Jumpa Lahiri's 'Interpreter Of Maladies'

YEAR 12
VCE ENGLISH

Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpa Lahiri


STUDENT RESOURCE BOOKLET

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Story summaries
Interpreter of Maladies 3
A Real Durwan 10
Sexy 13
Mrs Sen’s 17
This Blessed House 22
The Teatment of Bibi Haldar 23
The Third and Final Continent 25
When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine

Story Activities 29

Interviews and reviews 33

Essay Topics 58

Essay models 60

‘Interpreter of Maladies’ pages 43-69
Summary of the story
Mr. and Mrs. Das are arguing at the first rest stop about whose turn it is to take their daughter to the toilet. Mr. Das complains he bathed her the night before. Mrs. Das gets out of Mr. Kapasi 's car to take Tina. It is a Saturday in mid-July. Mr. Kapasi
is driving the Das family from their hotel to the Sun Temple at Konarak. He is assigned to pick up foreign tourists because he speaks English. The Das 's also have two boys, Ronny and Bobby. The parents are under thirty and look Indian but dress like foreigners. Mr. Das squeezes Mr. Kapasi 's hand greeting him like an American. Mr. Das holds a tour book titled "INDIA" and wears shorts, T-shirt, sneakers and camera around his neck. Ronny exits the car to see a goat. Bobby stays in the car. Mr. Das tells him to watch his brother but Bobby says he doesn 't feel like it. Mr. Kapasi tells Mr. Das the goats are tame.
Mr. Kapasi asks if he left India as a child. Mr. Das explains he and Mrs. Das were born and raised in America but are visiting their parents who retired in India. Tina returns. Mr. Das indicates this is her first trip to India and asks her where Mina is. Mr. Kapasi finds it strange Mr. Das asks his daughter about her mother using her first name. Tina points to her mother buying something from a shirtless man at the stall. As she walks away, the man sings part of a Hindi love song that Mrs. Das seems not to understand. Mr. Kapasi notices her short skirt and tight-fitting blouse like a man 's undershirt. Mr. Das answers Mr. Kapasi they live in New Brunswick, New Jersey and he teaches science in middle school. Mr. Das compares his student trips to a New York Museum with Mr. Kapasi 's work as a tour guide. Mrs. Das returns and asks how long the trip is. Mr. Kapasi answers two and one half hours. Mr. Das responds the tour book says eighteen miles. Mr. Kapasi says it 's actually fifty-two miles and roads are poor. Mr. Kapasi checks the door locks before starting the car and leaving the tea stall.
As they drive down the road, Ronny yells monkeys to what Bobby points at. Mr. Kapasi indicates they are common in the area as they jump into the road and on the car. They have only seen monkeys in a zoo. Mr. Das asks to stop so he can take pictures. Mrs. Das does her nails and tells Tina to leave her alone. The boys are confused by drivers on the opposite side than in America. Mr. Kapasi says he knows from watching ‘Dallas’. He thinks to himself the Das family act like brothers and sisters. The parents act just like an older brother and sister. Mrs. Das complains the car is not air-conditioned. She asks if Mr. Das saves fifty cents because of that. He tells her to quit complaining and it 's not so hot. Mr. Das asks Mr. Kapasi if his job is tiresome. He tells him to stop so he can take another picture. Mrs. Das looks away at the sky.
Mr. Kapasi looks forward to guiding tours, and the Sun Temple is a favorite destination. He guides tours only on Friday and Saturday, and has a job in a doctor 's office the other days. Mr. Das asks if he 's a doctor. Mr. Kapasi explains he interprets for a doctor who does not speak Gujarati. Mr. Das says that 's interesting. Mrs. Das says it 's romantic. She puts her sunglasses atop her head. Her eyes meet Mr. Kapasi 's in a drowsy gaze through the rearview mirror. Mr. Das turns to her to ask what 's romantic. She tells him she doesn 't know. Then she asks Mr. Kapasi if he wants some gum and to tell them more about his job. He asks what she wants to know. She says a typical situation. So she can picture what happens she tilts her head and closes her eyes. Mr. Kapasi tells them of one. She says it 's neat, patients depend on him, he has a big responsibility and Mr. Das agrees.
Mina explains that patients are more dependent on Mr. Kapasi than the doctor since neither understands the other without him. Mr. Kapasi reflects on what they say and how he never thinks of it that way. He thinks interpreting patient maladies is a failure to be the interpreter for diplomats and scholar of foreign languages he wanted. He remembers few foreign phrases anymore and his children know better English. He met the doctor when his son was sick and had to barter language skills for the medical treatment his son needed. The son died but he continues on with the doctor to pay their bills. This reminds his wife of their son. She never asks about his job.
Mrs. Das 's interest in it flatters him. Mr. Kapasi reflects on how his marriage and the Das couple seem similar. They both seem unhappily married to each other and have children to raise. He wonders if they 're a bad match also. He is exhilarated by her comment about his romantic job. He is happy to wear his good suit that morning and checks his reflection in the mirror while driving. He glances back at Mrs. Das and tells her more patient stories. The children look for monkeys, Mr. Das reads his tour book and Mr. Kapasi feels like he 's talking alone with Mrs. Das. When they stop for lunch, Mrs. Das calls Mr. Kapasi to sit with them. When they finish Mr. Das tells Mr. Kapasi to move near Mrs. Das so he can take a picture. She asks for his address to send pictures. He writes it down and dreams about writing to her.
The Das tour group arrives at the temple. Mr. Kapasi tells them its history and leads the family on a walking tour of the grounds. Mr. Das follows taking pictures. They pass by friezes of naked couples entwined in making love, elephant processions and topless female musicians. Mr. Kapasi sees Mrs. Das stare silently at the figures. He admires the back of her legs and points out features of Surya as he dreams of embracing her. He asks when they will return home. She says ten days. He hopes to hear from her in six weeks.
The group starts back to the hotel. Mr. Kapasi thinks about ways he can make the tour last longer. He mentions a side trip to another site on the left and the children agree. Mr. Kapasi fantasizes what he will say to Mrs. Das and that he might take her hand. When they arrive she says her legs are tired and won 't get out of the car. Mr. Das and children start up the hill. When Mr. Kapasi says he will join them to explain the caves Mrs. Das asks him to stay and gets into the front seat with him.
Mina watches Raj and her children hike up the hill and confides in Mr. Kapasi. She says Bobby is not Raj 's son. She explains they were young when they married and still in college. They had Ronny and she stayed at home to take care of the baby so she sees few friends. Raj didn 't mind because he enjoys coming home to play with the baby. He invites a friend of his to stay with them. She makes love to him and conceives Bobby the afternoon he leaves. Mr. Kapasi refers to her as Mrs. Das, but she says he should not call her Mrs. She is twenty-eight and he probably has children her age. He is crestfallen that she thinks he is as old as her parents. She tells him her secret because of his talent. She has not told anyone for eight years. Raj doesn 't even suspect her secret. She is in pain and hopes Mr. Kapasi knows what to say to relieve her so she feels better.
Mina 's secret depresses Mr. Kapasi. He asks her if its pain or guilt that she feels. She glares at him to say something insulting then gets out of the car to walk up the hill. As she walks eating handfuls of puffed rice, bits fall on the ground. The bits attract monkeys that pursue her up the hill. Mr. Kapasi follows so as not to alarm her by calling out. Mrs. Das calls out to Mr. Das to wait for her. Mr. Kapasi chases off the monkeys as he catches up with the Das family. Mr. Das asks where Bobby is. Mrs. Das asks what 's wrong with all of them. They call for him but do not hear his screams. He is surrounded by monkeys pulling at him. One is hitting him with a stick. Mr. Kapasi chases them away and picks up Bobby. He takes him stunned and frightened to his parents. They decide to go back to the hotel. Mrs. Das pulls out her brush to fix Bobby 's hair. When she pulls it from her purse the slip of paper with Mr. Kapasi 's address flies out and flutters away on the breeze into the trees with the monkeys.
Narrative Perspective
· Third person but provides perspective of Mr Kapasi
· Mix of narrative and dialogue
Characters:
Mr. Das (Raj)
· Around 30 years of age
· Tanned
· Shrill immature voice, clean-shaven.
· Sapphire blue visor, shorts, sneakers, t-shirt
· Dresses and acts like typical American tourist
· Expensive, complicated camera slung around neck
· Live in New Brunswick, New Jersey
· A science teacher: compares his student excursions to Mr. Kapasi’s job as tour guide: “In a way we have a lot in common, you could say, you and I.” p.46
· Thinks Mr. Kapasi’s job tiresome
· Stops car to take photo of poor man
· Takes photos at lunch stop
· Reads his tour book in car
· Supplements Mr. Kapasi’s description of the Sun Temple from his book
· Tells his wife off for wearing stupid shoes.
· Worried she won’t be in pictures at the hills. Thinks they could use on for their Christmas cards. Wants a picture of the five of them.
· Happy to come home from work in evenings, a contrast to his wife
· His camera triggers off monkeys
Mrs. Das (Mina)
· 28 years old, similar age to husband
· Tanned
· No initial interest in Mr. Kapasi
· Doesn’t realize men at tea stall sing at her: doesn’t understand Hindi
· Wears red and white checkered skirt above knee, slip on shoes, close fitting blouse with strawberry shaped appliqué.
· Short, small hands, painted fingernails and lips, slightly plump, short hair,
· Wears large brown sunglasses, carries big straw bag
· Buys puffed rice: doesn’t offer to anyone else in car
· Impatient
· Has Bombay film magazine written in English
· Paints her nails whilst children watch monkeys
· Complains that car not air-conditioned: blames her husband
· Looks the other way when her husband photographs the man by road
· First sign on interest is when she hears Mr. Kapasi works as an interpreter. Takes off her sunglasses for the first time.
· Offers gum to Mr. Kapasi
· Vanity: brushes hair, does nails, concerned about appearance
· Invites Mr. Kapasi to eat lunch with them
· Smells of scent – a mixture of whiskey and rosewater
· Wants Mr. Kapasi’s address to send copies of pictures
· Drops the slip of paper with his address into the ‘jumble of her bag’
· Likes the carvings at the temple. Stares silently at the carved lovers
· Refuses to get out of car at the hills. Says her legs are tired.
· Tells Mr. Kapasi to stay. She shifts to front seat beside him
· Revelation that Bobby is not Raj’s son
· Doesn’t cope well at home with the children – feels isolated
· Outrage when Raj invites a Punjabi friend to stay
· Reaction when Mr. Kapasi can’t offer advice to her problem
· Question of whether or not she realizes the effect her words and actions have on Mr. Kapasi throughout the tour
Mr. Kapasi
· An observer: he watches in his rearview mirror. He notices Mrs. Das’s ‘shaved, largely bare legs’
· We never learn his first name
· Speaks English so generally assigned as driver to foreign tourists
· Aged 46, receding silver hair, ‘butterscotch’ complexion
· Gray trousers and matching jacket-style shirt in synthetic non-crushable material. Made by tailor
· Finds it strange Mr. Das calls his wife by first name when speaking to daughter
· Asks questions about Das’s heritage and where they live
· A tour guide for 5 years
· Notes one boy paler skinned than the other
· Thinks parents more like children themselves
· Thinks their accents like American TV shows
· Sun Temple one of his favourite places: sees it as a ‘reward’
· Works as tour guide on Fridays and Saturdays.
· Has another job as Gujariti interpreter for a doctor
· Answers Mrs. Das’s questions about his job
· Never occurred to him that job is a ‘big responsibility’. He thinks it a thankless occupation
· Devoted scholar of foreign languages in youth
· Owned dictionaries, listed etymologies of words in his notebook
· Now has forgotten all but English
· Son contracted typhoid at 7 years old. Died in mother’s arms
· Job with doctor a barter of skills to pay son’s medical bills
· Financial pressures – education, housing, clothing
· Emotional pressure from wife grieving loss of son
· Wife calls him a ‘doctor’s assistant’. She’s not interested in his job
· Flattered by Mrs. Das’s interest in his job. Reminded of its intellectual challenges
· Finds Mrs. Das’s attention ‘intoxicating’
· Enjoys what seems like a ‘private conversation’ between him and Mrs. Das
· Writes his address carefully on scrap of paper
· Dreams of writing and receiving letters and what each will reveal to each other
· Has never seen his wife naked. Feels strange walking beside Mrs. Das
· Favorite statue is a particular Surya.
· Calculates how long until he receives first letter with photos
· Strategizes to make tour last longer
· Says monkeys are more hungry than dangerous. Tells them not to provoke them with food
· Shocked at Mrs. Das’s revelation about Bobby
· Upset that she thinks of him as a parent and healer
· He can’t comprehend she has told him her story. He thinks ‘interpreting’ only applies to language, not to problems.
· Feels insulted at being asked to interpret her ‘common, trivial little secret’
· Can foresee problem puffed rice will cause with monkeys
· Rescues Bobby and tempted to whisper truth of his birth to him

Tina
· Complains 5 minutes into trip
· Wearing purple sundress with big bows
· Carries yellow-haired doll
· Her first trip to India
· Plays with door locks inside car
· Screams in delight at monkeys
· Wants mother’s attention
Ronny
· Close in age to brother.
· Has braces: ‘network of flashing silver wires’
· Ignores father at tea stall: goes to the goat and quickly touches it.
· Excitement at seeing monkeys
Bobby
· Has braces like his brother
· Picks up stick that monkey snatches. He and monkey pass it back and forwards
· Not Mr. Das’s biological son
· Wanders off and gets surrounded by monkeys
· Monkey hits him repeatedly with stick he’d given it earlier
Themes
Marital Relationships
· They are arguing in opening line of the story
· Mr. Kapasi has never seen his wife naked, has never admired the backs of her legs
· ‘…and enjoy the evening newspaper and a cup of tea that his wife would serve him in silence.’ 60
· Revelation of Mrs. Das’s affair and birth of Bobby
· They married while still in college. Parents were best
friends.
· She is unhappy in her marriage – has kept her feelings secret for eight years
· The effect on her of finally releasing her secret. She suddenly has renewed vigour and interest in family
Parenting
· Mrs. Das doesn’t hold Tina’s hand
· Ronny ignores father on p44. So does Bobby p45
· Don’t stop Tina playing with door locks on car
· Mrs. Das tells Tina to leave her alone when applying nail polish p.48
· Mrs. Das ignores children at temple: ‘…walking past her children as if they were strangers.’ 58
· Seems to spring into maternal role after leaves Mr. Kapasi in a huff.
· Concern when Bobby missing
· Mrs. Das shows affection when Bobby hurt. Wants to fix his hair. Band-Aid.
Cultural
· Parents look Indian but dress as ‘foreigners’
· Mr. Das greets differently to Mr. Kapasi: Mr. Kapasi presses palms together whilst Mr. Das squeezed hands
· Guide book published abroad
· Mr. Das proud he and his wife born in America. Their parents have retired to Assansol.
· Boy wonders why driver on wrong side of the car
· Mr. Kapasi knows something of America from ‘Dallas’, the TV show
· Mr. Kapasi not used to a woman showing interest in him. Mrs. Das so different from his wife
· Souvenirs stand at Sun Temple
Tourists
· Guidebook on INDIA
· Camera and taking of photos
· Children’s excitement at seeing monkeys
· Ignorance of language and customs
· Mr. Das taking photo of man 49
Food/Smells
· Gum: ‘…a thick sweet liquid burst onto his tongue.’ 50
· Puffed rice
· Lunch stop
· Mrs. Das’s scent
Lack of fulfillment in life
· Mr. Kapasi had dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries and settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides
· Mrs. Das the first woman who had taken an interest in him
· She doesn’t have many close friends as whole life dominated by Raj and children
· has no-one to confide in
· She has fallen out of love with husband, children and life
Dreams
· Mr. Kapasi dreams that letters between them would fulfill his dream of serving as an interpreter between nations.
· Thinks about complimenting Mrs. Das or even holding her hand
Communication
· Mr. Kapasi translating Gujarati words into Hindi
· Mr. Kapasi speaks English
· Mrs. Das’s use of the word ‘romantic’ to describe his job
· Story-telling. Mr. Kapasi enjoys telling stories of the various patients for whom he has interpreted. ‘Mrs. Das listened attentively…asking more questions, for yet another example.’ 54
· Thought of receiving letters from Mrs. Das
· Mr. Kapasi dreads possibility of a lost letter
· Mrs. Das’s use of the word ‘neat’. Mr. Kapasi not sure what it means.
· Mrs. Das not close to her parents
· Story of Bobby’s conception
· Mrs. Das feels she hasn’t been able to express her anxieties to anyone – she wants advice
· Use of looks: glares
· Difficulty of communicating pain and problems to other people
Language and Style of Story
· Use of colours: ‘mustard oil on her frosty pink lips’
· Detail used to describe monkeys
· Detailed description of carvings at the Sun Temple
· Use of senses: smell, taste, touch, what the eyes see
· Use of motifs such as the slip of paper with address on it
Motifs:
· White Ambassador car: lots of references to seats, locks, windows
· Tour book: Mr. Das always reading it. He prefers to draw his facts from the book rather than listen to Mr. Kapasi. Represents arrogance and ignorance of the tourist, especially a tourist of Indian heritage. Gap between America and India.
· Camera: Mr. Das hopes to get a photo of the whole family together but doesn’t succeed. Clicks away on camera rather than simply appreciating what is in front of him. Thinks of family Christmas card. Noise of camera worries monkeys. Link to Mr. Kapasi who dreams of receiving copies of photos.
· Puffed rice: represents self-centeredness of Mrs. Das. She doesn’t offer any to her family, only to Mr. Kapasi when she confides in him. Her carelessness, when puffed rice dropped on track, leads to monkeys attacking Bobby.
· Straw bag: Mrs. Das keeps all sorts of ‘trivial’ items in it. Mr. Kapasi’s address tossed in carelessly and later blows away when she gets brush out.
· Sunglasses: hide her face and emotions. She takes them off for the first time when Mr. Kapasi tells of his job.
· Clothing: family’s American style clothing compared to Mr. Kapasi’s tailored synthetic suit. Focus on the strawberry appliqué on Mrs. Das’ blouse. Contrast to traditional Indian clothes Mr. Kapasi’s wife wears.
· Monkeys: exciting for children but prove a menace. Mr. Kapasi’s advice that food can make them a threat comes true.
· Carvings at Sun Temple at Konarak: emphasis on ‘erotic’ carvings where couples entwined together – the opposite of Mr. and Mrs. Das, and also Mr. Kapasi and his wife. The carvings of lovers may escalate Mr. Kapasi’s lust for Mrs. Das.
· Dried up river and crumbled interior of the temple: The loss of cultural heritage
· The tour: the events symbolize the ‘misinterpretations’ that occur in the two marriages.
Setting:
· India – American/Indian family are staying at Hotel Sandy Villa, near Puri. It is a Saturday in mid-July, ideal weather for sightseeing.

