This Blessed House: Character description

I decided to write about the character Sanjeev from the short story “This Blessed house” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Sanjeev is the one with the personality that craves strict order! Jhumpa Lahiri spends a great amount of time showing us the reader just how much attention Sanjeev pays to organization and neatness. The me, reader is introduced to Sanjeev as he kneels “on the floor, marking, with ripped bits of Post-it, patches on the baseboard that needed to be retouched with paint” (Lahiri 53). Any reader could take this seemingly simple science of marking parts of the floor that need a touch-up as a normal activity for a new owner of a home. In the story, Lahiri writes that Sanjeev organizes “his engineering texts from MIT in alphabetical order on a bookshelf” (Lahiri 54) and works his way “carefully through the major composers that the catalogue recommended…” (Lahiri 60). The Post-its and the precise way in which Sanjeev places them over the rough spots in the floor seem like an attempt to fix every small imperfection. Sanjeev keeps his life as orderly and precise as possible. He tries to control his life by controlling the things around him, such as arranging his books or following a list of composers, instead of choosing names at random. Sanjeev now lives in manhattan, but is from Calcutta

Sanjeev has only been married once unlike his wife Twinkle who has been married twice including this marriage.  Sanjeev seems to be on the more traditional side, because he married an Indian woman the first time. Sanjeev does not understand why these items are of such interest to Twinkle, because they are both Hindu and he finds no meaning in them himself Sanjeev, stuck in his need for everything to be neat and have a purpose, is at odds with Twinkle and her unpredictability. Sanjeev himself says that “Twinkle, was like that, excited and delighted by little things.  It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate…” (Lahiri 57). Sanjeev does not understand why Twinkle finds delight in little things that have no meaning, and Sanjeev used to understanding everything. Understanding is the key in any marriage, and neither of the pair understands why the other one thinks and acts as he or she does. This leads to a push-and-pull conflict of interests and also resentment. Twinkle and her desire does not fit into Sanjeev’s orderly life, he is not able to understand why Twinkle does the things she does.