THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/books/04Book.html?pagewanted=1&ref=review
BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures,

Conflicted Hearts

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 4, 2008

Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-
reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither:
too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped
in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the
American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy
house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land,
and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often
emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for
their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but
completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly
apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.

As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories “Interpreter of Maladies”

(1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel “The Namesake,” Ms. Lahiri writes about these
people in “Unaccustomed Earth” with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts,
using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision:
the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates with his dead wife;
the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for
her embarrassed daughter to take to school. A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through
these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and
mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her
husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.

Many of the characters in these stories seem to be in relationships that are filled with
silences and black holes. In some cases this is the result of an arranged marriage that’s
never worked out; in others it is simply a case of people failing to communicate or failing
to reach out, in time, for what they want.

In “Only Goodness” Sudha, who is working on her second master’s degree at the London
School of Economics, wonders at the bizarre “lack of emotion” in her parents’ marriage,
which was “neither happy nor unhappy” and seemingly devoid of both bitterness and
ardor, but she finds her own marriage to an Englishman foundering upon her failure to
tell him a family secret. In “Hell-Heaven” the narrator recounts the story of her parents’
chilly marriage and her mother’s passionate, unrequited love for a fellow Bengali and
family friend, who gave her mother “the only pure happiness she ever felt.” And in “A
Choice of Accommodations” Amit realizes that the “most profound thing” in his life —
the birth of his daughters — has already happened, that the rest of his life will be only “a
continuation of the things” he already knows. Increasingly he will come to regard
solitude — a run in the park, a ride by himself on the subway — as “what one relished
most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane.”

As for Ruma, the heroine of the title story, she realizes during a visit from her widowed
father that they rarely talk about matters of real importance; they do not speak about
her mother or her brother, they do not discuss her pregnancy or her marriage, or her
father’s new relationship with a woman he met on vacation. This has been their history
as long as she can remember: “Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion
would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them.” Her marriage,
Ruma realizes, is stilted too: she is increasingly aware that she and her husband, Adam,
are “separate people leading separate lives,” and that part of her is actually relieved
when Adam leaves on one of his many business trips.

Like many children of immigrants Ms. Lahiri’s characters are acutely aware of their
parents’ expectations; that they get into an Ivy Leagueschool, go to med school or grad
school, marry someone from a good Bengali family. Deftly explicating the emotional
arithmetic of her characters’ families, Ms. Lahiri shows how some of these children learn
to sidestep, even defy their parents’ wishes. But she also shows how haunted they
remain by the burden of their families’ dreams and their awareness of their role in the
generational process of Americanization.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri
333 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Related
Excerpt: ‘Unaccustomed Earth’(April 4, 2008)
Times Topics: Jhumpa Lahiri

Their parents often seem so exhausted just coping with the difficulties of surviving in a
strange new world that talk about self-fulfillment or depression or happiness seems
utterly irrelevant to them; they are strangely pragmatic and unsentimental — about
their marriages, their work, the hardships of daily life. These characters’ American-born
children are, at once, more romantic about the possibilities of finding genuine love and
rewarding careers and more cynical too about the trajectories of most people’s lives.
Often cast in the role of facilitator or fixer, they are accustomed to serving as their
parents’ go-betweens and to easing their younger siblings’ way into full-fledged
American lives.

Sudha, for instance, scavenged yard sales for the right toys for her little brother — “the
Fisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say that made animal sounds”; she read
him books like “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “Frog and Toad,” and “told her parents to
set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer.”

The last three overlapping tales in this volume tell a single story about a Bengali-
American girl and a Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing lives make up a
poignant ballad of love and loss and death. Hema and Kaushik get to know each other as
teenagers, when Kaushik’s family comes to stay with Hema’s parents while they house-
hunt in the Boston suburbs. Hema secretly nurses a crush on Kaushik, but he is
oblivious to her schoolgirl antics and preoccupied with his mother’s deteriorating
health. His grief over her death and his rage at his father’s hasty remarriage will propel
him into a career as a photojournalist, who spends most of his time traveling to war
zones in distant parts of the globe.

Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy love
affair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is
conscious of the “deadness” of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself
that the relationship will endow her life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then,
against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome — on the eve of Hema’s
departure for her wedding — and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is
 an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic
denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.

In the hands of a less talented writer it’s an ending that might have seemed
melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and
haunting power of tragedy — a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate
artistry as a writer.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/profiles/45571/

The Confidence Artist

Jhumpa Lahiri isn’t afraid to provoke tears, or calls of déjà vu.

 7 Comments Add Yours

 By Boris Kachka 
 Published Mar 27, 2008 

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(Photo: Peter Hapak)

mong the Brownstone Brooklyn novelists made good,

there’s one thing that sets Jhumpa Lahiri proudly apart. She is a succinct realist writer in an era of
attention-getting maneuvers. Stylistically, she doesn’t have a hook: no genre bending, no comics-
inflected supernaturalism, no world-historical ventriloquism, no 9/11 flip books. Just couples and
families joining, coming apart, dealing with immigration, death, and estrangement. This is true of
her debut short-story collection,Interpreter of Maladies (which won a Pulitzer in 2000); her
novel, The Namesake (a best seller turned Mira Nair film); and her new book,Unaccustomed Earth—
eight mature stories each stretching almost to novella length. Her heroes are Chekhov, Hardy,
William Trevor, and Alice Munro. Surrounded by acolytes of Rushdie or DeLillo, she’s a
traditionalist.
If there is a hook, it might pompously be called, in the language of the numerous liberal-arts syllabi
that list her books, the Bengali-American Experience. But Lahiri is no Orientalist; most of her
characters are middle-class strivers, like the academic parents—Rhode Island by way of London and
Calcutta—who raised her. What may have made The Namesake so popular (more than 800,000
copies sold, per BookScan) was the frisson of unfamiliar culture meeting familiar story line—young
man on identity quest.

“[Readers] can read their family stories into her family stories,” says Lahiri’s editor at Knopf, Robin
Desser, who took her on in a two-book deal worth at least $1 million. “It’s emotionally based
storytelling that unfolds in a many-layered way, but without tricks.” She even compares it, a bit
breathlessly, to Tolstoy: “When you read a paragraph of Natasha putting on her shoes, you know
exactly who she is. I feel that way about reading Jhumpa Lahiri.”
But Tolstoy wrote about Napoleon. Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile
South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “  ‘Is that all you’ve got in
there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked
this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes,
I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more
important than that.”

What makes Lahiri’s corner of the world seem so important, to her and to us? Maybe, for all the
polish, it’s the lack of ironic layering that tends to distance us from the tragedies chronicled in most
“literary” fiction. Lahiri isn’t afraid to make people cry.

Desser admits to breaking down in the office while going over Unaccustomed Earth—sometimes on
the third read. Lahiri writes often of illnesses, failing marriages, and just plain loneliness, but thanks
to her economy and mastery of detail, it never quite crosses over into the sentimental. Nor does it
rely on the melodramatic twists that are staples of more middlebrow writers like Sue Monk Kidd or
Alice Sebold.