Key quotes
‘Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents.’ 49
“Doesn’t it get tiresome, Mr. Kapasi, showing people the same thing every day?” 49
“But so romantic,” Mrs. Das said dreamily, breaking her extended silence. 50
“I want to picture what happens.” 51
‘To him it was a thankless occupation. He found nothing noble in interpreting people’s maladies…’ 51
‘The job was a sign of his failings.’ 52
‘Mr. Kapasi knew it was not a remarkable talent.’ 52
‘…and the countless other ways he tried to console his wife and to keep her from crying in her sleep…’ 53
‘Mr. Kapasi knew that his wife had little regard for his career as an interpreter. He knew it reminded her of the son she’d lost…’ 53
‘He wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Das were a bad match, just as he and his wife were. Perhaps they, too, had little in common apart from three children and a decade of their lives.’
‘The signs he recognized from his own marriage were there – the bickering, the indifference, the protracted silences.’ 53
‘In addition to glancing at her face he glanced at the strawberry between her breasts and the golden brown hollow in her throat.’ 54
‘In time she would reveal the disappointment of her marriage, and he his. In this way their friendship would grow, and flourish.’ 55
‘In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life’s mistakes made sense in the end.’ 56
‘The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief.’ 56
‘The thought of that silence, something to which he’d long been resigned, now oppressed him.’ 60
‘I’ve kept it a secret for eight whole years…But now I’ve told you.” 62
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Das, but why have you told me this information?” 64
“I told you because of your talents.” 65
“Mr. Kapasi, don’t you have anything to say? I thought that was your job.” 65
“Don’t you realize what it means for me to tell you?” 65
“Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?” 66
‘It crushed him; he knew at that moment that he was not even important enough to be properly insulted.’ 66
‘Mr. Kapasi observed it too, knowing that this was the picture of the Das family he would preserve forever in his mind.’ 69
QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED:
What are the key moments in this story?
What links can be made with other stories in the collection?
How is this story structured?
Does it have a clear beginning (opening section), middle (characters, situation and ideas are developed) and end (draws story to a conclusion)?
How does the story open?
Does it hold the reader’s attention? How?
How does it set the tone of the story?
Is there suggestion and implication used rather than direct description?
Does the story launch straight into the narrative?
How has the writer presented the characters?
Do they develop/ change?
Is there an event/ experience that leads them to personal development? Is there a moment of epiphany?


How do they relate to each other?
Does the story reach a climax?
Does it use the anti-climax and leave the ending open to a number of interpretations and questions?
How does the story end?







“A Real Durwan” pg. 70-82
Setting
“Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell” is the 64 year old durwan of a poor four-storey apartment building in Calcutta, India. She likes to describe the riches and luxuries of a past life.
Life is physically hard for her as she lives on the roof of the apartment building or under the letter boxes with her “life savings”. She is tolerated and drifts “in and out of the various households”.
Motifs
Food-lemon peels, ginger paste, vegetable peels, the cracker tin, tea, the delicacies of Boori Ma’s past life; “rice cooked in rosewater”, “we ate goat twice a week” etc
Skeleton keys and life savings-they rattle hidden away under the sari.
Reed broom, bucket, rags
Sari- “a cheap white weave with a border the colour of a dirty pond”.
Quilt-dirty and old, “They are clean now. I beat them with my broom” but they turn “into yoghurt” in the rain.
The apartment block
The rain- “It came slapping across the roof like a boy in slippers too big for him and washed Mrs.Dalal’s lemon peels into the gutter.”
The two basins-“In his excitement on his way home through the plumbing district, Mr. Dalal had bought two basins.”
Mr. Dalal’s wallet-“checking his pockets to make sure his wallet was in place.”
Newspapers-Boori Ma sleeps on these and uses them to block out the rain.
The collapsible gate, “stood guard between them and the outside world”
Summary of the story
Boori Ma is introduced to the reader as a poverty stricken and lonely old woman. As she sweeps the old cement stairs of the four-storey building she lives and works in, her stories of a past life filled with riches and prosperity form a focal point of the lives of the residents.
Characters relate to each other through Boori Ma’s stories. She forms a sympathetic focal point as her “litanies” draw the “whole buildings attention”. Mrs Dalal “has a soft spot” for Boori Ma and is “insulted” that the residents do not supply Boori Ma with the necessities of life. Her promises of bedding and a “sheep’s- hair blanket” from Simla are never realised.
A moment of change is signalled with the monsoonal rains. As Mrs Dala’s lemon peels are swept into the gutter so are the old ways and lives of the residents. Mr Dalal’s changing fortunes are the catalyst for this change. The arrival and installation of the two basins change he outlook and desires of the residents forever.
The wives of the residents, form a “collective surmise” and seem to understand Boori Ma’s need to express her pain. Their sympathetic appreciation and tolerance, deteriorates when the sink is stolen.
The climax of the story is when Mr Dalal installs the communal basin. Another climax is when Boori Ma’s “life savings and skeleton keys” are stolen in the market. This is a fore-shadowing of the robbery of the sink.
Is this a story about the destitution of a woman or a whole people?
Narrative Perspective
· Third person but provides perspective of Boori Ma
· Mix of narrative and dialogue
Characters
Boori Ma-the 64 year old durwan of a “very old building” who sweeps the cement stairs of this “particular flat building”.
“In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice: brittle with sorrows, as tart a s curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut.”
“She was sixty four years old, with hair in a knot no larger than a walnut, and she looked almost as narrow from the front as she did from the side.”
“So she garbled facts. She contradicted herself. She embellished almost everything. But her rants were so persuasive, her fretting were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not so easy to dismiss her.”
“On certain afternoons Boori Ma visited her fellow residents.”
“She picked up her broom-she never felt quite herself without it-…”
Mr and Mrs Dalal-of the “third floor” experience changing fortune when Mr Dalal is promoted.
“Mrs Dalal had a soft spot for Boori Ma; occasionally she gave the old woman some ginger paste with which to flavour her stews.”
“’I cannot dream them’, Mrs. Dalal echoed. She lowered her diaphanous eyelids and sighed. ‘I cannot dream them, Boori Ma. I live in two broken rooms, married to a man who sells toilet parts.’ “
‘”Who ever heard of it? I still cook on kerosene. You refuse to apply for a phone. And I have yet to see the fridge you promised when we married. You expect two basins to make up for all that?’”
Mr Chatterjee-his “opinions were always highly esteemed” despite his lack of physical or mental movement or pursuit.
The “collective” residents of the building who tolerate and appreciate Boori Ma , “they never drew the latch bars across their doors”, until the sink is stolen. They gather together to “ admire the day’s labours” but then separate into petty jealousies and material competitiveness.
“ No one in this particular flat-building owned much worth stealing. The second-floor widow, Mrs. Misra, was the only one with a telephone. Still, the residents were thankful that Boori Ma patrolled activities in the alley; screened the itinerant peddlars who came to sell combs and shawls from door to door…”
“In short, over the years, Boori Ma’s services came to resemble those of a real durwan…she honoured the responsibility, and maintained a vigil no less punctilious than if she were the gatekeeper of a house on Lower Circular Road, or Jodhpur Park, or any other fancy neighbourhood.”
The building itself-an old four-storey apartment block that is transformed by a coat of yellow paint.
“It was a very old building, the kind with bathwater that still had to be stored in drums, windows without glass and privy scaffolds made of bricks.”
Themes
Poverty and repression
The old versus the new
Prosperity and newly acquired wealth
Fulfillment
Belonging
Alienation and loneliness
Power
Possessions
Key quotes
“Most of all, the residents liked that Boori Ma, who slept each night behind the collapsible gate, stood guard between them and the outside world.” (p.73)
“In short, over the years, Boori Ma’s services came to resemble those of a real durwan.” (p.73)
“She spent the night on a bed of newspapers.” (p.78)
“Mr. Dalal, meanwhile, was thinking: A sink on the stairwell is sure to impress visitors.” (p.78)
“To occupy the time, Boori Ma retired to the rooftop. She shuffled along the parapets, but her hips were sore from sleeping on newspapers. After consulting the horizon on all four sides, she tore what was left of her quilts into several strips and resolved to polish the banister poles at a later time.” (p.78)
“’A sure sign of changing times,’ Mr. Chatterjee reputedly admitted from his balcony.” (p.79)
“’Boori Ma, I haven’t forgotten. We will bring you back a sheep’s-hair blanket made in the mountains,’ Mrs. Dalal said through the open window of the taxi.” (p.79)
“Of all the people who lived in that particular flat-building, Boori Ma was the only one who stood by the collapsible gate and wished them a safe journey.” (p.80)
“As soon as the Dalals were gone, the other wives began planning renovations of their own.” (p.80)
“Workers began to occupy this particular flat-building night and day.” (p.80)
“After a few days Boori Ma moved her baskets and her cooking bucket to the rooftop as well.” (p.80)
“Her mornings were long, her afternoons longer. She could not remember her last glass of tea.” (p.80)
“She grew restless on the roof, and so for some exercise, Boori Ma started circling the neighbourhood in the afternoons. Reed broom in hand, sari smeared with newsprint ink, she wandered through markets and began spending her life savings on small treats…One day ..she felt something tugging the free end of her sari. When she looked, the rest of her life savings and her skeleton keys were gone.” (p.81)
“In their haste the residents practically carried Boori Ma up the stairs on the roof, where they planted her on one side of the clothesline and started screaming at her from the other.” (p.81)
“’For years we have put up with your lies,’ they retorted. ‘You expect us, now, to believe you?’” (p.82)
“’Boori Ma’s mouth is full of ashes. But that is nothing new. What is new is the face of this building. What a building like this needs is a real durwan.’” (p.82)
“From the pile of belongings Boori Ma kept only her broom.’ Believe me, believe me,’ she said once more as her figure began to recede. She shook the free end of her sari, but nothing rattled.” (p.82) 


‘Sexy’ – pp.83-110
Setting:
Boston, Massachusetts. A New England maritime city, one of the oldest in America and with several distinguished universities. It was founded by Puritans in 1630. Socially progressive (abolitionist movement etc),it has been enriched first by Irish Catholic immigrants, then Italians, Russian and Polish Jews and other immigrant groups. As a university town, it still draws its population from around the world. Also known as “the cradle of liberty” (due to its role in the American Revolution), “the cradle of Modern America”, “the Hub of the Universe”.
White Americans make up 56% of the population, Black Americans around 25%, 1/5 of these being non-Hispanic. Asian Americans make up around 10%. Note how hard it is to follow a definition of a community on racial lines- boundaries begin to dissolve. WHAT DOES DEFINE A COMMUNITY? A CULTURE?
Miranda and/ or Dev visit Davis Square, Symphony Hall, MFA (Museum of Fine Art),and especially the Mapparium (where the lovers feel “as if they were standing in the center of the world”p 90) at the Christian Science centre, and Filene’s strange basement and maze-like cosmetics/ make-up dept, restaurants, the airport, Commonwealth Avenue (takes Dev home to his wife: irony here?) (84) and other Boston places. Also, consider the significance of an apartment, cubicle, neighbour’s house, restaurants.
Also, note how the setting extends through discussions about the past and about travellers and absent family members to include India (Punjab, Bengal, Delhi), England (Heathrow, London), bilingual Canada ( Montreal). There is a web of connections.
The narrator and narrative perspective:
Omniscient third person, aligned with Miranda. Offers narration with some reported dialogue.
Do you agree that it is one of the two stories told by a non-Indian narrator? If so, find evidence.
The Story: its position within the collection
This is the central story in the nine-story collection: does it contain issues of central importance to the collection? Can you see an overarching pattern from the concerns of the first story , “A Temporary Matter” to this middle story, “Sexy”, to the final story, “The Third and Final Continent” ?

The story: an overview
“Sexy” tells the story of Miranda, an American girl who has moved from Michigan to Boston. Feeling lonely, she falls in love with Dev (Devajit Mitra), an attractive Bengali, initially ignoring the clues that he is married. In a moment that defines their relationship, Dev calls Miranda ‘sexy’, but Rohin, a young Indian boy, later tells her it means ‘loving someone you don’t know’. Miranda realises that is precisely what she has done, having tried to use Dev as her romantic hero, and this liberating knowledge returns her to the cold, hard reality of things as they are- and freedom.

BUT that is not the full story, though Miranda acts as if it is.

In ironic counterpoint to Miranda’s flawed romance is the story unfolded to her by Laxmi, her co-worker in the next cubicle. Laxmi’s cousin and her family live in Montreal, Canada. The Bengali husband has had an affair with a younger woman he met on a flight between Delhi and London. He refuses to complete the journey home: his affair is threatening the marriage and causing deep suffering to his Punjabi wife. Miranda identifies with the wife (they both wait for their partner) but cannot see the larger connection between her affair with Dev and this affair.

Rohin, Laxmi’s cousin’s Bengali-Punjabi Canadian son, plays an important role in helping Miranda to face the truth and break free from Dev and perhaps from the delusions that led her to invite the flawed romantic connection and the pain it may cause his wife .

