Jhumpa Lahiris Interpreter of MaladiesA Reflection of Contemporary Society

Mrs. Renuka Devi Jena* Abstract Literature is a reflection of the changing cultural, psychological and social thought process of modern society. Post modern literature reflects the inner conflicts and existential crisis as a result of changing cultural values. Political and economic changes affect the psychology of the people and literature is influenced by such changes. My paper will critically analyse the characters of the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiris Interpreter of Maladies. She is an Indian American writer, her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri uses literature as a vehicle to transmit cultural identities, each of her stories in the collection presents a new cultural perspective of the Indian immigrant. Her speciality lies in her extraordinary craft of short story writing her psychological revelations and deep understanding of human nature.

Jhumpa Lahiris debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The collection is mainly concerned with the existential challenges of isolation and desolation of postcolonial situation, of the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans whose hyphenated Indian identity has led them to be caught between the Indian traditions that they have left behind and a totally different western culture that they have to adopt. The characters of the short stories face cultural dilemma, they are perplexed, disconcerted and confused, sentimental and homesick and show resistance also to the discourse of power in various forms. However the dissatisfaction becomes less intense in the second generation of characters, who adapt to the culture of the adopted country. Lahiri is a second-generation immigrant who feels just as much at home in her parents homeland as she does in her own, yet sometimes the feeling of alienation, belonging nowhere exists. The migrant has become one of the symbolic figures of the contemporary society world. It is through fiction contemporary writers attempt to voice the immigrants issues and concerns.

Jhumpa Lahiris collection of short stories seems is an in depth study of visible and invisible frontiers that the characters must transgress in order to find their real self.

*The writer is an Associate Professor, Department of English, B.M.Ruia Girls College. She is a PHD Research Scholar of JJT University, Rajasthan.

Out of the nine stories, three are set in India, whereas six are set in America, focusing on the lives of first or second generation Americans of Indian origin. The writer resists the stereotypes of Indian-ness, the encounter between the East and the West and probes the problems generated by the encounter between the self and the Other, into the condition of the troubled modern self and, more importantly, to investigate human nature. In this respect, Jhumpa Lahiris writings are more about the existential angst of the individual, she is interested in portraying the quintessence of the individual consciousness and in the self as the converging point of various cultural forces. Jhumpa Lahiri very efficiently brings out the crisis of dual identity, the universal experience of Indian diaspora, irrespective of religion or region and the inner conflicts of her characters. Lahiri also emphasises through her characters, be it Shoba, Mr. Pirzada, Mrs. Das, Mrs.Sen or Boorima that there are other individual issues that causes anxiety and distress to people, maladies that are of concern and thus gives us an understanding of the people in general. Stories have in common certain themes and motifs, such as exile, displacement, loneliness, difficult relationships, and problems about communication. The loneliness, the sense of alienation, a deep sense of remorse and emotional isolation that some of her fictional characters of Jhumpa Lahiri go through, are common experiences of people especially those

who for various reasons are forced to live away from their own country. Jhumpa Lahiris endeavour to interpret the maladies of the mind that people suffer from and the unique manner in which she makes them realize their own flaws reflects her remarkable insight, she delves deep into the psychological depths of her characters and reveals their inner world. The story "A Temporary Matter" deals with the pain of losing a child and the subsequent emotional problems pertaining to the couples relationship and divorce. The story is about an Indian couple living in America, whose marriage is failing due to the loss of their child at birth. A contrast is shown in the couple's relationship before and after they lose of the baby. It went from a strong marriage, full of love, to a weak marriage where Shukumar and Shoba (the Indian couple) become "experts at avoiding each other" (4). They no longer speak to each other and have lost all lines of communication. Due to some maintenance job in their residential area, the electricity is cut for an hour in the evenings. In the first evening Shoba comes up with the idea of a game in which each partner will tell something that they feel, or have done which they have never shared before. Shoba using game to tell her husband about her decision to leave him, she declares that she has rented a separate house for herself and it breaks Shukumars heart. To this confession, Shukumar gives her greater pain by telling her that their child was actually a boy, and he had held the boy in his lap and had really hugged him for quite some time. This is particularly painful to Shoba as she never wanted to know these details. Shobas crisis was her inability to deal with her anger and frustration of losing the baby for whose arrival she had planned elaborately. In her state of disappointment and self pity, she did not care if her marriage fell apart. It is only when Shukumar confesses his knowledge of the babys sex that she finally relents the hold she kept on her emotions and sees the truth that the loss of the baby has affected Shukumar as deeply as her. Letting out the pent up

