Taking sides in reading Bharati Mukherjee's "The Management of Grief", a story that "flutters between two worlds"

As they worked on their first essay in my first-semester Academic Writing course, my students gave me their working thesis statements to comment on. They are all writing about Bharati Mukherjee's short story "The Management of Grief", which explores the reactions of Indian immigrants to Canada after the 1985 Sikh bombing of an Air India flight. As one character puts it, the people in the story live "between Bombay and Wonderland." A number of the students, though, read the story not as between India and Canada, but rather as pro-India or pro-Canada. Even with a story that "flutters between two worlds", as the narrator puts it, they want to take sides. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 October 2021)