Note how Miranda learns from her time with Dev, with Laxmi and with Rohin. She also deals with her inner turmoil ie looks inward. The answer lies in her interactions with a range of people

Summary of the story
Here is a summary from “The New Yorker”. Can you see a need to add to it? Then please do so, and share with the class what you have done

Jhumpa Lahiri, Fiction, “Sexy,” The New Yorker, December 28, 1998, p. 100
ABSTRACT: Short story about twenty-two-year-old Miranda who breaks off her affair with a married man from India after babysitting the son of an Indian woman whose husband has left her for another woman... Miranda’s colleague in the fund-raising department of a Boston public-radio station, Laxmi, tells her about her cousin, whose husband had fallen in love with a woman he sat next to on an airplane. Miranda met Devajit Mitra a week ago, as she was browsing through the Filene’s cosmetics department. Well-dressed and handsome, he works in an investment bank and is buying face cream for his wife, who’s going to India for a few weeks. At first Miranda and Dev spend every night together. He always pays for things, holds doors open, and reaches across a restaurant table to kiss her hand. One Saturday, Dev takes Miranda to the Mapparium at the Christian Science center, which has stained-glass panels of the world. The farthest Miranda has ever been was to the Bahamas. “You’re sexy,” he whispers from across the room, and, because of the acoustics, she can hear his words clearly, making her go hot. When Dev’s wife returns from India, he visits Miranda on Sundays, telling his wife that he’s going running along the Charles River. Miranda begins to eat Indian food and study Bengali. Laxmi’s cousin is going to her parents’ house in California to recuperate, and will stop in Boston on the way. Laxmi asks Miranda to babysit her cousin’s son, seven-year-old Rohin, a thin boy who is trying to memorize all the world capitals. He tells Miranda that his mother cries for hours. Finding a silver cocktail dress she’d bought to wear for Dev, asks her to put it on and says, “You’re sexy.” Miranda demands that he tell her what it means, and he whispers, “It means loving someone you don’t know.” The next day, when Dev calls, Miranda tells him not to come, claiming a cold. “Do you remember that day we went to the Mapparium?” she asks him. “Do you remember what you said?” He pauses and then says, ”Let’s go back to your place.” She plans to tell him that there’s no point in it dragging on, but the next Sunday it snows so much that Dev can’t tell his wife he’s going running. The Sunday after that, Miranda goes to the movies with Laxmi. The third Sunday she goes out for a walk to the Christian Science center. Sitting in the plaza outside the church, she gazes at its giant pillars and its massive dome, and at the clear-blue sky spread over the city.
The story raises profound questions about identity, what defines it (geography? customs? appearance? beliefs and values?) and what aspects of experience are universal.

Some Key Tensions and Themes

· Isolation/ separation vs connection/ community

· Authentic connections/ relationships (marriages, affairs, friendships) vs forging false ones

· Authentic vs fantasy / self-serving/self-deceiving values and experiences. Miranda and the cosmetic/make-up counter

· Romance: sex and fantasy (the affair) vs authentic love (Taj Mahal), healing, inclusive, mature

· Local and situational (eg cultural or relationship-related)values and truths vs Universal

· Transactions- financial, but also within relationships

· Borders and boundaries- geographic vs moral; when are these regrettable transgressions (of good values?) ,when are they necessary steps to better understanding and freedom? (learning to see beyond one’s own limits? Consider the closing image of the story)

· Acts of translation: given the etymology of “trans” “Latio”, this word implies a change of place. Does Lahiri suggest translation of language OR the deeper translation to eg symbol and metaphor that conveys the deeper, dream-like level of reality that speaks to the imagination and emotions that shape our reality? Eg is it Rohin’s four languages that allow him to speak so effectively to Miranda and her dilemma, or is it the symbolic significance of his words and deeds?

· Choice: what is seen and selected over what is ignored/ unrecognised. We know ourselves by our pattern of choices: what shapes our good and bad choices?

· Inside/ outside: inner and outer landscapes, inner and ‘outer’ conflicts

· Dislocations : moving from other communities/ countries/ cultures. Inner dislocations.

· Gaps/ absence and presence: in the air between Delhi and London, Sunday jogging, lunchtime shopping, shopping at times other than “the main event” at Filene’s, a wife in India for some weeks etc etc. In what sense can you be both present and absent in your own life? Would this suggest an inner dislocation, a malady that needed healing?
Can you think of other key tensions/ themes etc, or express the above choices more clearly?
Motifs
· Cosmetics/ make-up
· Perfume/ odour
· Clothing
· Finance/ buying on credit/ discounting/ fund raising (and the symbolic significance of these various transactions)
· Phones/ mobiles
· Awaiting transport (and the symbolic significance of this action?). Look up “transport” in the dictionary, for a spiritual dimension to the meaning.) Might this sort of waiting be relevant to Miranda’s life situation?
Can you think of others?
KeyThemes:
1. IDENTITY
Jackie Large '05, and Erin Quinn '04, English 365, Northwestern University:

One of the themes Lahiri deals in most prolifically is the search for identity, as defined by the self, by others, by location and by circumstance. In Lahiri 's stories, everything -- including gender, homeland, geography, occupation, and role within the community -- can act in determining and qualifying identity. Lahiri brings up interesting questions as to what can and cannot act as agents in the determination of identity, and many of her characters struggle against or conform to outside influences that have effects on self-definition and outside definition
In "Sexy," Dev, a Bengali, shows Miranda a map in The Economist to define where he is from and, thus, who he is. Is there a symbolic significance in his choice of magazine? When she asks him about the political map ("one of the cities had a box around it, intended to attract the reader 's eye") he tells her the political history of his home country is "nothing [she 'll] ever need to worry about" (84). Is that true? Why does Dev choose to define himself in terms of geographical boundaries as opposed to feelings of nationality? Why does he choose not to address the complexities of his country of origin? How do we see him as a result?
“Who’s Devajit Mitra?” Rohin asks- can Miranda tell him, even after the affair? Does she know who she is?
2. SEEING IN TERMS OF DIFFERENCE AS OPPOSED TO CONNECTIONS

Eg Miranda sees Indian culture as exotic, in terms of how it is different, yet ultimately connects with eg Laxmi and Rohin as people with universal qualities to offer her

3. LANGUAGE and COMMUNICATION
This is raised early in the story. Rohin speaks four languages. Miranda does not listen to Laxmi. ? Dev had trouble learning American English (94), but has learned to fit in, to win acceptance (unlike the Dixits) and this may explain his cleverly telling Miranda what she needs to hear etc, mirroring/ reflecting back her needs and desires. (think of the meeting at the cosmetics counter)
What is needed for good, authentic communication? How does selective hearing shape a character’s experiences? Note the importance of communication between Dev and Miranda: the Mapparium visit is emblematic of the flaws in communication and understanding between them. Can you see why? How does Rohin show the power of truthful, authentic, communication
Communication requires more than shared language:
When Rohin says, “You’re sexy”, she “remembered the Mapporium, standing across the bridge from Dev. At the time, she thought she knew what his words meant. At the time, they’d made sense.”
4. FINDING DIRECTION/ PLACE and where things are in relation to each othe, how they fit together
Maps, map in “The Economist”, Mapparium, Rohin’s Almanac. Through Ronin, the world outside and the world within. How do these shed light on relationships?

5. INNER WORLD and OUTER WORLD: conflict. Discord. Warring elements.

6. RELATIONSHIPS: marriages, affairs, friendships, neighbours, babysitter etc

Laxmi’s marriage, that of her cousin, the cousin’s husband and his affair with his young 22 y o mistress. Dev’s marriage, Miranda’s toying with marriage with Dev

7. FOOD
Laxmi’s favourite Hot Mix which looks like “dusty orange cereal” to Miranda.
Laxmi’s calls to her husband to plan “what to cook for dinner” 84 together, “chicken or lamb” (90)
She “reserves a table for lunch at the Four Seasons” (100) for herself and her cousin
Miranda shops “on her lunch break” (85) ( and met Dev)
Dev and Miranda share “pulled pork and cornbread” (90) in Davis Square
“They sipped sangria...a grinning pigs head presiding over their conversation” (90)
Miranda remembers one South End restaurant meal with “foie gras and a soup made with champagne and raspberries” (91), only underlining they will not do it again
Miranda buys and shares European food Dev likes 93-4, making love on the crumbs in the bed (93-4). Dev speaks of drinking mango juice in India (94) but now he consumes cigarettes, with ash in the bed, on The Economist etc. He eats “smoked whitefish on a cracker” (98) in front of her
The narrator reports that Miranda was “too frightened to eat the [birthday] cake” (96) after seeing a picture of the goddess Kali at the Dixits’ house, as a child
Having nothing else to do, she walks to an Indian restaurant where“she orderedherself a plate of tandoori chicken” (96)
She and a former boyfriend once ate pancakes and “walked away without paying for their food, just to see if they could get away with it” (97)
She and Laxmi “had begun having lunch together at a new Indian restaurant” (97)
She “ate salad straight from the salad bowl” (97) while waiting for Dev.
At the Indian grocer’s, Miranda finds “Below the glass counter...trays of more plump samosas...fudge...and some bright orange pastries, shelves of “unlabeled packets and tins...frozen “bags of pita bread and vegetables she didn’t recognise” and Laxmi’s Hot Mix- “Very spicy...Too hot for you” (99) as the Indian grocer tells Miranda. NOTE HOW SHE IS CUT OFF FROM THESE FOODS
Miranda sips coffee while babysitting Rohin (100), has another (101, 103) and Rohin asks for some too: “There’s enough in the pot. I saw....The stewardess let me have coffee...Can’t I just have a little coffee?” (101). She has more later, at the final passage on 110.
She gives Rohin rice cakes (104), while offering to buy more food
EXERCISE:
Look at the details on the food theme above. Can you group related points? Can you see a pattern? What does the food theme reveal about a character such as Miranda? Rohin? Write up your ideas in a page of well-crafted prose.

Mrs Sen’s pp.111-135
Characters
Mrs Sen
Mrs Sen is the wife of Mr Sen who is working at a university as a Professor of Mathematics. She is about 30 years old, “She had a small gap between her teeth and faded pockmarks on her chin, yet her eyes were beautiful, with thick, flaring brows and liquid flourishes that extended beyond the natural width of the lids.”
Her dress was traditional Indian and described at the time of the meeting with Eliot’s mother as more suitable for “an evening affair”, and she was wearing a “coral gloss” lipstick.
She is clearly unhappy about being in America and being away from her family and community. She is struggling with loneliness, and does not know how to drive. She finds everything about driving threatening and unnerving. She is highly dependent on her husband for her transportation needs.
Mrs Sen reminisces about her life in India with Eliot and tries to maintain the character of that life by persisting to prepare food in the traditional way and using ingredients as near to those she might find at home as she can.
Mr Sen
Mr Sen remains a detached character. Even when they are standing together as a couple he seems distant. Note the first greeting with Eliot’s mother and the photo Eliot takes by the beach. He dresses in Western clothes and appears comfortable with the new routine, except for the problems his wife presents him with.
While he is kindly in trying to meet her needs he is determined that he will teach Mrs Sen to drive which will enable her to have the independence that he believes will resolve her unhappiness.
Eliot
Eliot is a curiously passive character. He appears to accept all that takes place with very little reaction. He is a passenger in his mother’s life if you take her car to be a suitable metaphor for this life. This is reinforced by the desire Eliot expressed to go to the car wash on Saturday , “so that they could sit inside, safe and dry.” He briefly becomes a passenger in Mrs Sen’s life, also, as he politely listens and absorbs her unhappiness.
Eliot is an observer, and he notices the contrasts between Mrs Sen and his mother. He never judges either of them, though. However, his reflections are critical for our understanding of what it is that Mrs Sen is unable to accept.
Eliot’s mother
Eliot’s mother is never given a name. She remains a very detached figure both within the story and seemingly with Eliot himself. There seems to be a lack of intimacy in her life as a whole. She is very uncomfortable with Mrs Sen’s hospitality. At the first meeting Eliot felt she “looked odd”, and “her shaved knees and thighs were too exposed.”
Her life style and domestic arrangements come across as equally Spartan, with a comfortless home, little companionship or friendship in evidence and take out the usual style of eating. The life she represents is diametrically opposite to the life Mrs Sen champions.

Setting
Mrs Sen’s apartment
· University apartment “on the fringes of the campus”
· Unattractive tiled lobby
· Mismatched remnants of “other carpets were positioned in front of the sofa and chairs, like individual welcome mats anticipating where a person’s feet would contact the floor.”
· Lampshades “were still wrapped in the manufacturer’s plastic.”
· The apartment mirrors the “mismatched” mental state of Mrs Sen, and the sense that this is not yet fully home.

Eliot’s home
· Tiny beach house was cold compared to Mrs Sen’s
· Always moving portable heater around and sealing windows with plastic sheets
· Few neighbours, had little to do with them even when they had a party
· Eliot suggested that when he had been home with his mother one day he would rather have gone to the car wash where they could “sit inside, safe and dry …”

The freeway
· For Mrs Sen this is an ever threatening presence; she is unable to cope with the impersonal and indifferent nature of it. She asks, “Why will not anybody slow down?”
· Eliot notes the contrast with his mother with who it is like “gliding”, the other cars are “merely a part of the scenery”.
· Conquering the road is essential if Mrs Sen is to get her precious fish.
· Eliot’s mother works some distance from home and driving is a constant feature of her life.
The beach and the ocean
· Eliot lives by by the beach, but it is not pleasant, it was “barren and dull to play on alone.”
· The ocean is important for Mrs Sen in relation to India but the ocean in America is cold and threatening much of the time
· When she, Mr Sen and Eliot went together to the fish it was windy, “they had to walk backward.”

Plot
1. Eliot needs a baby sitter
a. previous babysitters university student who finished degree and woman who was possibly an alcoholic
b. just wants someone to sit with him,
c. Mrs Sen employed although she cannot drive and Eliot must go to her place
2. Mrs Sen preparing food
a. Eliot watches the daily ritual of food preparation
b. Mrs Sen strictly keeps Eliot at a distance
c. The blade she uses is specially brought from India
d. Mrs Sen reminisces about the communal activity of food preparation at home in India
3. Mrs Sen asks Eliot, “if I began to scream ...?
a. Eliot thinks about the idea of home, of what Mrs Sen means and his own home
b. He recalls wanting to go to the car wash, “so that they could sit inside, safe and dry”.
c. Eliot’s answer to the question is that people might complain that she is making too much noise
4. Mrs Sen applies the dot above her eyebrows
a. Eliot is curious if she has cut herself
b. Signifies she is married, “for the rest of her days...”
5. Pick up time
a. Evidence of the food preparation cleaned up; Mrs Sen feels a need to hide evidence of this
b. Eliot feels his involvement with the food preparation is disobeying “some unspoken rule”
c. Mrs Sen insists on Eliot’s mother taking a seat and offers her food which she does not like, but politely “nibbles”
6. The routine
a. Mrs Sen picks Eliot up at the bus stop, always with something for him to eat
b. She does her 20 minutes driving practice
c. She tells Eliot that Mr Sen believes everything will improve for her when she gets her licence
d. Mrs Sen cannot manage the traffic, she cannot cope with the impersonal nature of it, “Why will not anybody slow down?”
e. Eliot compares this to his mother who, “did it, as if without thinking.”
7. What made Mrs Sen happy
a. Letters from home
i. “she would shut her eyes and shield them with her hands while he shuffled through the bills and magazines that came in Mr Sen’s name.” ii. Her excitement is palpable (plain to see, can be felt touched), kicking off shoes, reverting to her own language etc iii. Asks Eliot if he misses his mother, “The thought had never occurred to him.”
b. Fish
i. The importance of fresh fish, not fish you can buy in the supermarket ii. A daily part of the routine involving contacting Mr Sen who drives to the stall to pick it up
8. Fish crisis
a. Mr Sen needs to keep office hours and cannot get the fish
b. Mrs Sen upset, shows Eliot the saris she never wears indicating how she never goes out
c. Mr Sen does arrive, and takes Mrs Sen to fish stall, but she will not drive as he requests
9. Mrs Sen’s grandfather dies
a. Mrs Sen deeply upset, does not cook, practise driving etc
b. Listens to tape from home with grandfather’ s voice, plays music
10. Mrs Sen resumes cooking and Mr Sen takes them all to get the fish
a. Buy masses of fish
b. Have clam cakes at a picnic table
c. Laughs about waves resembling saris on a clothes line
d. Mr Sen gets Mrs Sen to drive, but eventually she pulls over and refuses to continue
e. There is tension between them and Mrs Sen becomes quite aggressive beeping at cars that blow their horn at her
11. The bus trip
a. Mrs Sen has stopped driving and took Eliot on the bus to get the fish
b. A boy, not the boss, served. He was impersonal in his behaviour toward her
c. On the way home the bus driver complained that passengers did not like the smell of the fish
12. The accident
a. Mrs Sen decides she will drive herself to the fish stall
b. Before they have got far Mrs Sen had a car accident which ended the trip
c. Mr Sen had to come and sort things out
d. Mr Sen reimburse’s Eliot’s mother for a month of the childcare fee
e. Eliot’s mother is glad the arrangement is over
13. The key
a. Eliot no longer has a baby sitter, his mother tells him that he is “a big boy now”
b. The story concludes with Eliot looking out at the “grave waves receding from the shore”
Metaphor, symbolism, motif and imagery driving and cars
· Cars and driving synonymous with becoming part of American community
· Eliot’s mother is exemplar working, as she does, far from home, “in an office fifty miles north.”
· Car and traffic impersonal, unlike the fishmonger who rings Mrs Sen to tell her of fresh fish available
· Mrs Sen’s continual failure to learn to drive is her continuing failure to adapt to American life homes and home life
· For Mrs Sen home is a place of community
· It is also India (page 116)
· Mrs Sen’s apartment reflects reluctance to settle in
· Eliot’s home embodies all that she fears food and its preparation
· Ritual of food preparation is at heart of life in India
· Communal event, cultural event
· Domestic life at the centre, not on the periphery as it is in Eliot’s word
· Fish a symbol for that life and culture
· Eliot enjoys watching and eventually participates in it; compare to pizza with his mum clothes and appearance
· Formality of dress of Mr and Mrs Sen
· Eliot’s mother has relatively little clothing, “Her cropped hair, a shade similar to her shorts, seemed too lank and sensible, and in that room where all things were so carefully covered, her shaved knees and thighs too exposed.” This seems to be suggesting more than a lack of modesty, but no sense of occasion, the individual subsumed into the pragmatic reality of daily life.
· Mrs Sen shows Eliot her saris and laments about having no occasion to wear them anymore while her relations at home think she is lucky …
· At the beach when the photograph is taken, “Mrs Sen’s read sari (is) leaping like flames under her coat.” This description is tied to the defiant mood that she increasingly reveals during this trip. temperature and climate
· The temperature is frequently mentioned throughout the story mirroring developments in the story
· The warmth of Mrs Sen’s apartment is contrasted with the cold of Eliot’s mother’s house and as such the contrast between India and America
· The ocean is central to life in both countries but in America it is grey, cold, threatening and the fish it produces don’t taste as good the keys
· Symbolic of achieving integration into American life. Ironically Eliot is given this, Mrs Sen fails to achieve it
· But the key is not without ambiguity. After having been given it his mother calls to check on him. He “looked out the kitchen window, at gray waves receding from the shore, and said that he was fine.”

