The short story I chose was Sisters by Anjum Hasan. The main protagonist of this story is Jaan, who has a prevailing illness that is introduced in the beginning of the short. The anticipated “sister” is Jamini, in which she eventually becomes the maid and loyal friend of Jaan. Because of the turn of this event, we see that Jaan eventually recovers to the point where she goes back to work. However, Jaan had always wondered what it was that had bonded the both of them together. Jamini was extremely loyal but it did not seem so to her own family, in which she had no ambition for her kids. The short ends when Jaan realizes Jamini’s death and goes to her home to discover the reason, however the death is not fully uncovered.
Mapping the characters and their relationships may help shed light on who we are able to track and who Jaan would be able to go to to find out. The main node is Jaan with accompanying nodes, Jamini, Jamed, Shakti, and Shankar. What constitutes a connection here is verbal dialogue, which implies that the characters know each other and have exchanged some sort of information. It can be seen that Jaan has connected with four other characters but also that two of the characters have also exchanged dialogue – Jamini and Shakti. This is valuable information that it outside the scope of Jaan’s knowledge and another story could be derived from there.
While the network graph is very simple, it also maps out the other possibilities of interaction between characters through dialogue. Its shortcomings are also apparent – that only verbal dialogue is considered here from the story. More analysis could be done to illustrate the dialogue as a positive or negative interaction to depict the biases that may surround information coming from a character. Another possibility could be to map non-verbal dialogue. This could show interaction although it is not explicitly written, which adds another layer to the characters’ connections.