feelings certainly acts like a catalyst in some ways. The marital discord is thus skilfully shown to be a temporary matter just as the interruption in electric power supply has been. In When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, Jhumpa Lahiri concentrates on the nostalgia for ones homeland in the character of Mr.Pirzada, from Dacca, which was a part of Pakistan, now the capital of Bangladesh. The story makes an explicit reference to the Bangladeshi war of independence in 1971 but Jhumpa Lahiri is not concerned with politics. She is more concerned with the issues of identity and intercultural communication, hybridity and multiculturalism rather than politics. The Indian familys desperation to invite someone from their homeland, their selecting discovered Mr.Pirzada as their guest, their sense of community in the company of Mr.Pirzada, is an existential tension that problematises the very liberal and democratic claim of hybridity. The positioning of Pirzada actually comes close to this in-between space creating sadness from a sense of absence, which percolates across the subconscious of all the immigrants. This is more applicable in the case of Lila, the narrator and, more importantly, a second generation migrant. Lila is a child so the story is narrated from the point of view of the child, her perception, her awareness and her consciousness in understanding of the difference between the self and the other across the visible and the invisible frontiers. Mr. Pirzada regularly visits his Bengali friends house to dine and to listen to the news about the Bangladesh war. After the war Mr.Pirzada becomes a man of no-nation. The narrator was completely taken aback by her fathers words, Mr.Pirzada is no longer considered Indian. Lilas observation is intriguing when she says It made no sense to me. Mr.Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They

ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands. p.25 Pirzadas case is more or less similar to BooriMa, a refugee in Calcutta from East Pakistan , the protagonist of A Real Durwan. She is a sixty-year-old woman, deported to Calcutta as a result of the Partition, whose problems of adaptability to a new culture are brought to the fore. She works hard throughout the day in an apartment building full of middle to lower-middle class families, in her old age, a time comes when her old bedding gets wet and turns into useless pulp, reducing her to sleep on discarded newspapers spread over a hard floor and she does not even get a glass of tea or any food from the apartment owners. Suffering from pangs of hunger Boorima had already lost not only her country of origin but her family and all her possessions. She claims of a rich past, having belonged to an affluent zamindaar family of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), but the traumatic events of Partition have reduced her to the present pitiable creature in Calcutta, at the mercy of other inhabitants of the building. Her experience of exile has left her stranded and estranged with the claustrophobic trauma of memories and she continues to mourn the riches of her past when compared to the insufficiency of the present. She tries to escape from the hardships of the present by reminiscing about the past life. Boori Mas exaggerated stories of her past are a momentary release from the traumatic and claustrophobic existence in the present. She is like the migrants who are constantly negotiating their positions between nations, between where theyre from, where they are at and where they are going, and, in the process creating identities that serve as momentary points of suture that stabilize the flow . Boori Mas rejection by the residents of the building highlights her alienation as she once again ends up being a refugeehomeless and displaced who painfully continues to be at odds with changed times.

The story of Mrs. Sen, is about the Mrs. Sen an elderly Indian immigrant ,wife of an academic, who looks after Eliot, an eleven-year-old boy, after his school time every day. The story deals with her constant struggle to adapt to the new American cultural space and built up her new identity. She steadfastly conducts her special Indian-cooking practices, enjoys buying fish and having fish to assert her idea of homeland, her ethnic identity. However, her final act of taking the courage to drive in order to be independent from a seemingly busy patriarchal figure of a husband who is not always there to help can be regarded as a revolutionary act. Mrs.Sen has learnt that in order to survive in her new surroundings, she needs to open up herself to the culture of the Other represented symbolically by the car towards which she initially shows great fear a fear much associated with the encounter between the Self or Other culture. Her first attempt to cross the boundaries fails but, no matter how traumatic the experience is, it at least makes her face the trauma and possibly release herself from the vicious cycle of escape and avoidance through being more open to the realm of the Other what is definitely going to prove useful in crafting and negotiating her new diasporic identity and in encouraging her to embrace her new life in America. Alienation refers to the state of exclusion, which arises when an expatriate does not grow out of the phase of nostalgia. Her ethnic identity haunts her incessantly. Aware of her differences, she cannot negotiate a new space or a new identity because expatriation for her is a state of mind. Lahiri shows that in any relationship the two partners must have enough patience to tolerate each others differences. This is even more so in an arranged marriage, where the couple must develop mutual love and respect. Through describing Twinkles taste for