Themes
· Separation and alienation
· Cultural Difference
· Loneliness and isolation
· Home and community

Commentary
The title, Mrs. Sen’s suggests a home, a place, something that firmly belongs to the person Mrs Sen. Ironically, the story has more to do with what she does not have than with what she does have. She is a woman who has followed her husband, reluctantly it would seem, to a new country and now finds herself unable to feel at home, unable to become a part of the life and culture it presents to her.
Eliot is a child of this culture and in a sense he is motherless. Although he does have a mother, she has few of those characteristics we would normally identify with that role. She remains aloof and nameless; she is “Eliot’s mother”. There is a lack of intimacy between them. Eliot appears to be simply another problem that she has to deal with in her busy life. Their home, which is situated in an isolated and forbidding kind of environment, is more like a pit stop on a racing track that a place for nurturing and relationships. Eliot’s mother works fifty miles away, rarely cooks and has little interest in home life. She uses her day off to do accounts. There is very little comradeship between her and Eliot, who would have even preferred the intimacy afforded by going through a carwash with her than staying home.
At Mrs Sen’s, Eliot enjoys the warmth, watching her prepare food, and he becomes involved with her struggle to cope with the American world. He becomes her confidante, listening to her expressions of dismay and frustration and he even tries to advise her on driving. He never says much but his reflections reveal a great deal about the gulf between the world he comes from and the world Mrs Sen still remains emotionally attached to back in India. This is particularly evident when he realises that when she says home, she actually means India. But this further implies a great deal more about the nature of community and relationships. He replies to Mrs Sen’s question about what would happen if she screamed by telling her that people might respond, “But they might complain that you were making too much noise.” As much as this story is about Mrs Sen’s failure to assimilate into the American way of life, it is also about Eliot’s own journey of discovery and the revelations about the nature of his own existence.
It is Mrs Sen’s passion to eat fish, a product that embodies so much of the life she feels she has lost, that drives (in every sense) and leads to the climax of the story; the final confrontation between apparently incompatible cultural and personal dimensions.
The importance of fish in Mrs Sen’s daily life cannot be underestimated. Apart from being something that exists at the heart of daily subsistence of life in India, being eaten at breakfast, lunch, dinner and even as a snack, “last thing before bed”, it is also the focus of daily food preparation. This ritual involved a special knife, careful planning to determine what it would provide, and making sure every part is eaten. It was her connection with home, and one of the only two things that made Mrs Sen happy. The other was mail, something that could put her in an almost trance-like state of excitement.
Mrs Sen was appalled that there was so little fish available in spite of the close proximity of the ocean, and the supermarket food was of too poor quality. However, the relationship that formed with the “man who ran the fish market” changed that. The quest to get fresh fish becomes the epicentre Mrs Sen’s struggle with the American way of life.
It is paradoxical that in order to hold on to this precious connection with India, Mrs Sen has to learn to live in America. Her attempts to achieve this culminate in the confrontation between Mr and Mrs Sen on the excursion with Eliot to the seaside to pick up the fish. At this point in the narrative Mrs Sen is re-emerging from her grieving over the death of her grandfather. The full weight of her separation from her home and her community in India has been on her mind. Mr Sen’s gesture is a response to this, but he also has an agenda of his own. The scene at the seaside is full of mixed signals. They bought a huge quantity of fish. They ate clam cakes at a picnic table and took photographs of each other. Mrs Sen imagines that “each wave resembles a sari drying on a clothesline.” She shouts “Impossible!” and laughs. But it is also cold and windy and the distance between Mr and Mrs Sen is clearly evident during the photography session, “They didn’t hold hands or put their arms around each other’s waists. Both smiled with their mouths closed, squinting into the wind, Mrs Sen’s red sari leaping like flames under her coat.” On the way home Mr Sen insists Mrs Sen drive. The tension hinted at in the description of the sari “leaping like flames under her coat” becomes clearly evident in the squabble about the radio and finally Mrs. Sen’s refusal to drive any further. Mrs Sen has dug her heals in there is now a stalemate between them.
After this she tries the bus. The unfriendly boy who serves her at the fish market, combined with the objection of the bus driver and the passengers to her smelly parcel of fish put an end to that. But the urge to get the fish is too strong and she finally decides to drive herself. The car accident that results confirms her failure to come to terms with the American way of life. She is finally defeated:
“After taking off her slippers and putting them on the bookcase, Mrs. Sen put away the blade that was still on the living room floor and threw the eggplant pieces and the newspapers into the garbage pail. She prepared a plate of crackers with peanut butter, placed them on the coffee table, and turned on the television for Eliot’s benefit.”
Mr Sen’s offer, and Eliot’s mother’s acceptance, of the money in compensation for the accident has the effect of reducing the relationship between Eliot and Mrs. Sen to little more than a business transaction. We have seen that it has been something much more, though. Although Eliot remains a reserved, even introverted character until the conclusion of the story, there is a sense of both pathos and sorrow in the final sentence that also suggests his loss. In spite of Mrs. Sen’s battle with, and dislike of “this place, where Mr Sen has brought me”, Eliot has been touched by her an emotional dimension to life that appears lacking in his own. Being issued with a key to the house and told that he is “a big boy now” does little to lessen the impact of those “gray waves receding from the shoreline.” This may seem like a story about Mrs. Sen’s failure, and on one level this is true. It is a story about the psychological struggle that confronts individuals who find themselves transplanted from their homeland to a new country through no choice of their own. But it’s greater significance is its depiction of loneliness and isolation, which is amplified and dramatised by the intimacy of its domestic context. Home becomes a powerful metaphor that expresses our most basic emotional need of companionship in our daily lives. In their respective ways both Eliot and Mrs. Sen illustrate the consequences of a world in which these needs are marginalised and little understood.

‘This Blessed House’ pp.136-157

‘This Blessed House’ pp.136-157



‘The Treatment of Bibi Haldar’ – pp. 158-172 ü This is the third of three stories set in India. ü Fairly timeless.. hard to pinpoint when it is set. Epilepsy is a condition not known or identified. ü A small, insular town, which seems to be cut off from the rest of the world. ü A lower middle class apartment block, similar to that in ‘A Real Durwan’? ü A girl without parents. The elderly cousin and his wife look after Bibi out of duty not love. Eventually they leave her completely without notice or contact address- she is cut off. ü How can the word ‘treament’ in the title be ‘interpreted’ in different ways? ü Why is this one of the least popular stories in the collection? Would this make it a good story for you to discuss in your essay- because many other candidates will omit it?! ü NARRATIVE VIEWPOINT v This is arguably the most interesting aspect of the story. The women of the apartment block are the ones who care for Bibi- they are the voice of the story- the first person plural ‘we.’ It is the only story where this occurs and it is stylistically unusual, compared to most works of literature. v How does the women’s collective voice ‘we’ “interpret’ Bibi Haldar’s various “maladies”, both physical and emotional? Are they reliable narrators? v How does the narrative voice position readers to view Bibi, the elder cousin, men and the speakers themselves?
Ø The women do not know who makes Bibi pregnant. Can readers work out who it might have been? Does it matter?

LANGUAGE AND STYLE
The collective voice of the women of the apartment block, is the most unusual and effective aspect of the story. v The story is both sad and comic. Find and write out sentences which show the tragic aspects of the story and find sentences which show the comedy..... and some which are tragi-comic! Eg “My name will never be printed with scarlet ink on a card.” v Find examples of Lahiri’s use of LISTS to offer contrasts, surprises, sadness and humour v Lahiri uses CONTRASTS in all her stories. What are some of the contrasts in this story? v Lahiri enjoys using ALLITERATION. Find some examples and comment on their effectiveness. v This is one of the few stories with a happy ending. Compare it with the endings of some other stories.

CHARACTER AND RELATIONSHIPS
Ø Why is Bibi a character we readers do not like very much? What are her physical and emotional attributes? Why isn’t she attractive to men? Who else does not like her? How do we feel about her at the end of the story?
Ø What is Bibi’s job and what is her payment? How old is she when the story opens?
Ø What irony can you find in the elder cousin running a tiny cosmetics shop with his treament and attitude to Bibi?
Ø In what ways do the women care for Bibi? Compare their lives with Bibi’s.
Ø Neighbours v family: compare the care the women take of Bibi with the way her cousin and his wife treat her eg what kinds of things haven’t her relatives taught Bibi?
Ø Discuss the cousin’s advertisement: ‘GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND.’
Ø Compare the new Bibi on the last page (172) with the former Bibi.
THEMES
By the time you come to this penultimate story in the collection, you will be very familiar with Lahiri’s themes in the collection. How and where are they present in “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”? In particular, look at MARRIAGE in this story. Is it treated seriously or comically?

COMPARISONS WITH OTHER STORIES in the collection.
You know that in your literary essay, you will be making comparions between the stories, which offer depth and detailed knowlege.
The most important comparisons for you to make are between Bibi Haldar and Boori Ma in “A Real Durwan”:
· Particularly look at their voices and the sorts of complaints they make.
· What do they have in common?
· How do Boori Ma and Bibi Haldar differ in personality and circumstances?
· Both stories are set in apartment blocks. Are they different in terms of class and prosperity? Remember that Jhumpa Lahiri makes rooms, storeys and living spaces important in every story in the collection, whether they are set in India or USA. Describe the areas where Boori Ma and Bibi Haldar sleep.
· Compare the attitudes of the apartment blocks’ residents to Boori Ma and Bibi Haldar.
· “A Real Durwan” ends with the old, destitute, rejected Boori Ma as a tragic figure. The last word of “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” is ‘cured.’ Discuss the two endings.
Sex and attractiveness are important in a number of stories. How is Bibi Haldar very different from:
 Twinkle in “This Blessed House”
 Miranda in “Sexy”
 Mrs Das in “Interpreter of Maladies”
 Shoba in “A Temporary Matter”
Food is another motif in the stories. Compare Bibi Haldar’s food with:
· Mrs Sen’s meal preparations
· Shoba and Shakumar’s meals in “A Temporary Matter”
· The dinners, Halloween treats and Mr Pirzad’s gifts to Lilia in “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine.”
Children. Bibi is ‘cured’ when she has a baby. Compare the role of children:
· The stillborn baby in “A Temporary Matter”- this is an important contrast with the arrival of Bibi Haldar’s baby.
· The elder cousin’s baby and Bibi’s.
· Eliot in “Mrs Sen’s”
· Rohin in ‘Sexy”
· Lilia in “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine.”
· Bobby, Ronny and Tina in “Interpreter of Maladies”, especially Bobby.
CLOSE STUDY
Passage from the bottom line of page 163 to the end of the main paragraph on page 164. An exasperated doctor has suggested marriage as a cure for Bibi.
1. Find examples of Lahiri’s use of alliteration, lists and contrasts.
2. Comment on the use of dialogue.
3. Physical features are important in the story. Comment on:
a) “Their rancor ..was fixed on their lips, thinner than the strings with which they tied our purchases.’
b) ‘Through the shutters of our balconies we watched her; perspiration had already left black moons beneath her armpits.’
4. Comment on Bibi’s statement: ‘Apart from my x-rays, I have never been photographed.’
GLOSSARY:
o ALLOPATH (p 158)- (opposite of homeopath); treats a disease by creating a system in the body quite different from the disease. o AYURVEDIC – traditional Indian treatment o HOMEOPATH – treatment through minute doses of substances o VEDIC VERSES (p 159) the VEDA are ancient religious texts, still read, studied and chanted throughout Hindu India. o Non sequiturs (p 160)- statements which don’t follow from what’s previously been said (non sequence) o Mawkish (161) – too sentimental o Maudlin- being excessively sentimentally sad and tearful o Malaise – illness, condition o ‘grandmothers consulted almanacs’ ie they looked up astrological charts to find dates and times of the best conjunctions of stars for a wedding o Magenta Benarasi silk ( 163)- magenta is a deep purply red; Benarasi is from the Indian city of Benares, now called Varanasi, on the holy river Ganges (or Ganga). o Kohl ( p 172) Indian black eye make up