Everyone has their Kleenex moments. For some, it’s the passage in The Namesake where the
protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, remembers walking with his now-dead father across Cape Cod at low
tide. Desser cites a relatively lighthearted scene in “Hema and Kaushik,” the sad trio of linked stories
that closes Unaccustomed Earth, in which two immigrant children buy doughnuts for the first time.
“It’s the happy parts of Mozart that make me cry,” she explains. She also gets to see firsthand, in
their meetings, how Lahiri’s own experiences keep feeding those moments. “The more life happens
to someone like Jhumpa Lahiri, the more it goes into the work,” she says. “I look forward to that.”

S itting in a starkly modern Italian restaurant in the far West Village, Lahiri, now 40, looks livelier
and looser than she did when fame first barged into her life—when a call about the Pulitzer
interrupted her cooking, or paparazzi staked out her Calcutta wedding to Guatemalan-Greek-
American journalist Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. That steely-eyed stiffness in her first book-jacket
photo has given way to a gentler, more relaxed wariness.
Lahiri still expresses an ambivalence about all her success that can’t be entirely written off as false
modesty. Yet success has allowed her to work on long-shelved ideas (some of her new stories—as well
as her coming novel—have been in the works for more than a decade). And it’s enabled her to write
longer short stories, a form that happens to suit her perfectly. “I could keep them on the back burner,
at a low simmer, for a longer time,” she says.

The new stories have an expansiveness that Interpreter’s snapshots lacked, but also a cohesion
that The Namesake could have used. “I just feel like maybe there’s a little more meat on the bones,”
she says. “I think that maybe, um, I’m a little less afraid to write about things.”

And hold on: There is a historical “hook” inUnaccustomed Earth—a reference to the 2004 tsunami.
It could be a great talking point, which is maybe why it makes Lahiri a little uncomfortable. “The real
event just sort of caught my character in there,” she says. “I don’t tackle major global events. I don’t
like to read about something—an event, a cataclysm—in fiction for the sake of reading it. I will want
to read [Lawrence Wright’s]The Looming Tower, because it will help me understand what happened
on September 11. I mean, that’s what good nonfiction is for. And I think that the fact there is a major
global event in this book—I don’t know if it was okay or not.”

In contemporary novels, “realistic” often means autobiographical, but Lahiri’s work has tended to
anticipate the milestones in her life. Mixed marriages, parenthood, ailing parents—she wrote about
all of these before she had any firsthand knowledge of them. It’s partly what made her seem so
precocious, though she wasn’t published until her thirties.

Within the past few years, though, she’s moved to Fort Greene and had two children. Her husband’s
parents both died while she was writing this book, and a few months ago (after she’d finished it), her
mother survived a heart attack. Suddenly, the inevitability of a parent’s mortality—a subject that
pervades her books—made the leap from plot device to lived experience. In “Hema and Kaushik,” a
man whose mother died young finds eventual solace with the daughter of an old family friend. It
recalls a situation in The Namesake, but in a way that’s at once less arbitrary and more complex.

Lahiri has made some structural advances, too—mixes of perspectives, mostly. But if you’re looking
for something radically new, look elsewhere. “I’m the least experimental writer,” she says. “The idea
of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested me.” We’ve
been conditioned to read such reluctance as insecurity, but maybe it arises from a confidence rare in
writers: the conviction that the material that matters to her is the only hook she needs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/books/review/Schillinger3-t.html?_r=1

American Children

Quaint and antique, the cry for love of country that Sir Walter Scott made in his poem
“The Lay of the Last Minstrel” is something schoolchildren quit memorizing a century
ago. Its stirring theme rouses a patriot’s yearning: “Breathes there the man, with soul so
dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!”

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Jhumpa Lahiri

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
333 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
Oliver Munday

It’s easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since
9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and
subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in
a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the
present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part
been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world
comes to reinvent itself — accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving
behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying theme
of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.” Here, as
in her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” and her novel, “The Namesake,” Lahiri,
who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today
makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest
attachment isn’t necessarily the country you’re tied to by blood or birth: it’s the place
that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any
map.

The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph, a metaphysical
passage from “The Custom-House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that
transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human
fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women “strike their roots into
unaccustomed earth.” It’s an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees
in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America — the
newcomers and their hyphenated children — struggle to build normal, secure lives. But
Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne’s notion as test it. Is it true that
transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed
outcomes?

As her characters mature in their new environments, they carry with them the potential
for upheaval. Geography is no guarantee of security. Lahiri shows that people may be
felled at any time by swift jabs of chance, wherever they happen to live. Uncontrollable
events may assail them — accidents of fate, health or weather. More often, they suffer
less dramatic reversals: failed love affairs, alcoholism, even simple passivity — the sort
of troubles that seem avoidable to everyone except the person who succumbs to them.
Like Laura, the well-meaning narrator of “Brief Encounter,” the men and women of
Lahiri’s stories often find themselves overwhelmed by unexpected passions. They share
her refrain: “I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” Again
and again, the reader is caught off-guard by the accesses of emotion and experience that
waylay Lahiri’s characters, despite their peregrinations, their precautions, their
concealments.

Each of the five stories in the book’s first section is self-contained. In “Hell-Heaven,” the
assimilated Bengali-American narrator considers how little thought she once gave to her
mother’s sacrifices as she reconstructs the tormenting, unrequited passion her young
mother had for a graduate student during the narrator’s childhood. In “Only Goodness,”
an older sister learns a sharp lesson about the limits of her responsibility to a self-
destructive younger brother. “A Choice of Accommodations” shows a shift in power
dynamics between a Bengali-American husband and his workaholic Anglo wife during a
weekend away from their kids — at the wedding of the husband’s prep-school crush.
And the American graduate student at the center of “Nobody’s Business” pines for his
Bengali-American roommate, a graduate-school dropout who entertains no romantic
feelings for him, spurns the polite advances of “prospective grooms” from the global
Bengali singles circuit and considers herself engaged to a selfish, foul-tempered
Egyptian historian.

In the title story, Ruma, a Bengali-American lawyer, repeats her mother’s life pattern
when she gives up her job and follows her husband to a distant city as they await the
birth of their second child. “Growing up, her mother’s example — moving to a foreign
place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household — had
served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.” The nurturing force
field of pregnancy shields Ruma from the sting this reflection might be expected to
provoke, but it doesn’t protect her widowed father. When he visits her in Seattle from
his condo in Pennsylvania, he asks her a very American question: “Will this make you
happy?” Urging Ruma not to isolate herself, to look for work, he reminds her that “self-
reliance is important.” Thinking back on his wife’s unhappiness in the early years of
their marriage, he realizes that “he had always assumed Ruma’s life would be different.”
But if his daughter chooses a life in Seattle that she could have led in Calcutta, who’s to
say this isn’t evidence of another kind of freedom?

Ruma is struck by how much her father “resembled an American in his old age. With his
gray hair and fair skin he could have been practically from anywhere.” Seeing his
daughter, Ruma’s father has the opposite reaction: “She now resembled his wife so
strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly.” Ruma’s identity, Lahiri suggests,
is affected less by her coordinates on the globe than by the internal indices of her will.
She is a creature of the American soil, but she carries her own emotional bearings within
her. What are the real possibilities for change attached to a move? Lahiri seems to ask.
What are the limits?

