66 pages • 2 hours read
Rajani LaRoccaRed, White, and Whole
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 101-118Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 101 Summary: “Hero”
Chapter 102 Summary: “The Needle”
Chapter 103 Summary: “Close Enough”
Reha prays that she is a close enough match to be a bone marrow donor for her mother. She remembers the promise her mother made when Reha was little and her father was sick. Amma promised to always be with Reha, “[n]o matter what happens” (208).
Chapter 104 Summary: “Savitri, Part 4”
In Savitri, Part 4, Lord Yama tries for a third time to take Satyavan’s soul. Savitri once more implores Lord Yama not to take her husband away. Once more, Lord Yama tells Savitri that she can ask for anything except Satyavan’s soul. This time Savitri asks for many children. When Lord Yama complies, Savitri tells him that he must leave Satyavan behind, because “he is the only one [she] will ever marry / and without him [she] cannot have children” (210). Lord Yama smiles, knowing that he has been outwitted, and agrees to let Satyavan live. Satyavan wakes up, and he and Savitri live happily ever after with their many children.
Chapter 105 Summary: “The Story I Want to Tell”
Reha learns that she cannot be a bone marrow donor for Amma; she is not enough of a match. It has been three months since Amma went into the hospital, but the good news is, she is in remission and can finally come home.
Chapter 106 Summary: “Watching”
Reha and her father bring Amma home. Their lives slowly start to return to normal; Prema Auntie takes care of Amma, who slowly gets stronger. Reha turns 14. Eventually, Prema Auntie has to go back to India. Reha keeps watching her mother and is “the first to see it / when Amma begins to feel sick again” (216) as her cancer returns.
Chapter 107 Summary: “Dr. Andrews”
Reha asks Dr. Andrews if taking care of patients who are so sick is hard. The conversation is implied to take place immediately after Amma’s death. Dr. Andrews confirms that it is very difficult. She apologizes to Reha and says that sometimes, the treatments available are not enough to save someone’s life. Reha says the important thing is that Dr. Andrew tries, for it is “another part of being a hero” (218).
Chapter 108 Summary: “The River”
Reha reflects on her mother’s death.
Chapter 109 Summary: “Goodbye”
Reha and her father say goodbye to Amma. There is no funeral, but they hold a puja, a celebration for her life. They invite everyone, and Reha sees that “all the pieces of [her] life, / the streams that seemed so separate, / have flowed together” (220). Reha feels like she has been saying goodbye to her mother for months.
Chapter 110 Summary: “Jealous”
Reha still sees her life split in two: the time before her mother’s death, and the time after. She feels angry at the “unfairness of what has happened / to Amma / to [her] family / to [her]” (222), and she is jealous of her friends who still have mothers.
Chapter 111 Summary: “Total Eclipse of the Heart”
Reha withdraws entirely from life. She stops talking to her friends and stops participating in school. Life continues around her, but she is numb. She misses her mother terribly.
Chapter 112 Summary: “Comfortably Numb”
Reha gets sick. She has a bad cough and a fever. She drifts in and out of consciousness, dreaming of Amma. When she wakes, she finds her father taking care of her. He gives her medicine and antibiotics and says, “I promise I will be both father and mother to you. / I will take care of you, kanna. / Always” (228).
Chapter 113 Summary: “The Phone Call”
Reha and her father receive a phone call from Prema Auntie. She has had her baby, a little girl named Chandra. The baby’s name means “moon.”
Chapter 114 Summary: “Savitri, Part 5”
Reha thinks about the end of Savitri’s story after the happy ending. She imagines Savitri and Satyavan at the end of their long, happy lives meeting Lord Yama one more time, this time willingly taking his hand.
Chapter 115 Summary: “Aerogramme”
Reha receives an aerogramme from her mother. Amma wrote the letter when she knew she was dying and asked Dr. Andrews to send it one month after her death. In the letter, Amma tells Reha how sorry she is that she had to go. She explains that she did not want to leave Reha, but that her death is nobody’s fault. Amma tells her how proud she is of her and that she always saw Reha struggle to fit into her two worlds. She tells Reha that she belongs in both countries: India and America. She knows that Reha will find a way to make both of “those two streams one” (233). Amma tells her daughter one more time that she loves her. Reha feels like “a small piece of Amma has flown across time / and landed in [her] hands” (233).