The Third and Final Continent pp.173-198
What is this story about?
As a young Indian man who is trying to create a better future for himself, the narrator leaves his birthplace in Calcutta (Asia, continent one) to venture into the western world. Arriving in north London (Europe, continent two), he boards “in a house occupied by penniless Bengali bachelors like [himself]...all struggling to educate and establish [themselves] abroad.” Sustaining himself on little else besides egg curry and tea, he attends “lectures at LSE and [works] at the university library” during the week and enjoys relaxing weekends with his flat mates while he still has “few responsibilities”.
In 1969, at the age of 36, the narrator’s marriage is arranged and he is offered a full-time job in Massachusetts (North America, continent three). He returns briefly to Calcutta to marry 27 year old Mala, “a duty” he regards with “neither objection nor enthusiasm”, before flying on to Boston to commence his new job and wait the six weeks it will take for her passport and green card to be finalised so she can join him.
During this time he meets his new landlady Mrs.Croft, a 103 year old former piano teacher who marvels at the fact “‘There is an American flag on the moon!’“ and insists the narrator greets this news each day with the boisterous exclamation “’Splendid!’” His developing relationship with Mrs.Croft gives us greater insight into the narrator’s humanity as he reflects on his relationship with his own mother (pp. 181-2, 187-8) in her difficult final days and offers gestures of kindness to his new landlady.
When Mala eventually arrives in the US, lonely and homesick, the narrator must leave Mrs.Croft’s home as one of her house rules stipulates that there can be “’No lady visitors!’” Her husband responds to Mala’s arrival as “something inevitable, but meaningless at the time.” Bound by duty and responsibility, their early days as man and wife are spent in an awkward tolerance where he “waited to get used to her”.
One Friday he takes Mala to visit Mrs.Croft, who declares that his undervalued wife “is a perfect lady!” From this point the narrator starts to see Mala in a different light: “I like to think of that moment in Mrs.Croft’s parlor as the moment the distance between Mala and me began to lessen.”
The story concludes with the narrator reflecting on his life with Mala and their son, how they reminisce sometimes when they drive down Massachusetts Avenue where Mrs. Croft’s house once stood, “amazed...that there was ever a time that [they] were strangers.” As simple as his life may seem, the narrator concludes that “there are times when it is beyond my imagination”, just as Mrs.Croft’s life had seemed to him when he marvelled at her 103 years on Earth.
What is the focus of this story?
When Mrs.Croft refers to Mala as a lady, the narrator sees his wife in a whole new way. When initially he had considered her to be something of a booby prize in the arranged marriage lottery because “she did not possess a fair complexion”, he suddenly sees her through the eyes of someone whose opinion he values because he is “in awe of how many years she had spent on this earth.” Learning to love Mala makes the narrator see that his life is embarking on yet another journey, that of a lifetime meaningfully connected to another human being.
This change is also reflected in the food the narrator eats. His never changing diet of egg curry in London and cornflakes with milk in Boston reflects the repetitious monotony of his life during this time. Food is also a motif for the lack of emotional nourishment he experiences until he lets Mala into his heart, her “chicken curry made with fresh garlic and ginger” signalling the change that will occur through his marriage to enrich his life.
How is this story structured?
The story begins with a journey across three seas from India to England, the narrator leaving the knowledge of one world behind to embark on the promise of another where he can “seek his fortune far from home”.
With this search for betterment established, the story continues in a predominantly chronological manner, with sparse reflections of past events in the narrator’s life in India popping up intermittently. The narrator’s journey fastforwards to America where he details the formative events and people he found there. Towards the end of the story, when the narrator is in his latter years, he understands that these experiences and people were fundamental in creating the sense of contentment he now feels as a husband and father.
The ending is like the moral to the story of the narrator’s own life. Reflecting on his survival “on three continents”, he acknowledges that his “achievement is quite ordinary”. Despite this, he finds himself at times “bewildered” by the intimate details of his life’s journey, marvelling at what he has seen and done and achieved in his very ordinariness. In this sense, Lahiri seems to be advocating that there is brilliance and wonder to be found in each of our lives, no matter how small and insignificant they may seem on the world stage.
Who is telling the story? (narrative viewpoint)
The story is told in the first person, the narrator’s perspective being the lens through which the audience must sift the information he shares about his life and the people and events he chooses to explore.
For the most part, the narrator tells the story in a very matter-of-fact manner, giving the audience little insight into his emotions. He tends to focus in great detail on what happened during this time rather than how it impacted on him. This renders him a fairly distant character, someone who seems to have little depth and who is especially lacking in empathy when it comes to his wife.
With the passing of time, however, as the narrative shifts to the present and the narrator is in a more reflective mood, the audience sees that he has matured into a man of some compassion and warmth. This humanity compels the audience to see his final ruminations on his life in a positive light, sensing that he has become a happier person because of the love he has experienced with his family.
Characters
The narrator
As an Indian man who has “hurled [himself] across the world” to the west, it might seem that the protagonist is on some kind of quest to ascend to the heights of power and wealth one can only find in the USA. Despite this, the narrator seems to be fairly lackslustre about the hopes his new life may offer him. He tends to fixate on the minutiae and routine of life, seemingly content with this and aspiring to no greater place than the suburban existence of a married man employed “in the processing department of a library”, the monotony and passivity of his job seemingly reflecting the personality of the man himself. Even so, the fact that he has succeeded in making this life so far away from his distinctly different birthplace makes it a far greater achievement than its ordinariness might initially suggest.
Moving into Mrs. Croft’s home, the narrator is able to continue to follow a routine by fitting into the rituals of the old lady’s life. It is through his interactions with her that the audience begins to see his caring side, especially when she tells him “it was very kind of you” when he hands her the rent envelope and when Helen tells him her mother “referred to [him] as a gentleman”. This view is compromised shortly thereafter, though, when the narrator is so ambivalent to the obvious distress his new bride is feeling upon her arrival in America.
This ambivalence does not last long. Though he knows it is his “duty to take care of Mala, to welcome her and protect her”, in an ephiphanous moment at Mrs.Croft’s home he suddenly realises the far greater impact Mala will have on his life: “I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, mine would affect her. ” His growing love for Mala helps the narrator come to the realisation of his true quest: to find purpose in his life through the giving of himself to another. We learn that later in her life Mala is “happy and strong”, which can be attributed in part to the narrator. This is further emphasised by their son “who attends Harvard University”, representing the continuity of the life they have created together in a new world.
In the final reckoning, the narrator is clearly a devoted and kind husband and father, who well deserves the love of his wife and son. He understands the value and importance of the content family life he has created. He reflects that though the astronauts who left a flag on the moon achieved something incredible, the flag stood “for mere hours”. The narrator, on the other hand, is rightly proud of the mark he has left on “this new world” because it has endured “for nearly thirty years”, suggesting the most amazing acheivement a person can realise is to leave the legacy of a life well lived.
Mala
As a newly married woman, Mala loses all sense of connection to her own familiar world, firstly moving to the home of her husband’s family directly after the nuptials, then arriving in America to start her new life. Unlike the narrator who chose to emigrate, Mala is bound by duty to follow her husband in making the two moves, representing her three continents, and is clearly unhappy and unsure in the early days of her married life. This is illustrated in her desire to keep her head covered by her sari, symbolising her need to wrap herself up in something familiar, protecting herself from both of the foreign worlds of marriage and America.
Eventually, Mala embraces her new world, discovering “pleasure and solace” in her husband’s arms and deciding “to grow old” with him in America. She “no longer drapes the end of the sari over her head”, a clear indication that she has opened herself up to her new life. Though she appears to have little independence as a person in her own right, the fact she is “happy and strong” suggests she is content with what she has.
Mrs. Croft
At 103 years of age, and with her opinions still firing, Mrs.Croft symbolises the power of life itself. Having lived long enough to see some of the greatest achievements of modern humanity, Mrs.Croft’s life is “the first life [the narrator] had admired”. Where she sees the “American flag on the moon” as a “splendid” achievement, the narrator sees the number of years she has spent in the world as “something of a miracle.”
Though her twisted body no longer allows her to move freely or play the piano, the conviction of her views, and the strength with which they are delivered – most of her dialogue a command ending with an exclamation mark – leaves no doubt that there is still much zest for life left in Mrs.Croft.
The visit to Mrs.Croft plays a pivotal role in changing the couple’s relationship. Mala’s response to the narrator’s cry of “’Splendid!’”, with “Her voice full of kindness, her eyes bright with amusement”, shows the narrator a side to his wife he had not seen before. Like her husband before her, Mrs.Croft brings out the humanity in Mala and this leads to new ways of connecting between the couple.
Helen
Helen is Mrs. Croft’s sixty-eight year old daughter who comes “once a week” to the house to bring her mother groceries. Friendly and outgoing, Helen acts as a conduit between the narrator and Mrs.Croft, happily sharing the details of her mother’s life to help the narrator (and the audience) better understand this intriguing centenarian.
Helen also represents the western approach to caring for elderly parents, an approach that is in direct contrast to that in India and which “mortified’ the narrator. Where it was his “job to sit by [his sick] mother’s feet” in an act of duty, “Helen didn’t seem worried” about her mother as “she came and went...one Sunday after the next.” Interestingly, though, at the end of the six weeks the narrator leaves Mrs.Croft on her own, reflecting that he “was not her son” so was not duty bound to her as he had been to his own mother and “owed her nothing.”
The narrator’s mother
It is in the detail of his memories about his mother that the audience gets the strongest sense of the narrator’s dedication to duty and family honour. Devastated by the early death of her husband as a result of encephalitis, the narrator’s mother spirals “into a world of darkness” because she “refused to adjust to life without him”. Her increasing madness leaves her “unguarded”, acting in inappropriate and embarrassing ways that render her increasingly unrecognisable to her two teenaged sons.
Her decline becomes so absolute that the narrator finds her “playing with her excrement in her final days”. In a final act of devotion, he cleans “each of her fingernails with a hairpin” before lighting her death pyre and releasing “her tormented soul to heaven.” His actions convey much about the duality of tenacity and tenderness residing within the narrator, which is particularly evident when his life is difficult. Certainly his actions are motivated in part by duty, such as when he had to assume “the role of eldest son” because his “brother could not bear” lighting “the flame to her temple”. On the other hand, the time and care he took to restore some degree of dignity to his mother in her final journey, and to understand the peace her death finally brought about, conveys his deep capacity for empathy and love. Ultimately, his treatment of his mother positively flags the potential for his marriage with Mala.
Language and style
Lahiri employs a relatively simple language style which seems to be telling a fairly non-descript story about a relatively ordinary Indian emigrant. This style mirrors the seemingly average life the narrator has led, a life where no great feats have been achieved but a host of memories of miles travelled, meals eaten and rooms slept in have amounted to a full life, his own life. In this sense Lahiri seems to suggest that what reads as a simple life can still be a worthy life.
Likewise, the degree to which the story focuses on short stages of sadness, small bursts of happiness but lengthy details of the everyday, illustrates the regular patterns of life.
Themes and ideas
Familial relationships, the nature of marriage, the place of duty and responsibility, clash of cultural norms and behaviours, the roles men and women play, sense of place, belonging, growth and change, emigration, human potential, personal achievement, the wonder of life.
Lasting impressions
We experience so many things in a lifetime and meet so many people but most of these fall into the abyss of long forgotten memories. Why is it then that some things we experience stay with us for the rest of our lives? That a particular day will stay with us always? These things which etch into our consciousness, the special people, the important times and the associated feelings and thoughts, become a part of us. In essence, these things which affect us so deeply help to define who we are. They can be the things that fill us with wonder, the small ‘miracles’ of our life, like falling in love. They can make what seems like an everyday life into something quite amazing.
Questions to consider
1. Look at the title. How does it relate to the story?
2. Food appears as a motif in many of the stories. What does Mrs.Croft’s diet say about her current stage of life?

3. What might Helen mean when she says that if the narrator heats Mrs.Croft’s soup he “would kill her altogether”?
4. We meet and lose so many people over a lifetime, so why is it that the narrator so affected by Mrs.Croft’s death?
5. In what ways does this story link to others in the collection?

“A Temporary Matter”
Lahiri’s use of contrast is constantly evident in this story:
1. a) Before and After the stillbirth. In two columns for Shoba and also for Shakumar, list their previous habits/daily routines/characteristics/relatio nship andthen the equivalent changes after the tragedy of the baby’s death.
b) In what ways has the blackout brought them together? “Something happened when the house was dark.” P19. Comment on this sentence.
c) What other contrasts can you find in the story?
d) Find and write down SIX good quotations to support

2. In two new columns, list the secrets each reveals and briefly comment on them, especially the final two secrets.
3. When does Lahiri foreshadow Shoba’s revelation about finding a new apartment? Write out 1-2 quoted lines.
4. Why does the story end with Shakumar seeing the neigbours walking by?
5. Why is the reader denied Shoba’s point of view?
6. Why do you think Lahiri has made this her first story in the collection?
7. What are the ‘maladies’ in this story and who is/are the ‘interpreters’?
8. What connections are there between “A Temporary Matter” and the title story?
9. The motif of houses, apartments, rooms- eg the importance of the nursery.
10. The motif of food.
11. The final sentence. Discuss “They wept together, for the things they now knew.’
12. What is the MOOD of this story? What is Lahiri’s TONE (the author’s attitude to the subject)?
13. Does India play a role in this story?
14. The motif of university studies or lecturing. What is Shakumar studying?
15. What features of a short story are present in ‘A Temporary Matter”?
‘A Temporary Matter’ by Jhumpa Lahiri
1. Two students will be selected to take on the personas of Shoba and Shukumar.
Construct at least two questions to ask them as part of this role-play.
2. Complete research to learn about the challenges faced by couples who suffer the tragedy of a stillborn child. Shoba and Shukumar 's marriage does not survive their loss. How common is this? What are some other difficulties that such couples may face, and what do medical professionals recommend to help prevent or minimize them?
3. A theme that runs throughout Lahiri 's body of work is that of the challenges faced by immigrants and children of immigrants who must strive to meld two cultures in their lives. Does this theme appear in "A Temporary Matter"? Explain your answer.
4. Do the two central protagonists change throughout the story? Is there anything missing that would complete the reader’s understanding of them?
5. Lahiri included in the story brief descriptions of both Shoba 's and Shukumar 's mothers. She accomplished this by having the narrator recall a visit from each woman. Why do you think Lahiri included these recollections? What do they add to the story?
6. What is your opinion of Shoba and her actions toward Shukumar? Specifically, what do you think of the way she chose to tell Shukumar that she was leaving him? Was she trying to spare his feelings by breaking the news gently, or was she being manipulative and unfair?
7. Why does the story end with Shukumar seeing the neighbours walking by?
8. Why is the reader denied Shoba’s point of view?
9. What is Lahiri saying about love and communication through her two characters?
10. “They wept together for the things they now knew.” How do Lahiri’s characters show that knowing can change a person’s life irrevocably?

(Write 200 words on this topic using a brief introduction and one body paragraph)

Interpreter of Maladies Homework Task
Definitions: Write down three different dictionary definitions for each
Interpreter
1.
2.
3.

Malady
1.
2.
3
What do you think the author, Jhumpa Lahiri, might have meant by an ‘interpreter of maladies’?
Complete this table.


The Search for Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri 's Interpreter of Maladies
Jackie Large '05, and Erin Quinn '04, English 365, Northwestern University
One of the themes Lahiri deals in most prolifically is the search for identity, as defined by the self, by others, by location and by circumstance. In Lahiri 's stories, everything -- including gender, homeland, geography, occupation, and role within the community -- can act in determining and qualifying identity. Lahiri brings up interesting questions as to what can and cannot act as agents in the determination of identity, and many of her characters struggle against or conform to outside influences that have effects on self-definition and outside definition. The following questions delve into Lahiri 's study of what affects identity in Interpreter of Maladies.
From "A Temporary Matter"
In "A Temporary Matter," the wife, Shoba, is an editor who has recently thrown herself into her work as an editor (her colored pencils are noted in a number of instances: p. 5, 8.) Instead of eating dinner with her husband, Shukumar, Shoba avoids him as much as possible, "watching game shows or proofreading files" (8). It is noted that "[Shukumar] and Shoba had become experts at avoiding each other" (4). How has Shoba effectively and ineffectively edited elements of her own life following the miscarriage she suffers? What is the significance behind the idea of being able to edit your own identity, and does "A Temporary Matter" make a convincing case for the effectiveness of such editing?
Shukumar 's identity as Indian is forged almost entirely from Americanized sources. We find out that "it wasn 't until his father died, in his last year of college, that the country began to interest him, and he studied its history from the course books as if it were any other subject" (12). Is it really possible for someone to create an identity based on books and a pre-fabricated, hyphenated identification category mapped by Americans? How does "A Temporary Matter" either support or dispel this idea?
From "Sexy"
In "Sexy," Dev, a Bengali, shows Miranda a map in The Economist to define where he is from and, thus, who he is. When she asks him about the political map ("one of the cities had a box around it, intended to attract the reader 's eye") he tells her the political history of his home country is "nothing [she 'll] ever need to worry about" (84). Why does Dev choose to define himself in terms of geographical boundaries as opposed to feelings of nationality?
From "This Blessed House"
Twinkle, the wife in "This Blessed House" is characterized as "excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream or dropping a letter in the mailbox. It was a quality he [her husband, Sanjeev] did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood" (142).
This image of sustained girlhood is, according to the generalizations set forth by Lahiri, admired in a wife in India; in martial relationships, women are expected to be docile homemakers, as Twinkle attempts to be. Her girlish charm is not, however, a quality Sanjeev, an Indian husband in diaspora in America, admires or even tolerates in his wife. What does this say about gender stereotypes, and, more specifically, husband-wife roles, within Diasporan cultures?
Why does Twinkle get so excited by the effigies she finds scattered throughout her new American home when she describes herself ironically as "a good little Hindu" (137)? What does her excitement, coupled with her lethargy and apathy in all other things, say about the way she views herself within her marriage? Is she unintentionally redefining her gender role, or knowingly breaking out of those boundaries?
"When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine"
Lahiri makes a statement about difference and the idea of belonging with "Pirzada." Lilia 's father tells her, in regards to Mr. Pirzada, "More importantly, Mr. Pirzada is no longer considered Indian -- Dacca no longer belongs to us" (25). What does this interpretation of what Mr. Pirzada is and is not considered say about the conflict between national identity and geographical boundaries? Can one 's national identity change with a change in physical boundaries?
"Interpreter of Maladies"
The idea of the photograph as capturing a specific (and usually positive) moment in time is important in "Interpreter of Maladies." Mr. Kapasi begins fantasizing about the photograph he takes with the Das family; what does that say about his own "malady" and his crisis of identity? What is the meaning of the photograph accidentally snapped while one of the Das ' children, Bobby, is attacked by monkeys at the site that the tour guide, Mr. Kapasi, suggested?
"Mrs. Sen 's"
When Mrs. Sen, an Indian woman, relocates with her husband to a coastal, Eastern American city, she has a sort of crisis of identity.
She flung open the drawers of the bureau and the doors of the closet, filled with saris of every imaginable texture and shade, brocaded with gold and silver threads. Some were transparent, tissue thin, others as thick as drapes, with tassels knotted along the edges. In the closet, they were on hangers; in the drawers they were folded flat or wound tightly thick scrolls. [125]
This scene is very similar to the one in F. Scott Fitzgerald 's The Great Gatsby in which the rich Gatsby defines himself by the multicolored shirts he owns. What parallels are drawn between Gatsby 's troubled identity and Mrs. Sen 's troubled identity in this scene? How does the colorful clothing define each protagonist in his or her own milieu?
"This Blessed House"
Sanjeev dislikes his wife 's collection of Christian paraphernalia from the time she begins discovering the treasures in their new house. However, the gleaming bust of Christ is the straw that breaks the camel 's back: "He hated that it was in his house, and that he owned it. Unlike the other things they 'd found, this contained dignity, solemnity, beauty even" (157). What does the bust of Christ represent that Sanjeev hates so much? What is threatening about the bust when it comes to Sanjeev 's sense of self? Of a national self? Of self as a husband?
"The Third and Final Continent"
What notions of home are expressed in "The Third and Final Continent?" What qualifies as home, and what does not? Does ones specific notion of home necessarily create their identity? Vice versa? Or are the two subjects unrelated?
How are age and generation interpreted as a function of identity in "The Third and Final Continent?"