Christian artefacts, Lahiri implies that Sanjeev also must develop a more tolerant attitude toward his new culture if he is to adapt successfully. As Sanjeevs character shows, the immigrant experience is often painful and the adjustments frequently overwhelming. The story, "This Blessed House", is a about a newly married couple who move into a house only to find out that the house is special and a blessed one. Jhumpa Lahiri uses the house moving metaphorically, a movement into America, which is not after all an empty space but contains within it elements of culture the here and there Christian artifacts the couple discover upon arrival. Belonging to different generations of immigrants, Sanjeev and Twinkle seem to be at different stages of their transformative identities and therefore their different attitudes towards the findings of biblical artifacts. Twinkles parents have long lived in California and she belongs to the second-generation immigrants, she is simply an American of Indian origin. While Twinkle is delighted by these objects and wants to display them everywhere, Sanjeev is uncomfortable with them and reminds her that they are Hindu, not Christian. This very temporal difference and variation in exposure to the culture of the Other makes Twinkle to be an embodiment of hybridity a stage which is yet to come for the first-generation female immigrants like Mrs. Sen or even for the first-generation male immigrants like Twinkles own husband, Sanjeev, who has come to America as a college student and his parents still live in Calcutta. As a more recent immigrant then, Sanjeev like Mrs. Sen is a manifestation of liminality and is, therefore, a stage behind Twinkle . It is this dynamic positive hybridity present in Twinkle that makes her survival definite and gives her a superiority and charm over other female characters whose confrontation with the Other either involves them in cycles of escape or at worst in a total Otherness. The story ends with her and the other party guests discovering a large bust of Jesus Christ in the attic. Although the object disgusts him, he obediently carries it downstairs.

Sanjeev pressed the massive silver face to his ribs, careful not to let the feather hat slip, and followed her.p.157 This action can either be interpreted as Sanjeev giving into Twinkle and accepting her eccentricities, or as a final, grudging act of compliance in a marriage that he is reconsidering. T he hybrid identity of those like Twinkle is formed gradually, it only a matter of time and the amount of exposure to the culture of the Other. So we can say that there is still time and hope of survival for those like Sanjeev and Mrs. Sen to pass through the threshold of liminality into the hybrid space. Twinkles success in negotiating a hybrid identity is the hopeful future for all those whose present experience of the culture of Other is that of threat and confusion. The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, is about the plight and anxiety of the female subaltern as it follows the aftermaths of the globalization process in the life of a native Indian woman who is a victim of both destitution and homelessness. Bibi Haldar is a woman living in India, in her own homeland, but is more or less exposed to the Othering process. Interestingly then, Bibis neighbours, a group of philanthropic caring Indian housewives of the same building where Bibi is living as a marginalized sick inhabitant, are much more eager than her own so-called relatives to offer help. Bibi has long suffered from a strange unknown ailment, and while numerous possible treatments have been suggested, none has proved to be useful. Bibi longs for a normal life in which she can have a husband and bear children. The twist though comes at the end of the story when Bibi, who has led a life of solitude and isolation on the roof of the building, gets pregnant and, giving birth to a son, is finally yet curiously cured. Bibis identity-crisis comes to surface when she wants to negotiate a new identity by embracing these gender codes of

the Other. In this story Lahiri has chiseled out a character so delicately that the final revelation hardly jolts the reader. Rather it fills him with a greater understanding of the workings of human psyche. Deprivation of fulfillment of certain desires makes misfits of some people. The birth of a son cures Bibi Haldar of a mysterious disease in spite of being deprived of marriage. Sexy tells the story of a young woman, Miranda, who gets involved in an affair with a married Indian man named Dev. The story is about sexual relationship between Dev and Miranda and the hopelessness of extra-marital affair. As portrayed in Mirandas fascination with Indian culture upon meeting Dev, native Self covertly takes an interest in knowing and locating the immigrant Other. Miranda, who in the beginning of the story knows quite a little about the Other Indian culture, is soon intrigued by the thrill of exploring the Other a sense of thrill which causes her to visit an Indian grocery or go to an Indian restaurant or to try, in any possible way, to learn more about India and Indian culture. This Self/Other confrontation then posits Mirandas identity on the verge of an open-ness to the Other. The relationship between the English girl Miranda and the Indian Dev dies a quiet death when Miranda realizes that she cannot expect more than physical fulfilment from Dev. The Interpreter Of Maladies is the title of a particular story in the collection causing it to have multiple meanings within the text. The story centres upon interpretation and its power. The interpreter, Mr. Kapasis occupation is to interpret patients ailments in a hospital where little Guajarati is spoken. His work enables correct diagnosis and treatment by understanding the pains and troubles of patientseffectively, he enables the saving of lives .Within the story he is giving a tour to a family, Mr and Mrs. Das and their three children. Mrs. Das looks for understanding from him, seeking absolution for the secret of her

