In her story “A Real Durwan,” Jhumpa Lahiri includes motifs of quilts, blankets, and keys as symbols of different qualities associated with home. The quilts and blankets that people put on their beds or sofas keep them warm and comfortable. Keys are associated with the ability to lock one’s door and gain privacy and security. Boori Ma is assigned to keep the building’s stairwell clean, and she greatly values her position. However, this job does not provide warmth or security. The conflict over the keys, and the lack of the tenants’s confidence in her that it reveals, establishes that the building is not a true home to her.

Boori Ma’s specific job is to sweep the building’s stairwell, but she has aspirations of being the durwan, or caretaker, of the whole building. She does not have an apartment: she sleeps underneath the letterboxes. Boori Ma says she did not always live this way. She constantly reminisces about the “comforts” of her past life, when she claims to have been well-to-do.

The quilts that constitute her bedding are an important component of her sleeping area, but she decides they have bedbugs and thinks she should tear them up into rags. This destruction corresponds with her uneasiness with the changes occurring in the building, which has become more prosperous. Her alienation from these conditions culminates in her wandering the streets and market, where she is robbed of the keys that symbolize her belonging to the building. By the end, quilts and keys are both gone. The residents's confidence in her evaporates, and she will soon be homeless.