home, searches for an identity and tries to free herself from the bondage of marriage and the various roles levied upon her. Devi's grandmother told tales of her own childhood and these inspired Devi and so she tried to replicate them with her own life. The stories which she heard every summer from her grandmother was a type of preparation for Devi's future life.
             As a child, Devi's mind was prepared to accept her role of woman. The grandmother's stories prepared her for a marriage where where fortitude, patience, endurance and perseverance are inevitable. Grandmother's stories alluded to gods, goddesses, superhuman warriors, brave princes, beautiful and virtuous princesses and other men and women destined to lead heroic lives. For each character's problems, her grandmother indirectly narrates a story. The stories are solutions to their problems but they "were not simple: they had to be decoded."(27) These were no ordinary bedtime stories.
             The stories were told for particular occasion to a particular character as Gauri's domestic problems is yoked with a story of the "beautiful girl who married a snake". Uma's disastrous marriage was linked with how even Amba, a high born prince becomes a 'victim of disaster'. Amma's stories are linked with Gandhari's story. Gandhari with all her fury "embraces her destiny –a blind husband-with self-sacrifice worthy of her royal blood."(29).In the same way, Amma is a willful, proud woman. In the story, the grandmother gives an anecdote about how the father-in-law scolded her for not sweeping the floor of the pooja room. When she lost herself in playing the veena, the uproar of the father-in-law to put her veena away. Amma angrily "reached for the strings of
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