Jhumpa Lahiri on her Debut Novel An Interview with the authorQ) In your first book, Interpreter of Maladies, some of the stories are set in India, others in the United States. The Namesake is set predominantly in the United States. Can you talk a bit about the significance of setting in your work?
A) When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts were, for some reason, always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well as a result of repeated visits with my family, sometimes for several months at a time. These trips, to a vast, unruly, fascinating city so different from the small New England town where I was raised, shaped my perceptions of the world and of people from a very early age. I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor as a former resident - a valuable position, I think, for a writer. The reason my first stories were set in Calcutta is due partly to that perspective - that necessary combination of distance and intimacy with a place. Eventually I started to set my stories in America, and as a result the majority of stories in Interpreter of Maladies have an American setting. Still, though I 've never lived anywhere but America, India continues to form part of my fictional landscape. As most of my characters have an Indian background, India keeps cropping up as a setting, sometimes literally, sometimes more figuratively, in the memory of the characters. The Namesake is, essentially, a story about life in the United States, so the American setting was always a given. The terrain is very much the terrain of my own life - New England and New York, with Calcutta always hovering in the background. Now that the writing is done I 've realized that America is a real presence in the book; the characters must struggle and come to terms with what it means to live here, to be brought up here, to belong and not belong here.
Q) The Namesake deals with Indian immigrants in the United States as well as their children. What, in your opinion, distinguishes the experiences of the former from the latter?
A) In a sense, very little. The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children. The older I get, the more I am aware that I have somehow inherited a sense of exile from my parents, even though in many ways I am so much more American than they are. In fact, it is still very hard to think of myself as an American. (This is of course complicated by the fact that I was born in London.) I think that 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. This has been my experience, in any case. For example, I never know how to answer the question "Where are you from?" If I say I 'm from Rhode Island, people are seldom satisfied. They want to know more, based on things such as my name, my appearance, etc. Alternatively, if I say I 'm from India, a place where I was not born and have never lived, this is also inaccurate. It bothers me less now. But it bothered me growing up, the feeling that there was no single place to which I fully belonged.
Q) Can you talk a little bit more specifically about the conflicts you felt growing up as the child of immigrants?
A) It was always a question of allegiance, of choice. I wanted to please my parents and meet their expectations. I also wanted to meet the expectations of my American peers, and the expectations I put on myself to fit into American society. It 's a classic case of divided identity, but depending on the degree to which the immigrants in question are willing to assimilate, the conflict is more or less pronounced. My parents were fearful and suspicious of America and American culture when I was growing up. Maintaining ties to India, and preserving Indian traditions in America, meant a lot to them. They 're more at home now, but it 's always an issue, and they will always feel like, and be treated as, foreigners here. Now that I 'm an adult I understand and sympathize more with my parents ' predicament. But when I was a child it was harder for me to understand their views. At times I felt that their expectations for me were in direct opposition to the reality of the world we lived in. Things like dating, living on one 's own, having close friendships with Americans, listening to American music and eating American food - all of it was a mystery to them. On the other hand, when I was growing up, India was largely a mystery to Americans as well, not nearly as present in the fabric of American culture as it is today. It wasn 't until I was in college that my American friends expressed curiosity about and interest in my Indian background. As a young child, I felt that that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment, and vice versa. I felt that I led two very separate lives.
Q) Did you feel as rebellious as your character Gogol does early in your novel?
A) Neither Gogol nor I was terribly rebellious, really. I suppose I, like Gogol, had my moments. But even ordinary things felt like a rebellion from my upbringing - what I ate, what I listened to, whom I befriended, what I read. Things my American friends ' parents wouldn 't think to remark upon were always remarked upon by mine.
Q) In The Namesake, characters have both good names, used in public, and pet names, used by families. Is this still a tradition in Bengali families? Do you have both a public and a family name?
A) I can 't speak for all Bengalis. But all the Bengalis I know personally, especially those living in India, have two names, one public, one private. It 's always fascinated me. My parents are called by different names depending on what country they happen to be in; in India they 're known by their pet names, but in America they 're known by their good names. My sister, who was born and raised in America, has two names. I 'm like Gogol in that my pet name inadvertently became my good name. I have two other names on my passport and my birth certificate (my mother couldn 't settle on just one). But when I was enrolled in school the teachers decided that Jhumpa was the easiest of my names to pronounce and that was that. To this day many of my relatives think that it 's both odd and inappropriate that I 'm known as Jhumpa in an official, public context.
Q) You write frequently from the male point of view. Why?
A) In the beginning I think it was mainly curiosity. I have no brothers, and growing up, men generally seemed like mysterious creatures to me. Except for an early story I wrote in college, the first thing I wrote from the male point of view was the story "This Blessed House," in Interpreter of Maladies. It was an exhilarating and liberating thing to do, so much so that I wrote three stories in a row, all from the male perspective. It 's a challenge, as well. I always have to ask myself, would a man think this? do this? I always knew that the protagonist of The Namesake would by a boy. The original spark of the book was the fact that a friend of my cousin 's in India had the pet name Gogol. I wanted to write about the pet name / good name distinction for a long time, and I knew I needed the space of a novel to explore the idea. It 's almost too perfect a metaphor for the experience of growing up as the child of immigrants, having a divided identity, divided loyalties, etc.
Q) Now that you 've written both stories and a novel, which do you prefer? What was the transition like?
A) I feel attracted to both forms. Moving from the purity and intensity of the short story to the broader canvas of a novel felt liberating and, at times, overwhelming. Writing a novel is certainly more demanding than writing a story, and the stakes are higher. Every time I questioned something about the novel it potentially affected hundreds of pages of writing, not just ten or twenty. The revision process was far more rigorous and daunting. It was much more of a commitment in every way. And I was juggling much more than I ever have in a story, more characters, more scenes, more points of view. At the same time, there 's something more forgiving about a novel. It 's roomier, messier, more tolerant than a short story. The action isn 't under a microscope in quite the same way. Short stories, now matter how complex, always have a ruthless, distilled quality. They require more control than novels. I hope I can continue to write both.
Q) Have you reevaluated any of your writing about men and/or marriage now that you are both a wife and mother?
A) Not really. The scenes about Ashima in labor and giving birth were written long before I became pregnant. I asked my friends and my mother and my mother 's friends a lot of questions, and I based Ashima 's experiences on the answers I got. Being married doesn 't make writing about men any easier, just as my being a woman doesn 't make writing about women any easier. It 's always a challenge. That said, the experiences of marriage and motherhood have changed me profoundly, have grounded me in a way I 've never been before. Motherhood, in particular, makes me look at life in an entirely different way. There 's nothing to prepare you for it, nothing to compare it to. And I imagine that my future work will reflect or otherwise be informed by that change.
Q) You quote Dostoyevsky as saying, "We all came out of Gogol 's overcoat." Has Nikolai Gogol had any influence on you as a writer?
A) I 'm not sure influence is the right word. I don 't turn to Gogol as consistently as I do to certain other writers when I 'm struggling with character or language. His writing is more overtly comic, more antic and absurd than mine tends to be. But I admire his work enormously and reread a lot of it as I was working on the novel, in addition to reading biographical material. "The Overcoat" is such a superb story. It really does haunt me the way it haunts the character of Ashoke in the novel. I like to think that every writer I admire influences me in some way, by teaching me something about writing. Of course, without the inspiration of Nikolai Gogol, without his name and without his writing, my novel would never have been conceived. In that respect, this book came out of Gogol 's overcoat, quite literally.
[A Houghton Mifflin Company Release] http://hinduism.about.com/library/weekly/extra/bl-jhumpainterview.htm

A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri

Q) What inspired the book 's title?A) The title came to me long before the book did, or, for that matter, the story to which it refers. In 1991, during my first year as a graduate student at Boston University, I bumped intoan acquaintance of mine. I barely knew him, but the year before, he had very kindly helped me move ... to a one-bedroom apartment. When I asked him what he was doing with himself, he said he was working at a doctor’s office, interpreting for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients who had difficulty explaining their ailments in English. As I walked away from that brief conversation, I thought continuously about what a unique position it was, and by the time I 'd reached my house, the phrase "interpreter of maladies" was planted in my head. I told myself, one day I 'll write a story with that title. Every now and then I struggled to find a story to suit the title. Nothing came to me. About five years passed. Then one day I jotted down a paragraph containing the bare bones of "Interpreter of Maladies" in my notebook. When I was putting the collection together, I knew from the beginning that this had to be the title story, because it best expresses, thematically, the predicament at the heart of the book—the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves. In some senses I view my position as a writer, in so far as I attempt to articulate these emotions, as a sort of interpreter as well.Q) Some of your settings are in India, others in the United States? Why this combination?A) When I began writing fiction seriously, my first attempts, for some reason, were always set in Calcutta, which is a city I know quite well from repeated visits with my family. These trips to a vast, unruly, fascinating city so different from the small New England town where I was raised shaped my perceptions of the world and of people from a very early age. I learned that there was another side, a vastly different version to everything. 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, in the ways I didn 't seem to belong in the United States. As I gained a bit more confidence, I began to set stories in the United States and wrote about situations closer to my own experiences. For me, that has been the greater challenge.Q) What distinguishes the experiences of Indian immigrants to the United States from those of their American-born children?A) In a sense, very little. The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are, or those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children. The older I get, the more aware am I that I have somehow inherited a sense of exile from my parents, even though in many ways—superficial ones, largely—I am so much more American than they are. 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.Q) When did you begin writing?A) I was seven. Although I now associate being a writer with solitude, as a child writing formed the basis of my friendships. My closest friend in elementary school and I used to co-author stories during recess. We thought them aloud, sentence by sentence. We set an example, and sometimes we had a group going, as many as four or five people, all working on a "book." I always hoped for rainy days, so I could stay inside and write instead of having to run around the playground. We were terribly prolific, until high school, when the traumas of adolescence took over. I wrote for the school newspaper, but I stopped writing fiction. In college I took a few workshops, but I had no confidence in myself as a fiction writer, and by the time I graduated, I had decided to be an academic. I applied to graduate English programs and was rejected from all of them. Now I know this was a blessing in disguise. I decided to apply again, but meanwhile I got a job as a research assistant at a nonprofit institution in Cambridge. For the first time I had a computer of my own at my desk, and I started writing fiction again, more seriously. Eventually I had enough material to apply to the creative writing program at Boston University. But once that ended, unsure of what to do next, I went on to graduate school and got my Ph.D. In the process, it became clear to me that I was not meant to be a scholar. I still wrote stories on the side, publishing things here and there. The year I finished my dissertation, I was also accepted to the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, and that changed everything. It was something of a miracle. In seven months I got an agent, sold a book, and had a story published in The New Yorker. I 've been extremely lucky. It 's been the happiest possible ending.

