night was structured around the sexual and marital experience of Devi, Sita, and Mayamma. The strategy adopted by Gita Hariharan was to highlight Devi’s experience by interspersing it with events related to Sita’s and Mayamma’s personal life. These alternative points of view explored the position of woman entrapped in typical male power structures. It portrayed women as vulnerable individuals craving for love and understanding, while all the time being victims of their own gender.
Gita Hariharan’s novel successfully juxtaposed and intermingled the lives of a foreign returned young girl Devi, her artistically inclined mother Sita, an old caretaker Mayamma, to present a picture of the multifaceted Indian woman. The Thousand Faces of Night had Devi, a middle class girl as its protagonist. Born in a traditional Tamil Brahmin family, she was sent abroad for higher education. Refusing an offer of marriage from her black American friend, Dan, she returned to India for the sake of her widowed mother. Once in India, her naked, vulnerable self-got easily sucked in by the stifling cocoon of her mother’s love and concern. Placing a forbidding hand on her daughter’s American experience gently but firmly, Sita led Devi to the altar of marriage. Married to Mahesh, a Regional Manager in a multinational company, Devi tried to fit herself the role of a wife…show more content… Fed on the stories of virtuous wives who were instrumental in making their husbands walk on the spiritual path, Devi tried to pull out all the stubborn weeds out of her garden. Failing to pierce the grey, impenetrable walls that Mahesh built around himself, she symbolically decided to grow “a garden of weeds” (58) instead, so that she too might survive like the weeds against all