Character Sketch: Maggie
Maggie is the central character in the story "The Price of Flowers" written by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. Maggie’s or Alice Margaret Clifford, is a young English girl of 13 or 14 years of age whom Mr. Gupta meets in a restaurant. Her clothes betray her poverty. Her hair hung in a heavy stream down her back. She had large eyes with a sad expression. She works in a shop close the restaurant as a typist. She goes to the restaurant only on Saturdays because Saturday is pay day. Maggie is hardworking. She lives with her old mother in a small house in the poor neighbourhood of Lambeth. Her only brother, Francis, is in the army and he is in India. She loves her brother very much and he too loves her. She loves her mother. She nurses her when she is sick. She is very disciplined and has polite manners.
Maggie is not happy with
her work in the shop. She says it is a mechanical job. She wants a job in which
her brain can be used. When she gets a better job, she will rent a better house
and take her mother there. It shows much she cares for her mother. When her
mother is in a critical condition, she even asks Mr. Gupta to tell her mother a
lie about her brother, so that the mother feels better by hearing that her son
is alive and well in India. Maggie is a very fine girl.
She wants Mr. Gupta to go
to the grave of her brother who is buried in India and gives one shilling to
him to flowers. A shilling is a lot of money for a poor girl like her. To get
that, she has to work hard for many days. Mr. Gupta took the money as it would
give her a lot of happiness.