Hell-Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri May 24, 2004
Pranab Chakraborty wasn’t technically my father’s younger brother. He was a fellow-Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the barren shores of my parents’ social life in the early seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square and could number their acquaintances on one hand. But I had no real uncles in America, and so I was taught to call him Pranab Kaku. Accordingly, he called my father Shyamal Da, always addressing him in the polite form, and he called my mother Boudi, which is how Bengalis are supposed to address an older brother’s wife, instead of using her first name, Aparna. After Pranab Kaku was befriended by my parents, he confessed that on the day we first met him he had followed my mother and me for the better part of an afternoon around the streets of Cambridge, where she and I tended to roam after I got out of school. He had trailed behind us along Massachusetts Avenue, and in and out of the Harvard Coop, where my mother liked to look at discounted housewares. He wandered with us into Harvard Yard, where my mother often sat on the grass on pleasant days and watched the stream of students and professors filing busily along the paths, until, finally, as we were climbing the steps to Widener Library so that I could use the bathroom, he tapped my mother on the shoulder and inquired, in English, if she might be a Bengali. The answer to his question was clear, given that my mother was wearing the red and white bangles unique to Bengali married women, and a common Tangail sari, and had a thick stem of vermillion powder in the center parting of her hair, and the full round face and large dark eyes that are so typical of Bengali women. He noticed the two or three safety pins she wore fastened to the thin gold bangles that were behind the red and white ones, which she would use to replace a missing hook on a blouse or to draw a string through a petticoat at a moment’s notice, a practice he associated strictly with his mother and sisters and aunts in Calcutta. Moreover, Pranab Kaku had overheard my mother speaking to me in Bengali, telling me that I couldn’t buy an issue of Archie at the Coop. But back then, he also confessed, he was so new to America that he took nothing for granted, and doubted even the obvious.
My parents and I had lived in Central Square for three years prior to that day; before that, we had lived in Berlin, where I was born and where my father had finished his training in microbiology before accepting a position as a researcher at Mass General, and before Berlin my mother and father had lived in India, where they had been strangers to each other, and where their marriage had been arranged. Central Square is the first place I can recall living, and in my memories of our apartment, in a dark-brown shingled house on Ashburton Place, Pranab Kaku is always there. According to the story he liked to recall often, my mother invited him to accompany us back to our apartment that very afternoon, and prepared tea for the two of them; then, after learning that he had not had a proper Bengali meal in more than three months, she served him the leftover curried mackerel and rice that we had eaten for dinner the night before. He remained into the evening, for a second dinner, after my father got home, and after that he showed up for dinner almost every night, occupying the fourth chair at our square Formica kitchen table, and becoming a part of our family in practice as well as in name.
He was from a wealthy family in Calcutta and had never had to do so much as pour himself a glass of water before moving to America, to study engineering at M.I.T. Life as a graduate student in Boston was a cruel shock, and in his first month he lost nearly twenty pounds. He had arrived in January, in the middle of a snowstorm, and at the end of a week he had packed his bags and gone to Logan, prepared to abandon the opportunity he’d worked toward all his life, only to change his mind at the last minute. He was living on Trowbridge Street in the home of a divorced woman with two young children who were always screaming and crying. He rented a room in the attic and was permitted to use the kitchen only at specified times of the day, and instructed always to wipe down the stove with Windex and a sponge. My parents agreed that it was a terrible situation, and if they’d had a bedroom to spare they would have offered it to him. Instead, they welcomed him to our meals, and opened up our apartment to him at any time, and soon it was there he went between classes and on his days off, always leaving behind some vestige of himself: a nearly finished pack of cigarettes, a newspaper, a piece of mail he had not bothered to open, a sweater he had taken off and forgotten in the course of his stay.
I remember vividly the sound of his exuberant laughter and the sight of his lanky body slouched or sprawled on the dull, mismatched furniture that had come with our apartment. He had a striking face, with a high forehead and a thick mustache, and overgrown, untamed hair that my mother said made him look like the American hippies who were everywhere in those days. His long legs jiggled rapidly up and down wherever he sat, and his elegant hands trembled when he held a cigarette between his fingers, tapping the ashes into a teacup that my mother began to set aside for this exclusive purpose. Though he was a scientist by training, there was nothing rigid or predictable or orderly about him. He always seemed to be starving, walking through the door and announcing that he hadn’t had lunch, and then he would eat ravenously, reaching behind my mother to steal cutlets as she was frying them, before she had a chance to set them properly on a plate with red-onion salad. In private, my parents remarked that he was a brilliant student, a star at Jadavpur who had come to M.I.T. with an impressive assistantship, but Pranab Kaku was cavalier about his classes, skipping them with frequency. “These Americans are learning equations I knew at Usha’s age,” he would complain. He was stunned that my second-grade teacher didn’t assign any homework, and that at the age of seven I hadn’t yet been taught square roots or the concept of pi.
He appeared without warning, never phoning beforehand but simply knocking on the door the way people did in Calcutta and calling out “Boudi!” as he waited for my mother to let him in. Before we met him, I would return from school and find my mother with her purse in her lap and her trenchcoat on, desperate to escape the apartment where she had spent the day alone. But now I would find her in the kitchen, rolling out dough for luchis, which she normally made only on Sundays for my father and me, or putting up new curtains she’d bought at Woolworth’s. I did not know, back then, that Pranab Kaku’s visits were what my mother looked forward to all day, that she changed into a new sari and combed her hair in anticipation of his arrival, and that she planned, days in advance, the snacks she would serve him with such nonchalance. That she lived for the moment she heard him call out “Boudi!” from the porch, and that she was in a foul humor on the days he didn’t materialize.
It must have pleased her that I looked forward to his visits as well. He showed me card tricks and an optical illusion in which he appeared to be severing his own thumb with enormous struggle and strength, and taught me to memorize multiplication tables well before I had to learn them in school. His hobby was photography. He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. I remember having to run back and forth in Harvard Yard as he stood with the camera, trying to capture me in motion, or posing on the steps of university buildings and on the street and against the trunks of trees. There is only one photograph in which my mother appears; she is holding me as I sit straddling her lap, her head tilted toward me, her hands pressed to my ears as if to prevent me from hearing something. In that picture, Pranab Kaku’s shadow, his two arms raised at angles to hold the camera to his face, hovers in the corner of the frame, his darkened, featureless shape superimposed on one side of my mother’s body. It was always the three of us. I was always there when he visited. It would have been inappropriate for my mother to receive him in the apartment alone; this was something that went without saying.
They had in common all the things she and my father did not: a love of music, film, leftist politics, poetry. They were from the same neighborhood in North Calcutta, their family homes within walking distance, the façades familiar to them once the exact locations were described. They knew the same shops, the same bus and tram routes, the same holes-in-the-wall for the best jelabis and moghlai parathas. My father, on the other hand, came from a suburb twenty miles outside Calcutta, an area that my mother considered the wilderness, and even in her bleakest hours of homesickness she was grateful that my father had at least spared her a life in the stern house of her in-laws, where she would have had to keep her head covered with the end of her sari at all times and use an outhouse that was nothing but a raised platform with a hole, and where, in the rooms, there was not a single painting hanging on the walls. Within a few weeks, Pranab Kaku had brought his reel-to-reel over to our apartment, and he played for my mother medley after medley of songs from the Hindi films of their youth. They were cheerful songs of courtship, which transformed the quiet life in our apartment and transported my mother back to the world she’d left behind in order to marry my father. She and Pranab Kaku would try to recall which scene in which movie the songs were from, who the actors were and what they were wearing. My mother would describe Raj Kapoor and Nargis singing under umbrellas in the rain, or Dev Anand strumming a guitar on the beach in Goa. She and Pranab Kaku would argue passionately about these matters, raising their voices in playful combat, confronting each other in a way she and my father never did.
Because he played the part of a younger brother, she felt free to call him Pranab, whereas she never called my father by his first name. My father was thirty-seven then, nine years older than my mother. Pranab Kaku was twenty-five. My father was monkish by nature, a lover of silence and solitude. He had married my mother to placate his parents; they were willing to accept his desertion as long as he had a wife. He was wedded to his work, his research, and he existed in a shell that neither my mother nor I could penetrate. Conversation was a chore for him; it required an effort he preferred to expend at the lab. He disliked excess in anything, voiced no cravings or needs apart from the frugal elements of his daily routine: cereal and tea in the mornings, a cup of tea after he got home, and two different vegetable dishes every night with dinner. He did not eat with the reckless appetite of Pranab Kaku. My father had a survivor’s mentality. From time to time, he liked to remark, in mixed company and often with no relevant provocation, that starving Russians under Stalin had resorted to eating the glue off the back of their wallpaper. One might think that he would have felt slightly jealous, or at the very least suspicious, about the regularity of Pranab Kaku’s visits and the effect they had on my mother’s behavior and mood. But my guess is that my father was grateful to Pranab Kaku for the companionship he provided, freed from the sense of responsibility he must have felt for forcing her to leave India, and relieved, perhaps, to see her happy for a change.
In the summer, Pranab Kaku bought a navy-blue Volkswagen Beetle, and began to take my mother and me for drives through Boston and Cambridge, and soon outside the city, flying down the highway. He would take us to India Tea and Spices in Watertown, and one time he drove us all the way to New Hampshire to look at the mountains. As the weather grew hotter, we started going, once or twice a week, to Walden Pond. My mother always prepared a picnic of hard-boiled eggs and cucumber sandwiches, and talked fondly about the winter picnics of her youth, grand expeditions with fifty of her relatives, all taking the train into the West Bengal countryside. Pranab Kaku listened to these stories with interest, absorbing the vanishing details of her past. He did not turn a deaf ear to her nostalgia, like my father, or listen uncomprehending, like me. At Walden Pond, Pranab Kaku would coax my mother through the woods, and lead her down the steep slope to the water’s edge. She would unpack the picnic things and sit and watch us as we swam. His chest was matted with thick dark hair, all the way to his waist. He was an odd sight, with his pole-thin legs and a small, flaccid belly, like an otherwise svelte woman who has had a baby and not bothered to tone her abdomen. “You’re making me fat, Boudi,” he would complain after gorging himself on my mother’s cooking. He swam noisily, clumsily, his head always above the water; he didn’t know how to blow bubbles or hold his breath, as I had learned in swimming class. Wherever we went, any stranger would have naturally assumed that Pranab Kaku was my father, that my mother was his wife.
It is clear to me now that my mother was in love with him. He wooed her as no other man had, with the innocent affection of a brother-in-law. In my mind, he was just a family member, a cross between an uncle and a much older brother, for in certain respects my parents sheltered and cared for him in much the same way they cared for me. He was respectful of my father, always seeking his advice about making a life in the West, about setting up a bank account and getting a job, and deferring to his opinions about Kissinger and Watergate. Occasionally, my mother would tease him about women, asking about female Indian students at M.I.T., or showing him pictures of her younger cousins in India. “What do you think of her?” she would ask. “Isn’t she pretty?” She knew that she could never have Pranab Kaku for herself, and I suppose it was her attempt to keep him in the family. But, most important, in the beginning he was totally dependent on her, needing her for those months in a way my father never did in the whole history of their marriage. He brought to my mother the first and, I suspect, the only pure happiness she ever felt. I don’t think even my birth made her as happy. I was evidence of her marriage to my father, an assumed consequence of the life she had been raised to lead. But Pranab Kaku was different. He was the one totally unanticipated pleasure in her life.
In the fall of 1974, Pranab Kaku met a student at Radcliffe named Deborah, an American, and she began to accompany him to our house. I called Deborah by her first name, as my parents did, but Pranab Kaku taught her to call my father Shyamal Da and my mother Boudi, something with which Deborah gladly complied. Before they came to dinner for the first time, I asked my mother, as she was straightening up the living room, if I ought to address her as Deborah Kakima, turning her into an aunt as I had turned Pranab into an uncle. “What’s the point?” my mother said, looking back at me sharply. “In a few weeks, the fun will be over and she’ll leave him.” And yet Deborah remained by his side, attending the weekend parties that Pranab Kaku and my parents were becoming more involved with, gatherings that were exclusively Bengali with the exception of her. Deborah was very tall, taller than both my parents and nearly as tall as Pranab Kaku. She wore her long brass-colored hair center-parted, as my mother did, but it was gathered into a low ponytail instead of a braid, or it spilled messily over her shoulders and down her back in a way that my mother considered indecent. She wore small silver spectacles and not a trace of makeup, and she studied philosophy. I found her utterly beautiful, but according to my mother she had spots on her face, and her hips were too small.
For a while, Pranab Kaku still showed up once a week for dinner on his own, mostly asking my mother what she thought of Deborah. He sought her approval, telling her that Deborah was the daughter of professors at Boston College, that her father published poetry, and that both her parents had Ph.D.s. When he wasn’t around, my mother complained about Deborah’s visits, about having to make the food less spicy even though Deborah said she liked spicy food, and feeling embarrassed to put a fried fish head in the dal. Pranab Kaku taught Deborah to say khub bhalo and aacha and to pick up certain foods with her fingers instead of with a fork. Sometimes they ended up feeding each other, allowing their fingers to linger in each other’s mouth, causing my parents to look down at their plates and wait for the moment to pass. At larger gatherings, they kissed and held hands in front of everyone, and when they were out of earshot my mother would talk to the other Bengali women. “He used to be so different. I don’t understand how a person can change so suddenly. It’s just hell-heaven, the difference,” she would say, always using the English words for her self-concocted, backward metaphor.
The more my mother began to resent Deborah’s visits, the more I began to anticipate them. I fell in love with Deborah, the way young girls often fall in love with women who are not their mothers. I loved her serene gray eyes, the ponchos and denim wrap skirts and sandals she wore, her straight hair that she let me manipulate into all sorts of silly styles. I longed for her casual appearance; my mother insisted whenever there was a gathering that I wear one of my ankle-length, faintly Victorian dresses, which she referred to as maxis, and have party hair, which meant taking a strand from either side of my head and joining them with a barrette at the back. At parties, Deborah would, eventually, politely slip away, much to the relief of the Bengali women with whom she was expected to carry on a conversation, and she would play with me. I was older than all my parents’ friends’ children, but with Deborah I had a companion. She knew all about the books I read, about Pippi Longstocking and Anne of Green Gables. She gave me the sorts of gifts my parents had neither the money nor the inspiration to buy: a large book of Grimms’ fairy tales with watercolor illustrations on thick, silken pages, wooden puppets with hair fashioned from yarn. She told me about her family, three older sisters and two brothers, the youngest of whom was closer to my age than to hers. Once, after visiting her parents, she brought back three Nancy Drews, her name written in a girlish hand at the top of the first page, and an old toy she’d had, a small paper theatre set with interchangeable backdrops, the exterior of a castle and a ballroom and an open field. Deborah and I spoke freely in English, a language in which, by that age, I expressed myself more easily than Bengali, which I was required to speak at home. Sometimes she asked me how to say this or that in Bengali; once, she asked me what asobbho meant. I hesitated, then told her it was what my mother called me if I had done something extremely naughty, and Deborah’s face clouded. I felt protective of her, aware that she was unwanted, that she was resented, aware of the nasty things people said.
Outings in the Volkswagen now involved the four of us, Deborah in the front, her hand over Pranab Kaku’s while it rested on the gearshift, my mother and I in the back. Soon, my mother began coming up with reasons to excuse herself, headaches and incipient colds, and so I became part of a new triangle. To my surprise, my mother allowed me to go with them, to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Public Garden and the aquarium. She was waiting for the affair to end, for Deborah to break Pranab Kaku’s heart and for him to return to us, scarred and penitent. I saw no sign of their relationship foundering. Their open affection for each other, their easily expressed happiness, was a new and romantic thing to me. Having me in the back seat allowed Pranab Kaku and Deborah to practice for the future, to try on the idea of a family of their own. Countless photographs were taken of me and Deborah, of me sitting on Deborah’s lap, holding her hand, kissing her on the cheek. We exchanged what I believed were secret smiles, and in those moments I felt that she understood me better than anyone else in the world. Anyone would have said that Deborah would make an excellent mother one day. But my mother refused to acknowledge such a thing. I did not know at the time that my mother allowed me to go off with Pranab Kaku and Deborah because she was pregnant for the fifth time since my birth, and was so sick and exhausted and fearful of losing another baby that she slept most of the day. After ten weeks, she miscarried once again, and was advised by her doctor to stop trying.
By summer, there was a diamond on Deborah’s left hand, something my mother had never been given. Because his own family lived so far away, Pranab Kaku came to the house alone one day, to ask for my parents’ blessing before giving her the ring. He showed us the box, opening it and taking out the diamond nestled inside. “I want to see how it looks on someone,” he said, urging my mother to try it on, but she refused. I was the one who stuck out my hand, feeling the weight of the ring suspended at the base of my finger. Then he asked for a second thing: he wanted my parents to write to his parents, saying that they had met Deborah and that they thought highly of her. He was nervous, naturally, about telling his family that he intended to marry an American girl. He had told his parents all about us, and at one point my parents had received a letter from them, expressing appreciation for taking such good care of their son and for giving him a proper home in America. “It needn’t be long,” Pranab Kaku said. “Just a few lines. They’ll accept it more easily if it comes from you.” My father thought neither ill nor well of Deborah, never commenting or criticizing as my mother did, but he assured Pranab Kaku that a letter of endorsement would be on its way to Calcutta by the end of the week. My mother nodded her assent, but the following day I saw the teacup Pranab Kaku had used all this time as an ashtray in the kitchen garbage can, in pieces, and three Band-Aids taped to my mother’s hand.
