Commentary on a Gift by Rahila Gupta

The short story, 'A Gift' tells the tale of a loud and dominant woman who falls in love with another quiet but powerful woman, and the anger and hurt she feels when the woman does not return her feelings. The text tells us the story of how they met, how their relationship grew, and then at the end, how the woman tells the narrator that the feelings are not mutral.

The narrator starts the text in an angry tone, which makes us wonder what the other person has done to upset her. Words such as ''You ultimate egotist'' enhance this angry and hurt mood. The mood then suddenly changes   at ''from the moment that you first entered that crowded room'', which is around the same place the tense changes. The texts starts off in the past tense, telling us what the woman, who we do not know is actually female yet, said: ''I am gifting you an experience''. Perhaps the narrator changes the tense to remember the good times, and how things used to be before. Maybe she wanted to remember how the woman she was in love with was before she broke her heart?

The structure of the sentences also change during the text. At first the sentences are short and choppy, which perhaps emphasise the anger and irritation the narrator feels. The sentences then change to longer and more descriptive. This could be because the narrator is forgetting the anger she feels as she remembers the good times her and her 'crush' had spent together. The diction of the text also adds the the mood and pace of the story. Words like ''And who are you to make that gift'' add the the angry mood ant the beginning, and sentences like ''the party, to which we owed varying degrees of loyalty'' help change the mood in the third paragraph.

The body of the text tells us how the two met, and how their friendship grew. When the narrator talks about how they met and how they were often at the same place at the same time and doing things together seems like an attempt to prove how alike they are. Sentences such as...