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
333 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Related
Excerpt: ‘Unaccustomed Earth’(April 4, 2008)
'Unaccustomed Earth,' by Jhumpa Lahiri: Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures, Conflicted
Hearts (April 4, 2008)
Times Topics: Jhumpa Lahiri

While tending Ruma’s neglected garden, her father shows his grandson how to sow
seeds. The boy digs holes, but plants Legos in them, along with a plastic dinosaur and a
wooden block with a star. Emblems of the international, the prehistoric and the
celestial, they are buried in one garden plot, auguries of an ideal future, a utopia that
could be anywhere or nowhere. How can it grow?

Lahiri’s final three stories, grouped together as “Hema and Kaushik,” explore the
overlapping histories of the title characters, a girl and boy from two Bengali immigrant
families, set during significant moments of their lives. “Once in a Lifetime” begins in
1974, the year Kaushik Choudhuri and his parents leave Cambridge and return to India.
Seven years later, when the Choudhuris return to Massachusetts, Hema’s parents are
perplexed to find that “Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had.”
The next story, “Year’s End,” visits Kaushik during his senior year at Swarthmore as he
wrestles with the news of his father’s remarriage and meets his father’s new wife and
stepdaughters. The final story, “Going Ashore,” begins with Hema, now a Latin
professor at Wellesley, spending a few months in Rome before entering into an arranged
marriage with a parent-approved Hindu Punjabi man named Navin. Hema likes Navin’s
traditionalism and respect: “It touched her to be treated, at 37, like a teenaged girl.” The
couple plan to settle in Massachusetts. But in Rome, Hema runs across Kaushik, now a
world-roving war photographer. “As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant,”
Kaushik thinks. But how irrelevant are Kaushik’s origins — to Hema and to himself?
And which suitor will Hema choose? The romantic who has no home outside of
memory? Or the realist who wants to make a home where his wife chooses to live?

Except for their names, “Hema and Kaushik” could evoke any American’s ’70s
childhood, any American’s bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The
generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the waves of admiration,
competition and criticism that flow between the two families could occur between
Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight for connection and control
between Hema and Kaushik — as children and as adults — replays the tussle that has
gone on ever since men and women lived in caves.

Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow
as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the
espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos
of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil,
spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.

http://www.pajiba.com/book_reviews/unaccustomed-earth-by-jhumpa-lahiri.php

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

By Sophia | Posted Under Book Reviews | Share | 

Short stories aren’t usually my favorite genre. They tend to go by too quickly, so by the
time I get involved with the characters and story, it’s over and I’m already struggling to
ground myself in the next story.Unaccustomed Earth (2008) by Jhumpa Lahiri somehow
sucked me into each story but also left me satisfied with their brief length. This was my
first foray into Lahiri’s writing, although I have seen the movie The Namesake, but I am
now looking forward to reading Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Unaccustomed Earth consists of eight short stories, the last three of which center around the
lives of two recurring characters, Hema and Kaushik. The stories focus on the private,
family dramas that change our lives and shape our personalities but are rarely detected
by those around us. The first story describes a father’s week-long visit to see his
daughter after his wife, her mother, unexpectedly dies. It’s amazing what true and
different emotions and themes Lahiri could pack into this short story. There’s the loss of
a parent and a spouse, the staleness of marriage and roles in the marriage, the push and
pull of cultural expectations, the constantly changing roles of parent, caretaker, and
child, the silence that surrounds important issues, and understanding and forgiveness.
The other stories explore an aging marriage, the love (or crush) of an unhappily married
woman, alcoholism, and a housemate’s view of a failing relationship. The final three
stories visit Hema and Kaushik at different turning points of their lives.

I sometimes have a hard time describing books that I’ve really liked. I don’t have
anything negative to say, and anything I could say to describe it wouldn’t be as good as
actually reading the stories. These weren’t exactly page-turners, but quiet, insightful,
and emotional stories about people that I could relate to, feel for, and understand. I
enjoyed reading them and was very impressed by my first reading of Lahiri’s work.

This review is part of the Cannonball Read series, which Sophia has already
completed. But she keeps bringing the reviews, god bless her. For more of Sophia’s
reviews, check out her blog,  My Life As Seen Through Books.

http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2010/05/unaccustomed-earth-by-jhumpa-lahiri.html

Short Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri - The Unaccustomed

Earth
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POSTED BY BOOKLOVER FRIDAY, MAY 7, 2010 

Book Review by Pritha Mathur

The Unaccustomed Earth" is a splendid work by Jhumpa Lahiri. The work involves elegance and
poise intermingled with intricate feelings of the heart.

The book has two parts. The first part has some stories with a variety of characters : When Ruma's
father came to spend a few days with her family, she feared that he would permanentlysettle down
with them. She realised that her mother's death made them intimate in a way that never had been
before and also, that the relationship between them was then "infinite" and "unyielding". And after
her father left, unexpectedly, she found out a secret that explained - everything. There's a story
about a housewife who fell in love with a young family friend and revealed this to her daughter
years later when the latter's heart was broken by a broken relationship. Amit and Megan's
relationship were fading away over the years but unexpectedly, they begin to love each other after
many years of their marriage and he hoped that she had forgiven him after they had finished. A
sister introduced her brother to alcohol, cared for him when everybody rejected him and at the end,
she behaved with him just as everybody else did.

The second part deals with stories where the characters are interlinked. The most striking
relationship is that of Hema and Kaushik. In "Going Ashore" the writer has succinctly written how
their meeting after many years was unexpected, their parting sudden and yet, obvious and
extremely painful and how their feelings had taken every particle of their care to slowly take shape.
The beautiful thing about the stories is that they involve the happiness and sorrow of common and
yet, uncommon people; the stories end quite suddenly and the reader has to imagine so much
before he/she is fully satisfied.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9C06E7DD1239F930A35754C0A9669C8B63&ref=jhumpalahiri

India's Post-Rushdie Generation; Young Writers Leave

Magic Realism and Look at Reality
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 3, 2000

The tale begins in the middle of a swelteringly hot April night in 1996 on a train
meandering through the Indian countryside. Pankaj Mishra, a 27-year-old editor at
HarperCollins's India division, was reading a manuscript, a first novel by a relatively
unknown Indian film writer.

The writer was Arundhati Roy. The novel was ''The God of Small Things,'' a story of love
and caste in Kerala in tropical southwest India. Mr. Mishra immediately championed
her book in the West and watched his instincts validated as it sold nearly three million
copies worldwide and won the prestigious Booker Prize in Britain.

Now, four years later, a young, critically praised generation of Indian writers -- some of
whom are now New Yorkers -- are following in Ms. Roy's footsteps in their chosen
language, English.

And although their voices are being heard much more loudly in the West than in India,
they are ushering in a new era for Indian literature in English. They are often called
Midnight's Grandchildren in homage to another seminal Indian novel, Salman
Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children,'' the dark parable of Indian history since independence
that won the Booker Prize in 1981 and in 1993 won a special Booker Prize as the best
British novel of the previous quarter century. Now the new generation of writers have in
many ways broken away from the magic realism that characterizes much of Mr.
Rushdie's work.

