Creating Atmosphere Within a Story

Creating atmosphere within a story can be accomplished through a variety of descriptors ranging from the personal to the environmental. Stories are contained worlds and the characters that populate them must interact with the audience through dialogue, both inner and outer, as well as their actions and even their clothing. Clothing has always been important throughout art in projecting more onto the audience than words or images can allow. A character's primness can be characterized in a buttoned up outfit or, as in "Clothes," every fluctuating mood and emotion can be similarly expressed in the various clothing styles that evolve over the course of the story.

When first meeting Mita, she is awaiting her upcoming bride viewing while having her hair bathed in the Women's Lake with "…my sari float up around me, wet and yellow, like a sunflower after the rain." The intensity of the color yellow in comparison to the muddiness of the surrounding waters acts as a symbol for the seeming brightness of her future in comparison to her faded and sepia colored past. The color yellow is new and bright and her future has no reason to not follow suit.

The theme of transformation and metamorphosis from her past continues when she is confronted with her actual bride viewing sari which she mentions is, "…a sari that could change one's life." It's construction and color, pale pink with gold thread, is the most extravagant and beautiful outfit she has ever owned and encapsulates the promise of her future and its transformative effect on her. She mentions that, "Its body was pale pink, like the dawn sky over the women's lake. The color of transition."

Transitioning towards her new life in America, Mita travels with her beloved father and her again, clothing takes on an aura of significance. While she preferred a blue sari because of the colors link to possibility, her mother stressed that red should be the color of choice as it is considered lucky to married women. Her father is the ultimate compromiser and chooses a sari that blends both luck and possibility. As she transitions over the thousands of miles of ocean on her way to America, Mita starts to imagine herself in her new life, with her new name and finds that, "…the syllables rustle uneasily in my mouth like a stiff satin that's never been worn." Again she finds her frame of reference in the clothing that she both wears and has been surrounded by all of her life.

It is in this past full of colors and clothing that she is able to connect to her past as a grounded station against her momentary rise in panic when she discovers that she cannot picture her husband Somesh's face. Knowing and fixating onto the truth that within the plane there is a case full of her saris she can travel through her own past and upbringing with, "…the thin hand-woven cottons of the Bengal countryside, green as a young banana plant, gray as a women's lake on a monsoon morning." The textiles and colors both act as a trigger point for poignant childhood images and emotion. As a result Mita, "..can feel my shoulders loosening up, my breath steadying." Also, within her trunk of saris are a number of sandalwood filled sachets to protect her clothing made from her mother's own saris and symbolizing the fusing of the past and present. They also act as a reminder that she, her mother and her mother's mother before her have all ventured out into the unknown -- it is a woman's duty.

Her life with Somesh in contrast to her nervousness while they were together in India progresses nicely into a playful and happy union. They live with her in-laws as Somesh works hard to raise enough money for them to move out on their own while also taking care of his parents. This time acts as a protective cocoon for the burgeoning love and affection for one another and the complete transition of Mita into a married woman flourishing in a new world -- American. Here, as before, clothing expresses this newness and her comfort with it to the reader.

Somesh covertly buys her American clothing, in one instance jeans, "…the same pale blue as the nayantara flowers that grow in my parent's garden. The solid weight comforting." She is able to find joy in this new clothing because she can find a connection to her old life through its comforting sameness in color to an already established memory. The t-shirt she is given is, "…sunrise orange -- the color, I decide, of joy, of my new American life." Her christening the worth of the color orange on her own terms is interesting when compared to the ending of the story. If she had related to the traditional symbolism of orange as a healing color representing vitality through endurance, it would have acted as a portent of things to come.