Wolfreys et al (2002) assumed that hybridity is originally naming something or someone of mixed ancestry or derived from heterogeneous sources. Hybrid identity emerges therefrom multiple forms of hybridity. Smith (2008) divided multiple forms of hybridity as identities that exist across borders, duality, gender (a false dichotomy), new identities, the diaspora (borderless), and the internal colony hybrid (formed within boundaries).
The hybrid identity in this short story emerges because of defying borders that is carried out by Rani. In this case, borders are the norms which applied in Indian culture such as making woman's hair as long as possible, using oil every week and avoiding shampoos, getting married in young age, and doing house works like common women in India.
"One day, two months earlier, her daughter had cut off her long thick hair, just like that. The abruptness and sacrilege of this acts still haunted the mother." (pg. 491).
". she too had wanted the escape of solitude which meant, of course, that in the process she neither made her bed nor tidied up her room." (pg. 492).
We can see from the quotations especially the word 'abruptness' and 'sacrilege' that Rani breaks the norms that should be done by Indian's woman. She cut off her long hair and it made her parents gets angry. Moreover, her mother said that she has perfected art of hurting them. It shows the inconsistency of two cultures, which are native culture and western culture that engraft by the colonizer.
Engrafting culture, which has been done by the colonizer, has contaminated the native culture that made the Native inclines to the western culture. It is because they consider the western culture as the higher one than their culture and it raises the freedom from the norms that restrain them. That is also the reason why Rani decided to leave her home and migrate to America.
"When she got her daughter's first letter from America, the mother had a good cry.