''The signal that young Indian writers got from the success of 'The God of Small Things'
and the way the media dealt with the book is that there are people out there willing to
look at what you have to say,'' said Raj Kamal Jha, a 33-year-old editor at The Indian
Express in New Delhi, whose first novel, ''The Blue Bedspread,'' has received strong
reviews and an advance reported in the Indian press to be more than $275,000.

The phenomenon, publishers and writers say, is also a product of a renewed interest in
things Indian that began in 1997 with the mammoth publicity for the 50th anniversary
of the country's independence and that has been enhanced by the growth of computers
and the Internet, which have increased contact between Indian writers and Western
influences.

In addition to Mr. Jha, the writers include Mr. Mishra, now 31, whose first novel, ''The
Romantics,'' was called ''resonant and highly subtle'' by Michiko Kakutani in The New
York Times; Amit Chaudhuri, 37, of Calcutta whose writing has been described by Mr.
Rushdie as ''languorous, elliptical, beautiful''; and Kiran Desai (daughter of the
renowned Indian fiction writer Anita Desai), 28, who won praise two years ago for her
first novel, ''Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.''

They also include Jhumpa Lahiri, a 33-year-old New Yorker, the daughter of Bengali
immigrants, who won the Pulitzer Prize in April for her first book, a collection of short
stories titled ''Interpreter of Maladies.'' The stories evoke the complex and conflicted
world of Indian immigrants in the United States. This month Akhil Sharma, a 28-year-
old investment banker in Manhattan whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker
and The Atlantic, will publish his first novel, ''An Obedient Father'' (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux). It is about corruption, decay and greed in the Indian government and about an
Indian family.

Mr. Jha, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi with a
degree in mechanical engineering, went on to get a master's degree in journalism at the
University of Southern California. Richard Bernstein said in The New York Times that
''The Blue Bedspread,'' published in the United States by Random House, is ''a brilliant
beginning for a writer whose voice already shows a maturity well beyond his years.''

In the novel, an unnamed narrator is told that his sister has died in childbirth and that
he must care for her daughter for one night, until the baby can be placed for adoption.
As he watches the infant in his home, he writes for her the stories he believes will help
her understand her place in the world.
India's Post-Rushdie Generation; Young Writers Leave
Magic Realism and Look at Reality
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 3, 2000

The tale begins in the middle of a swelteringly hot April night in 1996 on a train
meandering through the Indian countryside. Pankaj Mishra, a 27-year-old editor at
HarperCollins's India division, was reading a manuscript, a first novel by a relatively
unknown Indian film writer.

The writer was Arundhati Roy. The novel was ''The God of Small Things,'' a story of love
and caste in Kerala in tropical southwest India. Mr. Mishra immediately championed
her book in the West and watched his instincts validated as it sold nearly three million
copies worldwide and won the prestigious Booker Prize in Britain.

Now, four years later, a young, critically praised generation of Indian writers -- some of
whom are now New Yorkers -- are following in Ms. Roy's footsteps in their chosen
language, English.

And although their voices are being heard much more loudly in the West than in India,
they are ushering in a new era for Indian literature in English. They are often called
Midnight's Grandchildren in homage to another seminal Indian novel, Salman
Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children,'' the dark parable of Indian history since independence
that won the Booker Prize in 1981 and in 1993 won a special Booker Prize as the best
British novel of the previous quarter century. Now the new generation of writers have in
many ways broken away from the magic realism that characterizes much of Mr.
Rushdie's work.

''The signal that young Indian writers got from the success of 'The God of Small Things'
and the way the media dealt with the book is that there are people out there willing to
look at what you have to say,'' said Raj Kamal Jha, a 33-year-old editor at The Indian
Express in New Delhi, whose first novel, ''The Blue Bedspread,'' has received strong
reviews and an advance reported in the Indian press to be more than $275,000.

The phenomenon, publishers and writers say, is also a product of a renewed interest in
things Indian that began in 1997 with the mammoth publicity for the 50th anniversary
of the country's independence and that has been enhanced by the growth of computers
and the Internet, which have increased contact between Indian writers and Western
influences.
In addition to Mr. Jha, the writers include Mr. Mishra, now 31, whose first novel, ''The
Romantics,'' was called ''resonant and highly subtle'' by Michiko Kakutani in The New
York Times; Amit Chaudhuri, 37, of Calcutta whose writing has been described by Mr.
Rushdie as ''languorous, elliptical, beautiful''; and Kiran Desai (daughter of the
renowned Indian fiction writer Anita Desai), 28, who won praise two years ago for her
first novel, ''Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.''

They also include Jhumpa Lahiri, a 33-year-old New Yorker, the daughter of Bengali
immigrants, who won the Pulitzer Prize in April for her first book, a collection of short
stories titled ''Interpreter of Maladies.'' The stories evoke the complex and conflicted
world of Indian immigrants in the United States. This month Akhil Sharma, a 28-year-
old investment banker in Manhattan whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker
and The Atlantic, will publish his first novel, ''An Obedient Father'' (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux). It is about corruption, decay and greed in the Indian government and about an
Indian family.

Mr. Jha, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi with a
degree in mechanical engineering, went on to get a master's degree in journalism at the
University of Southern California. Richard Bernstein said in The New York Times that
''The Blue Bedspread,'' published in the United States by Random House, is ''a brilliant
beginning for a writer whose voice already shows a maturity well beyond his years.''

In the novel, an unnamed narrator is told that his sister has died in childbirth and that
he must care for her daughter for one night, until the baby can be placed for adoption.
As he watches the infant in his home, he writes for her the stories he believes will help
her understand her place in the world.
It is that kind of knowledge, she said, that propels her stories of Indians in what for
them is a strange land. But the writers who have influenced her the most, she said, are
not Indian. They are instead also strangers in strange lands -- either immigrants or
writers who live or lived in a kind of self-imposed exile. They include Vladimir Nabokov,
James Joyce, Mavis Gallant and William Trevor.

''What I love about these writers is their connection to place, or at least their obsession
with place, even if they don't feel connected,'' she said.

Mr. Sharma, the author of ''An Obedient Father,'' moved to New Jersey from New Delhi
with his parents when he was 9, but when it comes to writing about India and Indians,
he said, he views himself as ''quite an insider.''
His resume seems quintessentially American. He took Toni Morrison's writing class at
Princeton University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford
University, went to Harvard Law School and is an investment banker in New York. But
''I've spent a lot of time in India,'' he said. ''I've been back 10 to 15 times, three months
or so each visit, a total of three and a half years. India has played a large role in my
imagination, and I think I write from an Indian point of view.''

Ms. Desai, whose novel focuses on the contradictions of modern life in a small Indian
town, has been compared by critics to an older generation of Indian writers, among
them her mother and R. K. Narayan. Ms. Desai, who has lived in the United States since
she was 14 and has a home in Manhattan, spends about half the year in New Delhi. She
said she considers herself ''an Indian writer who lives in America.''

''My own relation to India is a very natural one,'' she said in an interview. ''I find it very
easy to reach into my past and write about India, because it is my heritage. It's in my
blood. My family lives in both places. These days there's so much coming and going. It's
not the old style of immigration.''

Mr. Jha and Mr. Mishra say that in the vastness of India, where their middle-class lives
have been the exception rather than the rule, they feel that they are in some ways
separate from the real country and its overwhelming issues of poverty and class.