adultery. In confessing to Mr. Kapasi, she endows him with a sort of priestly power, expecting her confession to draw out forgiveness and consolation. Mrs. Das confides that one of their sons is not her husbands child and asks Mr. Kapasi for his help with this malady, her secret. He admits, however, that he is only an interpreter of languages, not of her guilt. When she tells Mr. Kapasi that she feels relieved of the pain that she was subjected to for seven long years by disclosing the secret that shrouded the birth of her second son, he says: Is it really pain you feel Mrs. Das or is it guilt? Mr. Kapasis question makes her furious and she walks away in a huff. But its effect is more far-reaching than expected. She is no longer the brooding and disinterested woman we first met. Obviously she is relieved of her burden of guilt for the first time in seven years. She is whipped into action and gets her son , Bobby. Lahiri in this story deals with one of her major themes that of disjunction between cultures. Through this story, Lahiri is able to deepen the connection between her narratives. Lahiri explores the idea that identity, especially for immigrants, is something that must be sought. We gain a sense of identity through family, society and culture. For the culturally displaced, this is a difficult endeavour. Interpretation also becomes a means of communication and connection, something for which both Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das yearn. Both feel a disconnect from their spouses and their families, unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives. Yet, although Lahiris work may be interpreted as essentially focusing on the problems of immigrants but she lays emphasis on communication problems of individuals. It is not so much the visible frontiers that the writer seems to be obsessed with as the invisible ones that do tend to keep people apart.

The speaker in The Third and Final Continent searches for his identity across continents. He is born in Asia, travels to Europe to study, and finally immigrates to North America. Although he has adapted to the British way of life as a student, it is not a true cultural integration as he lived with other Bengali bachelors like himself. He attempts to keep his cultural identity intact by keeping the most trivial of Indian traditions alive, such as eating egg curry. His search for identity is further strained by his arranged marriage, more or less en route to his new job in America, to a woman he has never met. In America, his cultural conflict is manifest in his refusal to eat hamburgers or hot dogs , as the consumption of beef is sacrilegious according to his Hindu beliefs. The speaker is burdened with a fragmented sense of identity; constantly pulled in opposite directions between Indian culture and the need to assimilate in America. When the narrator meets his centenarian landlady, Mrs Croft, he is bewildered by her age and her repetitious phrases while admiring her strength in surviving for so long. In contrast to his relationship with his own mother, whose rejection of life had further exacerbated the speakers sense of emotional isolation, through his fondness for Mrs Croft, and his admiration for her ability to accept the inevitable. In contrast with the speaker, his wife Mala is able to maintain her identity because she takes on the role of a traditional Indian wife. In this story Jhumpa Lahiri portrays a relatively positive story of the Indian-American experience. The obstacles and hardships that the protagonist must overcome are much more tangible, such as learning to stomach a diet of cornflakes and bananas, or boarding in a cramped YMCA. Mrs. Croft makes a point of commenting on the protagonists sari-wrapped wife, calling her a perfect lady. Crofts daughter Helen also remarks that Cambridge is a very international city, hinting at the reason why the protagonist is met with a general sense of acceptance. In the

ending on a cultural tone of social acceptance and tolerance, Lahiri suggests that the experience of adapting to American society is ultimately achievable. The Third and the Final Continent contain moving pictures of life. The Calcutta boy reminds us of many Indians who by trial and tribulation settle abroad for a better life. The bond between the landlady Mrs. Croft and the Bengali youth is beyond explanation. It is something to be felt and understood. The old lady is well aware of people and can read them as one would a book, despite being hundred and three. Mrs. Croft never spoke more than a few words at a time, most of which she repeats daily to the young tenant but the narrator knows her loneliness and develops fondness for her. It grows after being told by her only daughter that she made a living for herself and for her daughter by teaching the piano for forty years which resulted in swollen knuckles. He is also reminded of his own mother who refused to participate in life after the death of her husband. In conclusion we can say that the collection of stories in Interpreter of Maladies attempt to offer an interpretation of the maladies of the contemporary society, of individuals anxieties and torment and of the individual inevitably caught between different cultures and yet belonging in neither of them. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

References Lahiri Jhumpa (2005). Interpreter Of Maladies, Harper Collins Publishers India. Mishra, Vijay (2000). New lamps for Old: Diasporas Migrancy Border, in Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context, edited by Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla.

Shukla, Sandhya (2005). India Abroad, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Watson, C.W. (2005). Multiculturalism, New Delhi: Viva Books.