Chapter 116 Summary: “Family Ties”
Reha reads Amma’s aerogramme to her father. Reha realizes that her mother always understood her and always “believed [she] didn’t need to be split in two, / that [she] could be whole” (234). Reha starts to believe it too.
Chapter 117 Summary: “Start”
Chapter 118 Summary: “Always Something There to Remind Me”
Reha and her father are preparing to bring Amma’s ashes to India. Reha sees God in her father and in their life together and realizes that she has “one life / a stream with many tributaries” (236). She resolves to write her own story and reflects that Amma’s life, “the one she gave to [Reha], / is in [her] heart, [her] veins, / [her] blood” and that Amma “is everywhere” (237).
Chapters 101-118 Analysis
Reha’s determination to help her mother at any cost demonstrates her maturity and her love. Earlier, she wondered why girls could not be heroes in stories of courtly love, but Pete helps her to see that she is a hero in her own life. She thinks of his kiss as a token like noble ladies would give to knights, and this moment reverses the gender-based stereotypes that dominate the stories of heroism that she and Pete read in English class. Reha hopes that she will be as successful in her heroic efforts as Savitri, who managed to outsmart death itself and save her husband’s life. For a while, it seems that reality might actually mimic the story and her mother will be well, even though Reha was not able to complete a grand heroic gesture to personally save her.
Ultimately, however, Reha must learn to accept that it is not in her power to save her mother’s life. It is not in anyone’s power; even Dr. Andrews apologizes for not being able to do more, but Reha genuinely feels that Dr. Andrews has nothing to apologize for. Despite her new maturity, however, she still goes through a dark time of Grief and Loss just after Amma’s death; even though she knows that there was nothing anyone could do, she is full of anger and despair in the face of such profound loss. While this time is deeply challenging for Reha, it is also a normal part of the grieving process. It is a testament to the love everyone in Reha’s life has for her that they give her the space to grieve during this time.
More powerful than all the gestures of the living is the letter that comes from Reha’s lost loved one, for Amma’s aerogramme helps to pull her out of her despair so that she can finally start the healing process. Having struggled all her life with the pressures of Familial Expectations, Reha realizes that what her mother really expects of her is that she create a life that makes her happy. Yes, academic success is important, but only because it will help Reha to build a good life, whatever that might look like. Amma’s clarified expectations for her daughter therefore become a way for Reha to connect with her mother’s memory. She now has the opportunity to live up to her mother’s hopes simply by being happy and living her life fully. With this revelation, Reha reframes her understanding of her family’s expectations in a much more positive way. Thus, thanks to the aerogramme, Reha is able to find some peace after her mother’s death. She also starts to think of death not as something to be defeated, but something that is inevitable. This altered approach to death is powerfully depicted when she imagines a further ending beyond the usual conclusion of Savitri and Satyavan’s story and realizes that they, too, must one day die. All the wit and heroism in the world cannot achieve immortality, so Reha has not failed to save Amma by being insufficiently dutiful or by failing to be a bone marrow match. Amma reinforces this truth by stating emphatically in her aerogramme that her death is not anyone’s fault, especially not Reha’s. By accepting her mother’s death instead of trying to change the inevitable, Reha is finally able to take on a more mature and ultimately healthier outlook, informed by her nuanced understanding of what it means to be a hero.
In the last chapters of the book, Reha’s sense of alienation finally resolves into a clear feeling of belonging. Earlier in the story, Reha felt that her American life and her Indian life were almost entirely separate, but she learns that in fact, the two are intricately connected. One of Amma’s final gifts to her daughter is a greater sense of unity in her life: Everyone from both cultures attends Amma’s memorial celebration. Reha previously felt that she was the only one to feel so out of place, but her mother explains in her aerogramme that she often felt a similar sense of alienation. Reha realizes that it is within her power to increase her own sense of belonging; she starts inviting all of her friends to her house at the same time, where they can all listen to the music that connects them.