''When I go home from work I see at every intersection 5-year-olds coming to my car
and tapping on the window for some loose change,'' Mr. Jha said. ''I can't escape that
reality. It deeply affects me. And at the same time I feel very impotent, because I can't
engage with it. And one simply must.''

Despite the problems and concerns, Mr. Chaudhuri, whose first American book,
''Freedom Song,'' was praised by critics last year and whose new novel, ''A New World,''
is being published by Knopf in October, said he was confident about the future of Indian
writing in English.

''This is the coming of age of a particular generation that suddenly finds the novel an
attractive form,'' Mr. Chaudhuri said. '' We need time to witness the evolution, and see
what develops.''

Photos: Among the young Indian writers who are making a literary splash in the West:
above, Jhumpa Lahiri and from left, Raj Kamal Jha, Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra.
(Ruth Fremson/The New York Times); (Raaj Dayal/Random House); (Associated
Press); (Pradip Krishen/Random House)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/books/04Book.html?ref=jhumpalahiri

Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures,

Conflicted Hearts
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: April 4, 2008

Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-
reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither:
too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped
in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the
American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy
house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land,
and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often
emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for
their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but
completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly
apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.

Elena Seibert

Jhumpa Lahiri

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri
333 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

As she did in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories “Interpreter of Maladies”

(1999) and her dazzling 2003 novel “The Namesake,” Ms. Lahiri writes about these
people in “Unaccustomed Earth” with an intimate knowledge of their conflicted hearts,
using her lapidary eye for detail to conjure their daily lives with extraordinary precision:
the faint taste of coconut in the Nice cookies that a man associates with his dead wife;
the Wonder Bread sandwiches, tinted green with curry, that a Bengali mother makes for
her embarrassed daughter to take to school. A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through
these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and
mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her
husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.

Many of the characters in these stories seem to be in relationships that are filled with
silences and black holes. In some cases this is the result of an arranged marriage that’s
never worked out; in others it is simply a case of people failing to communicate or failing
to reach out, in time, for what they want.

In “Only Goodness” Sudha, who is working on her second master’s degree at the London
School of Economics, wonders at the bizarre “lack of emotion” in her parents’ marriage,
which was “neither happy nor unhappy” and seemingly devoid of both bitterness and
ardor, but she finds her own marriage to an Englishman foundering upon her failure to
tell him a family secret. In “Hell-Heaven” the narrator recounts the story of her parents’
chilly marriage and her mother’s passionate, unrequited love for a fellow Bengali and
family friend, who gave her mother “the only pure happiness she ever felt.” And in “A
Choice of Accommodations” Amit realizes that the “most profound thing” in his life —
the birth of his daughters — has already happened, that the rest of his life will be only “a
continuation of the things” he already knows. Increasingly he will come to regard
solitude — a run in the park, a ride by himself on the subway — as “what one relished
most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane.”

As for Ruma, the heroine of the title story, she realizes during a visit from her widowed
father that they rarely talk about matters of real importance; they do not speak about
her mother or her brother, they do not discuss her pregnancy or her marriage, or her
father’s new relationship with a woman he met on vacation. This has been their history
as long as she can remember: “Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion
would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them.” Her marriage,
Ruma realizes, is stilted too: she is increasingly aware that she and her husband, Adam,
are “separate people leading separate lives,” and that part of her is actually relieved
when Adam leaves on one of his many business trips.

Like many children of immigrants Ms. Lahiri’s characters are acutely aware of their
parents’ expectations; that they get into an Ivy Leagueschool, go to med school or grad
school, marry someone from a good Bengali family. Deftly explicating the emotional
arithmetic of her characters’ families, Ms. Lahiri shows how some of these children learn
to sidestep, even defy their parents’ wishes. But she also shows how haunted they
remain by the burden of their families’ dreams and their awareness of their role in the
generational process of Americanization.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri
333 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Related
Excerpt: ‘Unaccustomed Earth’(April 4, 2008)
Times Topics: Jhumpa Lahiri

Their parents often seem so exhausted just coping with the difficulties of surviving in a
strange new world that talk about self-fulfillment or depression or happiness seems
utterly irrelevant to them; they are strangely pragmatic and unsentimental — about
their marriages, their work, the hardships of daily life. These characters’ American-born
children are, at once, more romantic about the possibilities of finding genuine love and
rewarding careers and more cynical too about the trajectories of most people’s lives.
Often cast in the role of facilitator or fixer, they are accustomed to serving as their
parents’ go-betweens and to easing their younger siblings’ way into full-fledged
American lives.

Sudha, for instance, scavenged yard sales for the right toys for her little brother — “the
Fisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say that made animal sounds”; she read
him books like “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “Frog and Toad,” and “told her parents to
set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer.”

The last three overlapping tales in this volume tell a single story about a Bengali-
American girl and a Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing lives make up a
poignant ballad of love and loss and death. Hema and Kaushik get to know each other as
teenagers, when Kaushik’s family comes to stay with Hema’s parents while they house-
hunt in the Boston suburbs. Hema secretly nurses a crush on Kaushik, but he is
oblivious to her schoolgirl antics and preoccupied with his mother’s deteriorating
health. His grief over her death and his rage at his father’s hasty remarriage will propel
him into a career as a photojournalist, who spends most of his time traveling to war
zones in distant parts of the globe.
Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy love
affair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is
conscious of the “deadness” of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself
that the relationship will endow her life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then,
against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome — on the eve of Hema’s
departure for her wedding — and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is
an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic
denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.

In the hands of a less talented writer it’s an ending that might have seemed
melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and
haunting power of tragedy — a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate
artistry as a writer.

http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/index.php/JLCMS/article/viewFile/9/8

Negotiating Borders of Culture :

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

DEBARATI BANDYOPADHYAY*

In Indian English Literature : A Critical Survey 1980-2000, M.K. Naik

and Shyamala A. Narain praise Jhumpa Lahiri for creating “history

in becoming the first Indian author to win prestigious Pulitzer Prize

in the USA for her collection of short stories, Interpreter ofs Maladies.”

(1999: 36) Though Jhumpa Lahiri belongs to the second generation

of an Indian family abroad, she retains her links with India even

today, as amply proved by her subsequent work in the form of a

critically-acclaimed novel, The Namesake (2003). In her work, Indians

going abroad negotiate the borders and fringes of a foreign society

in various ways and seek to establish their identity on alien shores.

It is this movement across continents and cultures that I intend to

map here.

Negotiating borders, moving across continents and the seven seas,

when an individual in search of a better life, reaches the First World,

how does he assimilate himself with the citizens of the host nation?

Is the process of such assimilation or its opposite—dissension—

different in the case of men, women and children? This question

arises because the response of Ashima in The Namesake, is different

from that of her children Gogol and Sonali, to the socio-cultural

conditions of life in the USA, born as she is in Calcutta. Similarly

there had been different responses to life in the USA in the case of

various characters in the collection of stories depicting life in ‘Bengal,

Boston and Beyond,’ as the subtitle of Interpreter of Maladies reveals.

Conflict between distinct cultural backgrounds and regular encounters

between different worldviews shape the emotional life of the diaspora

even in multi-ethnic, multicultural societies like India and the USA.

Culture suggests the arts, customs and institutions of a certain

people or nation, thereby helping us to distinguish a certain group

of people from others and one nation from another. It also helps in
the burgeoning of a distinct national identity among its citizens.

Multiculturalism in the context of one nation’s experience of

vicissitudes appears to institutionalize another way of expressing that

nation’s cultural identity. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction, Indian roots and

American life, or, to be more precise, at least in the case of The

Namesake, Calcutta on the one hand, and Cambridge and New York

on the other, provide readers with different paradigms of life among

people representing distinct cultures and worldviews. It is in this

context, however, that we ought to remember Edward Said’s scepticism

with the concept of culture as something distinctive, representative

of and exclusive to a certain group or nation in Culture and Imperialism

(1993) so as to understand the basic problem with such terms. Said

writes:

Culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating

element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known

and thought, as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s. Arnold

believed that culture palliates, if it does not altogether neutralize,

the ravages of a modern, aggressive, mercantile and brutalizing

urban experience …. In time culture comes to be associated, often

aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiates ‘us’

from ‘them,’ almost always with some degree of xenophobia.

Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather

combative one at that…. (xiii)

Against this concept of culture as a homogenization of the good,

patriotic attributes of a nation for the sake of exclusiveness, and

creation and preservation of an identity, Said mentions

‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’ next, in order to praise their

‘permissiveness’ and ‘relatively liberal philosophies’ (xiv). In the case

of Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters, a search for their origin, finding a

place or a nation that may be called one’s own and belonging to

either the Indian subcontinent or the USA, or, in other words, making

a choice between the concepts of cultural identity and multiculturalism

seem to remain juxtaposed always.

‘Multiculturalism’ suggests the coexistence of a number of different

cultures. It does not prescribe homogenization and conformity directly,

nor does it encourage overtly different ethnic, religious, lingual or

racial constituents of a particular society to denigrate and alienate

each other to such an extent that the fragile balance of such a society

is damaged or destroyed permanently. It is at a transitional point

between two hemispheres—East and West—and two segments of the

world hierarchy—Third and First—or, the Indian subcontinent and

the USA that we may locate most of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fictional world.

India with her concept of ‘unity in diversity’ and the USA as the

melting pot of cultures and races, coexist in her fiction.

98

*Reader, Department of English, Viswa Bharati, Santiniketan.

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Discussing a cultural experience in a completely different context,

Vijay Mishra, in “New Lamps for Old: Diasporas Migrancy Border,”

had commented:

Even though the establishment of a homeland is not essential

to ‘the cultural logic’ of diasporas… it must be conceded that

‘homeland’ figures prominently in the psychic imaginary of

diasporas. Hindi news from India on SBS radio in Australia

always refer to the news as desh ki khabar (‘news from desh’

where desh is unmarked as a country and can be translated as

‘Homeland’). India alone as desh is unnamed, every other country

including Australia is named in the news bulletin. (70)

Though Jhumpa Lahiri has been living away from Bengal for the

largest part of her life, in ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,’ it is

this same yearning for one’s homeland that finds expression. Mr.

Pirzada in the crucial days of 1971, comes to the tiny Lilia’s US home

to her Bengali parents to dine and gradually, more important, to listen

to the news of the birth pangs of Bangladesh: “At six-thirty, which

was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and

adjusted the antennas.” (31) Lilia’s Indian parents and Mr. Pirzada

from East Pakistan in 1971, watch their “national news” of mass

destruction avidly. In contrast, Lilia, born in the USA (in her mother’s

“estimation,” unlike herself, and also her husband) is assured of an

easy life during which she would never be compelled to eat “rationed

food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from … rooftop, or hide

neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot.” (26-27)

And the price paid for this in the US is the limits imposed upon

young Lilia’s awareness of the non-US parts of the world:

No one at school talked about the war followed so faithfully

in my living room. We continued to study the American

Revolution, and learned about the injustices of taxation without

representation, and memorized passages from the Declaration of

Independence. During recess the boys would divide in two

groups … Redcoats against the colonies. (32-33)

While Lilia learns about US Declaration of Independence, East

Pakistan’s struggle to become independent as a nation is, ironically,

neglected completely. Mr. Pirzada, the newcomer, separated from his

wife and seven daughters, for whom he remained anxious throughout

this period, must have yearned to return to his own country. Yet,

like Lilia’s parents, he graciously accommodates US celebrations into

his life by helping Lilia celebrate Halloween like a typical American

child. In contrast, when in the school library, Lilia finds and begins

to read a book containing a few pages on Dacca, her teacher acts

decisively:

Mrs. Kenyon emerged… and lifted the book by the tip of

its spine as if it were a hair clinging to my sweater. She glanced

at the cover, then at me.

“Is this book a part of your report, Lilia?”

“No, Mrs. Kenyon.”

“Then I see no reason to consult,” she said, replacing it in

the slim gap on the shelf. “Do you?” (33)

This reading of Lahiri’s short story reveals that though the author
herself was born in London and grew up in Rhode Island, USA, yet

she has Bengali parents and even celebrated her marriage in the

Bengali manner and continues to write about both the countries, both

the continents, thereby expressing the emotions that disturb all

expatriate artists. Brati Biswas quotes Lahiri’s words from an internet

conversation: “I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts…

were always set in Calcutta…. I learned to observe things as an

outsider, and yet I also knew that as different as Calcutta is from

Rhode Island, I belonged there in some fundamental way ….” (187)

Lahiri points out clearly in this conversation that though she lives

in the USA and visits Calcutta as well as India from time to time

she feels a sense of belonging here “in the ways I did not seem to

belong in the United States.” (187) It is in this sense that Suman Bala

chooses to consider her as “an expatriate Indian writer… [who]

stands in the same category as that of V.S. Naipaul, whom Bharati

Mukherjee calls an Indian expatriate writer.” (11)

However, in Lahiri’s fiction the readers are constantly being

invited to cross over from India to the USA alongwith the characters.

Against a panoramic background of journeys — not merely in terms

of physical and career relocation as in the case of Mrs. Sen in a short

story and Ashoke in The Namesake, but also emotional, leaving behind

permanent fault-lines marking rupture and patching up — the minute

details representing socio-cultural parameters for acceptance and

rejection, stand out conspicuously. Amalgamation of typically Indian

incidents and their American counterparts in detail help us to

compare and contrast two different cultural patterns. In the first story

in her collection, “A Temporary Matter”, Lahiri begins by creating

a typically Indian situation at the very centre of the USA, namely,

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that of power-cut. Of course, where in the USA it is only a temporary

matter and the local consumers receive notice and ample time for

preparing for the situation, in India it is not so, as Shoba points out

in the darkness lit up with candles: “It’s like India…. Sometimes the

current disappears for hours at a stretch. I once had to attend an

entire rice ceremony in the dark. The baby just cried and cried. It

must have been so hot.” (11)

In this case, Lahiri makes the distinction quite vivid but a mere

hint can sometimes alert the readers to these situations that mark
India and the USA. as so far apart. For instance, in the same story,

when Shoba used to go shopping, she could be found “arguing

under the morning sun with boys too young to shave but already

missing teeth….During the drive back home, as the car curved along

the Charles, they invariably marveled at how much food they’d

bought.” (7)

It is not the hint of violence in lower class life in the USA in

the pre-adolescence group but the other suggestion that links India

with the American way of life by means of contrast. In the case of

Boorima in “A Real Durwan,” a refugee in Calcutta from East

Pakistan, who had to work 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,

Reed broom in head, sari smeared with newspaper ink, she

wandered through markets and began spending her life savings

on small treats: today a packet of puffed rice…. The next day

she walked… to the produce markets in Bow Bazar. It was there

… that she felt something tugging on the free end of her sari.

When she looked… the rest of her life savings…were gone. (81)

Boorima had already lost not only her country of origin but her family

and all her possessions. Now she loses all means of survival. The

subtle hints localizing Shoba along the Charles and Boorima at

Bowbazar suggest the yawning gap that exists between the old

woman’s starvation and Shoba’s ability to purchase astonishingly

rich food, both in quality and quantity, thereby indicating the nature

of Lahiri’s awareness of the socio-economic divide between First and

Third World countries.

Where in “A Temporary Matter” Lahiri mentions the piles of food

purchased in passing, in “This Blessed House” the details she

provides, makes the opulence (compared to an average lower middle

class Indian’s lifestyle) of a person in the USA with roots in India,

quite vivid:

The menu for the party was fairly simple: there would be

a case of champagne, and samosas from an Indian restaurant

in Hartford, and big trays of rice with chicken and almonds and

orange peels, which Sanjeev had spent the greater part of the

morning and afternoon preparing… worried that there would

not be enough to drink,[he] ran out at one point to buy another

case of champagne just in case. (150)

The fairly simple menu and the champagne prove that Sanjeev and

his wife Twinkle have blended the western and the Indian food

habits quite well. Cross-cultural relations are on display in Sanjeev’s

cooking and sweeping the house as preparatory work for the party

while his wife had left for a pedicure and a manicure. In “A

Temporary Matter” too, Shoba continued to work out of home while

Shukumar, on leave to complete his dissertation, would prepare food

for both. This is normal in the West and gradually, not so very rare

in India either. But even a few years ago, at the time when these

stories are set, the domestic pictures in India and the west could not

have been more different, as proved in the “Interpreter of Maladies”

where Mr. Kapasi, a typical Indian husband would return home after

a long day’s work outside, “scrub his feet and hands with sandalwood

soap, and enjoy the evening newspaper and a cup of tea that his

wife would serve him….” (60)

Lahiri is not only aware of the traditional Indian family-structure

and the role designated to men and women in this society, but also

the way Indians view foreign-returned fellow-Indians or people of

white skin. In “A Temporary Matter” Shoba says that back in

Calcutta “[for] some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell

them the names of my friends in America. I don’t know why the

information was so interesting to them. The last time I saw my aunt

she asked after four girls I went to elementary school with in Tucson.

I barely remember them now.” (12)

And for foreign-returned Indian and N.R.Is themselves, India is

both a threat and an attraction as amply proved by Shukumar’s

experiences. “His parents… used to go back without him. The first

time he’d gone as an infant he’d nearly died of amoebic dysentery.

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His father… was afraid to take him again....” (12) But while India

remained a country whose germs were to be avoided and sailing

camps in the USA were to be given preference over, when this same

Shukumar had grown up and listened to his wife Shoba reminiscing

about India, he “wished now that he had his own childhood story

of India.” (12)

Undoubtedly those who make the transition from the Indian

subcontinent to the West feel both attraction for their roots in a

nostalgic manner and yet, it is difficult for them to accept the

mundane realities prevailing in India. For women of an earlier

generation especially, the West provided opportunities that in the

past traditional Indian wives and mothers could not even imagine

of. In “A Temporary Matter’’ we find such a lady maintaining a

balance between Indian tradition and Western necessities. Shoba’s

mother, who had come over to spend two months with the couple

after Shoba had given birth to a dead son, takes care of everything

efficiently.

She came from America… cooked dinner every night, drove herself

to the supermarket, washed their clothes, put them away. She was

a religious woman. She set up a small shrine, a framed picture of

a lavender-faced goddess and a plate of marigold petals, on the

bedside table in the guest room…. She folded his [Shukumar’s]

sweaters with an expertise she had learned from her job in a

department store. (9)

But though in this case a perfect balance had been reached, the

case was not so for the majority of women who had gone abroad

with their husbands. In ‘Mrs Sen’s”, the lady in question finds it

difficult to adjust to the fast pace of life in the West, symbolized in

her inability to master driving skills quickly enough and her propensity

to use the curved blade “hinged at one end to a narrow wooden

base” to cut vegetable into pieces instead of the knife used in the

West for this purpose (114). In The Namesake, after spending all her

married life in the USA, even after giving birth to her two children

and bringing them up there, Ashima, the housewife retains completely

Indian sentiments in such a manner that the USA never feels like

her home. With grown-up children living away from home, she

continued to revisit India in nostalgia, rereading her long-dead

parents’ letters from India, her home. At forty-eight, she is still unable

to operate a bank account all by herself and when she has cheques

to deposit she hands them over to her husband Ashoke and “he

deposits them for her at the bank into their account.” (162) When

her husband returns home every third weekend, he “does the things

she still doesn’t know how to do. He pays all the bills, and rakes

the leaves on the lawn, and puts gas from the self-service station into

her car.” (163)

But is the situation the same for second generation members of

the diaspora? Since she herself is a representative of this group of

expatriate Indians, Jhumpa Lahiri knows the meaning of this type

of life very well and therefore, she distinguishes between the

experiences of different generations of the diaspora emphatically. As

Brati Biswas had quoted from her internet-interview, Lahiri discusses

her own experience and points out its significance in the larger

context of the rest of such expatriate Indians. She says:

In fact, it is still very hard to think of myself as an American.

For immigrants the challenges of exile, the loneliness, the

constant sense of alienation, the knowledge of and longing for

a lost world, are more explicit and distressing than for their

children. On the other hand, the problem for the children of

immigrants, those with strong ties to their country of origin, is

that they feel neither one thing nor the other. The feeling that

there was no single place to which I fully belonged bothered

me growing up. It bothers me less now. (187-8)

This seems to be the story of not only Jhumpa Lahiri’s life, but

also of Gogol alias Nikhil Ganguli in The Namesake. In her first novel,

Lahiri continues to relocate her characters from Calcutta to Boston

and for Gogol, the representative of the next generation, from these

places to New York and in the midst of the sophisticated white urban
population in the USA. In contrast to both Ashoke and Ashima, the

India-born couple, Gogol is born in the USA and as an US citizen

by birth, he feels a lost more confident about his position in his

society than his parents would ever be, except possibly for the

problem about the unusual appearance of his own name. Therefore

in his childhood, Ashoke and Ashima, eager to ensure that their son

would imbibe and retain some essence of their Indian as well as

Bengali background, would make a point of driving into Cambridge…

when the Apu Trilogy plays at the Orson Welles, or when there is

a Kathakali dance performance or a sitar recital at Memorial Hall…

send him to Bengali language and culture lessons. (65) Gogol himself,

like other children of Indian expatriates sitting through these lessons

“without interest, wishing they could be at ballet or softball practice

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instead” like typically American children, hated attending them

too.(66)

Where Ashoke and Ashima work and behave like all normal

American people except for receiving issues of India Abroad and

Sangbad Bichitra, Gogol proves to be a more authentic American than

they are, though, he does not look forward to occasional visits to

Calcutta or the annual pujo held at one of the local community halls

where “they were required to throw marigold petals at a cardboard

effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food.” (64) To him, it

was never as interesting and lively as Christmas. And the fact that

the American themselves make a subtle yet pronounced distinction

between his parents and himself (presumably because of their accents

and behaviour) posits in him a confident, American way of viewing

life.

For by now he is aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his

parents’ accents, and of salesmen who prefer to direct their

conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either

incompetent or deaf. But his father is unaffected at such

moments…. (67-68)

However, it is not always that even Gogol can feel confident about

his position in the American society. When he finds the family

mailbox bearing the surname GANGULI had been tampered with to

spell GANGREEN (67), and when during a school project where the

young students are made to record the names etched on tombstones,

Gogol realizes that he can never hope to find his family name on

any of these among hordes of Smiths, Collinses and Woods or as

his other classmates find theirs, he feels enraged at being burdened

with a useless, absurd identity.

Apart from these stray experiences sobering up Gogol Ganguli’s

wild enthusiasm to lead a life on his own terms like a typical

American citizen a bit, he goes on to chart out his own path away

from home among Ruth, Maxine, Gerald, Lydia and other American

friends and lovers, just as his sister Sonali (turned into Sonia now)

does with her boyfriend Ben. And like a typically American couple,

Gogol and his wife Moushumi separate quite naturally over marital

infidelity. Compared to the situation of Lahiri’s earlier story “Sexy”

where a philandering Indian husband in the USA has a tearful, loyal

wife clinging to him and not ready to accept separation at all, here

it is the infidelity of the wife, born to Indian parents but brought

up in England and the USA like Lahiri herself, that destroys their

marriage. Moushumi, like Gogol, is a second generation Indian

immigrant and there is a world wide gap between the traditional Mrs.

Sen or Ashimalike wife in the West and women of her generation

in 2000.
In contrast to Gogol’s confident view of the American way of

life as the acceptable one, we find the wealthy and suave urbanites

Maxine and her parents Gerald and Lydia’s polite expression of

interest in India. India viewed through the eyes of the American

citizens who have learnt about this Asian country not by visiting it

but by glancing at pictures and reading newspaper reports or from

hearsay at the most is something like this:

Eventually the talk turns to India. Gerald asks questions about

the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism, a topic Gogol knows

little about. Lydia talks at length about Indian carpets and

miniatures, Maxine about a college class she’d once taken on

Buddhist stupas…. Gerald has an Indian colleague… who just

went to India for his honeymoon. He’d brought back spectacular

photographs, of a palace built on a lake. (134)

On the other hand, Pamela, another American woman says

unequivocally that Gogol must be lucky because he does not have

to fall sick visiting India like her friend had. When Gogol says that

he too has to get shots before he goes to India and that his parents

“devote the better part of a suitcase to medicine,” she is sceptical,

as, according to her, as an Indian, he must be immune to the health

hazards the Americans face in India. (157) This then, represents the

spectrum of the American ways of viewing India, as from the country

of historical artifacts to recent religious controversies in polite society

and then as a spectre of an ugly, unhealthy, dirty place crawling

with germs, in case of the more forthright.

Gogol Ganguli’s choice of this American way of life over the

Indian and the Bengali had appeared to be quite natural for the

greater part of the novel, at least to him. It is only after his marriage

with Moushumi fails and his father dies that Gogol returns home

dutifully to take care of his mother regularly, as much as possible.

It is in these changed circumstances where traditional Indian concepts

of filial duty and responsibility are reasserted as values that Gogol

understands his true position in the world. Along with the legacy

left by the father, he finds a new love to cherish for the motherland

far away. Not because the Americans had rejected Gogol (because

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they had accepted him as an American most of the time clearly), nor

because he could not imbibe the American way of life but because
he feels that now since Ashima, a widow, is to spend half the year

in Calcutta and half in the States after selling off the house, he will

find his home occupied by strangers henceforth, the new buyers of

their house. Now that one peripatetic Gogol Ganguli loses the only

fixed point, his ‘home’ containing his roots, he is able to understand

the value of the ‘homeland.’

He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective

families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a

perpetual state of expectation, of longing. All those trips to Calcutta

he’d once resented — how could they have been enough? … Gogol

knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite

of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess

himself. (281)

The realization of his inadequacy, the inability to be sustained by

memories of a ‘homeland’, to go on struggling to survive abroad, are

skills that Gogol seeks because he feels that in the absence of a little

India in the form of his ‘home’ containing Ashima, he will not feel

at home in the country where he was born. Now he understands

the nature of the bond that compelled his parents to make annual

pilgrimages to the motherland.

He had spent years maintaining distance from his origins; his

parents, in bridging that distance as best they could. And yet, for

all his aloofness… he has always hovered close to this quiet, ordinary

town that had remained, for his mother and father, stubbornly exotic.

… for most of his adult life… he has never been more than a fourhour train ride away.
And there was nothing, apart from his family,

to draw him home, to make this train journey, again and again. (281)

Roots, origin, family bonds induce expatriate, immigrant nonresident Indians to return
again and again to the point from where

they move away. This emotional and spiritual bond gives form to

Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories and about such a state of expatriate existence,

the following words of Aamer Hussin seem to be the most appropriate :

it implies neither a forced eviction from one’s motherland, nor

a deliberate rejection; there are no connotations of permanent

or obligatory leavetaking. There is, instead, a tremendous inherent

privilege in the term, a mobility of mind if not always of matter,

to which we as writers should lay claim: a doubling instead of

a split. (102)

Jhumpa Lahiri, as a fictional creator, occupies this privileged space

in between two countries, two continents, two cultures, and this

multiplicity of perspectives, a truly multi-national existence and a

multi-cultural experience makes her one of the foremost spokespersons

of the multitude of minute yet consequential incidents that constitute

contemporary life.

References

Bala, Suman.2002. ‘Jhumpa Lahiri: The Master Storyteller’, Jhumpa Lahiri: The

Master.Storyteller: A Critical Response to Interpreter of Maladies,

ed. Suman Bala. New Delhi: Khosla.

Biswas, Brati. 2002. “‘Beyond” Ethnicity: A Study of Interpreter of Maladies,’

Jhumpa Lahiri: The Master Storyteller: A Critical Response to Interpreter

of Maladies, ed. Suman Bala. New Delhi: Khosla.

Hussein, Aamer.1991. ‘The Echoing of Quiet Voices’. Asian Voices in English,

eds. Mini Chan and Roy Harris. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2000. Interpreter of Maladies. 1999. New Delhi: Harper Collins,

1999.

------------- 2003. The Namesake. London: Flamingo-Harper Collins.

Mishra, Vijay. 2000. ‘New Lamps for Old: Diaspora Migrancy Border’.

Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory, Text and Context. eds. Harish

Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: Indian Institute of

Advanced Study, 1996.

Naik, M.K. and Shyamala A. Narayan. 2001. Indian English Literature 1980-
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Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. London: Vintag