Pranab Kaku’s parents were horrified by the thought of their only son marrying an American woman, and a few weeks later our telephone rang in the middle of the night: it was Mr. Chakraborty telling my father that they could not possibly bless such a marriage, that it was out of the question, that if Pranab Kaku dared to marry Deborah he would no longer acknowledge him as a son. Then his wife got on the phone, asking to speak to my mother, and attacked her as if they were intimate, blaming my mother for allowing the affair to develop. She said that they had already chosen a wife for him in Calcutta, that he’d left for America with the understanding that he’d go back after he had finished his studies, and marry this girl. They had bought the neighboring flat in their building for Pranab and his betrothed, and it was sitting empty, waiting for his return. “We thought we could trust you, and yet you have betrayed us so deeply,” his mother said, taking out her anger on a stranger in a way she could not with her son. “Is this what happens to people in America?” For Pranab Kaku’s sake, my mother defended the engagement, telling his mother that Deborah was a polite girl from a decent family. Pranab Kaku’s parents pleaded with mine to talk him out of the engagement, but my father refused, deciding that it was not their place to get embroiled in a situation that had nothing to do with them. “We are not his parents,” he told my mother. “We can tell him they don’t approve but nothing more.” And so my parents told Pranab Kaku nothing about how his parents had berated them, and blamed them, and threatened to disown Pranab Kaku, only that they had refused to give him their blessing. In the face of this refusal, Pranab Kaku shrugged. “I don’t care. Not everyone can be as open-minded as you,” he told my parents. “Your blessing is blessing enough.”
After the engagement, Pranab Kaku and Deborah began drifting out of our lives. They moved in together, to an apartment in Boston, in the South End, a part of the city my parents considered unsafe. We moved as well, to a house in Natick. Though my parents had bought the house, they occupied it as if they were still tenants, touching up scuff marks with leftover paint and reluctant to put holes in the walls, and every afternoon when the sun shone through the living-room window my mother closed the blinds so that our new furniture would not fade. A few weeks before the wedding, my parents invited Pranab Kaku to the house alone, and my mother prepared a special meal to mark the end of his bachelorhood. It would be the only Bengali aspect of the wedding; the rest of it would be strictly American, with a cake and a minister and Deborah in a long white dress and veil. There is a photograph of the dinner, taken by my father, the only picture, to my knowledge, in which my mother and Pranab Kaku appear together. The picture is slightly blurry; I remember Pranab Kaku explaining to my father how to work the camera, and so he is captured looking up from the kitchen table and the elaborate array of food my mother had prepared in his honor, his mouth open, his long arm outstretched and his finger pointing, instructing my father how to read the light meter or some such thing. My mother stands beside him, one hand placed on top of his head in a gesture of blessing, the first and last time she was to touch him in her life. “She will leave him,” my mother told her friends afterward. “He is throwing his life away.”
The wedding was at a church in Ipswich, with a reception at a country club. It was going to be a small ceremony, which my parents took to mean one or two hundred people as opposed to three or four hundred. My mother was shocked that fewer than thirty people had been invited, and she was more perplexed than honored that, of all the Bengalis Pranab Kaku knew by then, we were the only ones on the list. At the wedding, we sat, like the other guests, first on the hard wooden pews of the church and then at a long table that had been set up for lunch. Though we were the closest thing Pranab Kaku had to a family that day, we were not included in the group photographs that were taken on the grounds of the country club, with Deborah’s parents and grandparents and her many siblings, and neither my mother nor my father got up to make a toast. My mother did not appreciate the fact that Deborah had made sure that my parents, who did not eat beef, were given fish instead of filet mignon like everyone else. She kept speaking in Bengali, complaining about the formality of the proceedings, and the fact that Pranab Kaku, wearing a tuxedo, barely said a word to us because he was too busy leaning over the shoulders of his new American in-laws as he circled the table. As usual, my father said nothing in response to my mother’s commentary, quietly and methodically working though his meal, his fork and knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china, because he was accustomed to eating with his hands. He cleared his plate and then my mother’s, for she had pronounced the food inedible, and then he announced that he had overeaten and had a stomach ache. The only time my mother forced a smile was when Deborah appeared behind her chair, kissing her on the cheek and asking if we were enjoying ourselves. When the dancing started, my parents remained at the table, drinking tea, and after two or three songs they decided that it was time for us to go home, my mother shooting me looks to that effect across the room, where I was dancing in a circle with Pranab Kaku and Deborah and the other children at the wedding. I wanted to stay, and when, reluctantly, I walked over to where my parents sat Deborah followed me. “Boudi, let Usha stay. She’s having such a good time,” she said to my mother. “Lots of people will be heading back your way, someone can drop her off in a little while.” But my mother said no, I had had plenty of fun already, and forced me to put on my coat over my long puff-sleeved dress. As we drove home from the wedding I told my mother, for the first but not the last time in my life, that I hated her.
The following year, we received a birth announcement from the Chakrabortys, a picture of twin girls, which my mother did not paste into an album or display on the refrigerator door. The girls were named Srabani and Sabitri, but were called Bonny and Sara. Apart from a thank-you card for our wedding gift, it was their only communication; we were not invited to the new house in Marblehead, bought after Pranab Kaku got a high-paying job at Stone & Webster. For a while, my parents and their friends continued to invite the Chakrabortys to gatherings, but because they never came, or left after staying only an hour, the invitations stopped. Their absences were attributed, by my parents and their circle, to Deborah, and it was universally agreed that she had stripped Pranab Kaku not only of his origins but of his independence. She was the enemy, he was her prey, and their example was invoked as a warning, and as vindication, that mixed marriages were a doomed enterprise. Occasionally, they surprised everyone, appearing at a pujo for a few hours with their two identical little girls who barely looked Bengali and spoke only English and were being raised so differently from me and most of the other children. They were not taken to Calcutta every summer, they did not have parents who were clinging to another way of life and exhorting their children to do the same. Because of Deborah, they were exempt from all that, and for this reason I envied them. “Usha, look at you, all grown up and so pretty,” Deborah would say whenever she saw me, rekindling, if only for a minute, our bond of years before. She had cut off her beautiful long hair by then, and had a bob. “I bet you’ll be old enough to babysit soon,” she would say. “I’ll call you—the girls would love that.” But she never did.
I began to grow out of my girlhood, entering middle school and developing crushes on the American boys in my class. The crushes amounted to nothing; in spite of Deborah’s compliments, I was always overlooked at that age. But my mother must have picked up on something, for she forbade me to attend the dances that were held the last Friday of every month in the school cafeteria, and it was an unspoken law that I was not allowed to date. “Don’t think you’ll get away with marrying an American, the way Pranab Kaku did,” she would say from time to time. I was thirteen, the thought of marriage irrelevant to my life. Still, her words upset me, and I felt her grip on me tighten. She would fly into a rage when I told her I wanted to start wearing a bra, or if I wanted to go to Harvard Square with a friend. In the middle of our arguments, she often conjured Deborah as her antithesis, the sort of woman she refused to be. “If she were your mother, she would let you do whatever you wanted, because she wouldn’t care. Is that what you want, Usha, a mother who doesn’t care?” When I began menstruating, the summer before I started ninth grade, my mother gave me a speech, telling me that I was to let no boy touch me, and then she asked if I knew how a woman became pregnant. I told her what I had been taught in science, about the sperm fertilizing the egg, and then she asked if I knew how, exactly, that happened. I saw the terror in her eyes and so, though I knew that aspect of procreation as well, I lied, and told her it hadn’t been explained to us.
I began keeping other secrets from her, evading her with the aid of my friends. I told her I was sleeping over at a friend’s when really I went to parties, drinking beer and allowing boys to kiss me and fondle my breasts and press their erections against my hip as we lay groping on a sofa or the back seat of a car. I began to pity my mother; the older I got, the more I saw what a desolate life she led. She had never worked, and during the day she watched soap operas to pass the time. Her only job, every day, was to clean and cook for my father and me. We rarely went to restaurants, my father always pointing out, even in cheap ones, how expensive they were compared with eating at home. When my mother complained to him about how much she hated life in the suburbs and how lonely she felt, he said nothing to placate her. “If you are so unhappy, go back to Calcutta,” he would offer, making it clear that their separation would not affect him one way or the other. I began to take my cues from my father in dealing with her, isolating her doubly. When she screamed at me for talking too long on the telephone, or for staying too long in my room, I learned to scream back, telling her that she was pathetic, that she knew nothing about me, and it was clear to us both that I had stopped needing her, definitively and abruptly, just as Pranab Kaku had.
Then, the year before I went off to college, my parents and I were invited to the Chakrabortys’ home for Thanksgiving. We were not the only guests from my parents’ old Cambridge crowd; it turned out that Pranab Kaku and Deborah wanted to have a sort of reunion of all the people they had been friendly with back then. Normally, my parents did not celebrate Thanksgiving; the ritual of a large sit-down dinner and the foods that one was supposed to eat was lost on them. They treated it as if it were Memorial Day or Veterans Day—just another holiday in the American year. But we drove out to Marblehead, to an impressive stone-faced house with a semicircular gravel driveway clogged with cars. The house was a short walk from the ocean; on our way, we had driven by the harbor overlooking the cold, glittering Atlantic, and when we stepped out of the car we were greeted by the sound of gulls and waves. Most of the living-room furniture had been moved to the basement, and extra tables joined to the main one to form a giant U. They were covered with tablecloths, set with white plates and silverware, and had centerpieces of gourds. I was struck by the toys and dolls that were everywhere, dogs that shed long yellow hairs on everything, all the photographs of Bonny and Sara and Deborah decorating the walls, still more plastering the refrigerator door. Food was being prepared when we arrived, something my mother always frowned upon, the kitchen a chaos of people and smells and enormous dirtied bowls.
Deborah’s family, whom we remembered dimly from the wedding, was there, her parents and her brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives and boyfriends and babies. Her sisters were in their thirties, but, like Deborah, they could have been mistaken for college students, wearing jeans and clogs and fisherman sweaters, and her brother Matty, with whom I had danced in a circle at the wedding, was now a freshman at Amherst, with wide-set green eyes and wispy brown hair and a complexion that reddened easily. As soon as I saw Deborah’s siblings, joking with one another as they chopped and stirred things in the kitchen, I was furious with my mother for making a scene before we left the house and forcing me to wear a shalwar kameez. I knew they assumed, from my clothing, that I had more in common with the other Bengalis than with them. But Deborah insisted on including me, setting me to work peeling apples with Matty, and out of my parents’ sight I was given beer to drink. When the meal was ready, we were told where to sit, in an alternating boy-girl formation that made the Bengalis uncomfortable. Bottles of wine were lined up on the table. Two turkeys were brought out, one stuffed with sausage and one without. My mouth watered at the food, but I knew that afterward, on our way home, my mother would complain that it was all tasteless and bland. “Impossible,” my mother said, shaking her hand over the top of her glass when someone tried to pour her a little wine.
Deborah’s father, Gene, got up to say grace, and asked everyone at the table to join hands. He bowed his head and closed his eyes. “Dear Lord, we thank you today for the food we are about to receive,” he began. My parents were seated next to each other, and I was stunned to see that they complied, that my father’s brown fingers lightly clasped my mother’s pale ones. I noticed Matty seated on the other side of the room, and saw him glancing at me as his father spoke. After the chorus of amens, Gene raised his glass and said, “Forgive me, but I never thought I’d have the opportunity to say this: Here’s to Thanksgiving with the Indians.” Only a few people laughed at the joke.
Then Pranab Kaku stood up and thanked everyone for coming. He was relaxed from alcohol, his once wiry body beginning to thicken. He started to talk sentimentally about his early days in Cambridge, and then suddenly he recounted the story of meeting me and my mother for the first time, telling the guests about how he had followed us that afternoon. The people who did not know us laughed, amused by the description of the encounter, and by Pranab Kaku’s desperation. He walked around the room to where my mother was sitting and draped a lanky arm around her shoulder, forcing her, for a brief moment, to stand up. “This woman,” he declared, pulling her close to his side, “this woman hosted my first real Thanksgiving in America. It might have been an afternoon in May, but that first meal at Boudi’s table was Thanksgiving to me. If it weren’t for that meal, I would have gone back to Calcutta.” My mother looked away, embarrassed. She was thirty-eight, already going gray, and she looked closer to my father’s age than to Pranab Kaku’s; regardless of his waistline, he retained his handsome, carefree looks. Pranab Kaku went back to his place at the head of the table, next to Deborah, and concluded, “And if that had been the case I’d have never met you, my darling,” and he kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone, to much applause, as if it were their wedding day all over again.
After the turkey, smaller forks were distributed and orders were taken for three different kinds of pie, written on small pads by Deborah’s sisters, as if they were waitresses. After dessert, the dogs needed to go out, and Pranab Kaku volunteered to take them. “How about a walk on the beach?” he suggested, and Deborah’s side of the family agreed that that was an excellent idea. None of the Bengalis wanted to go, preferring to sit with their tea and cluster together, at last, at one end of the room, speaking freely after the forced chitchat with the Americans during the meal. Matty came over and sat in the chair beside me that was now empty, encouraging me to join the walk. When I hesitated, pointing to my inappropriate clothes and shoes but also aware of my mother’s silent fury at the sight of us together, he said, “I’m sure Deb can lend you something.” So I went upstairs, where Deborah gave me a pair of her jeans and a thick sweater and some sneakers, so that I looked like her and her sisters.
She sat on the edge of her bed, watching me change, as if we were girlfriends, and she asked if I had a boyfriend. When I told her no, she said, “Matty thinks you’re cute.”
“He told you?”
“No, but I can tell.”
As I walked back downstairs, emboldened by this information, in the jeans I’d had to roll up and in which I felt finally like myself, I noticed my mother lift her eyes from her teacup and stare at me, but she said nothing, and off I went, with Pranab Kaku and his dogs and his in-laws, along a road and then down some steep wooden steps to the water. Deborah and one of her sisters stayed behind, to begin the cleanup and see to the needs of those who remained. Initially, we all walked together, in a single row across the sand, but then I noticed Matty hanging back, and so the two of us trailed behind, the distance between us and the others increasing. We began flirting, talking of things I no longer remember, and eventually we wandered into a rocky inlet and Matty fished a joint out of his pocket. We turned our backs to the wind and smoked it, our cold fingers touching in the process, our lips pressed to the same damp section of the rolling paper. At first I didn’t feel any effect, but then, listening to him talk about the band he was in, I was aware that his voice sounded miles away, and that I had the urge to laugh, even though what he was saying was not terribly funny. It felt as if we were apart from the group for hours, but when we wandered back to the sand we could still see them, walking out onto a rocky promontory to watch the sun set. It was dark by the time we all headed back to the house, and I dreaded seeing my parents while I was still high. But when we got there Deborah told me that my parents, feeling tired, had left, agreeing to let someone drive me home later. A fire had been lit and I was told to relax and have more pie as the leftovers were put away and the living room slowly put back in order. Of course, it was Matty who drove me home, and sitting in my parents’ driveway I kissed him, at once thrilled and terrified that my mother might walk onto the lawn in her nightgown and discover us. I gave Matty my phone number, and for a few weeks I thought of him constantly, and hoped foolishly that he would call.
In the end, my mother was right, and fourteen years after that Thanksgiving, after twenty-three years of marriage, Pranab Kaku and Deborah got divorced. It was he who had strayed, falling in love with a married Bengali woman, destroying two families in the process. The other woman was someone my parents knew, though not very well. Deborah was in her forties by then, Bonny and Sara away at college. In her shock and grief, it was my mother whom Deborah turned to, calling and weeping into the phone. Somehow, through all the years, she had continued to regard us as quasi in-laws, sending flowers when my grandparents died, and giving me a compact edition of the O.E.D. as a college-graduation present. “You knew him so well. How could he do something like this?” Deborah asked my mother. And then, “Did you know anything about it?” My mother answered truthfully that she did not. Their hearts had been broken by the same man, only my mother’s had long ago mended, and in an odd way, as my parents approached their old age, she and my father had grown fond of each other, out of habit if nothing else. I believe my absence from the house, once I left for college, had something to do with this, because over the years, when I visited, I noticed a warmth between my parents that had not been there before, a quiet teasing, a solidarity, a concern when one of them fell ill. My mother and I had also made peace; she had accepted the fact that I was not only her daughter but a child of America as well. Slowly, she accepted that I dated one American man, and then another, and then yet another, that I slept with them, and even that I lived with one though we were not married. She welcomed my boyfriends into our home and when things didn’t work out she told me I would find someone better. After years of being idle, she decided, when she turned fifty, to get a degree in library science at a nearby university.
On the phone, Deborah admitted something that surprised my mother: that all these years she had felt hopelessly shut out of a part of Pranab Kaku’s life. “I was so horribly jealous of you back then, for knowing him, understanding him in a way I never could. He turned his back on his family, on all of you, really, but I still felt threatened. I could never get over that.” She told my mother that she had tried, for years, to get Pranab Kaku to reconcile with his parents, and that she had also encouraged him to maintain ties with other Bengalis, but he had resisted. It had been Deborah’s idea to invite us to their Thanksgiving; ironically, the other woman had been there, too. “I hope you don’t blame me for taking him away from your lives, Boudi. I always worried that you did.”
My mother assured Deborah that she blamed her for nothing. She confessed nothing to Deborah about her own jealousy of decades before, only that she was sorry for what had happened, that it was a sad and terrible thing for their family. She did not tell Deborah that a few weeks after Pranab Kaku’s wedding, while I was at a Girl Scout meeting and my father was at work, she had gone through the house, gathering up all the safety pins that lurked in drawers and tins, and adding them to the few fastened to her bracelets. When she’d found enough, she pinned them to her sari one by one, attaching the front piece to the layer of material underneath, so that no one would be able to pull the garment off her body. Then she took a can of lighter fluid and a box of kitchen matches and stepped outside, into our chilly back yard, which was full of leaves needing to be raked. Over her sari she was wearing a knee-length lilac trenchcoat, and to any neighbor she must have looked as though she’d simply stepped out for some fresh air. She opened up the coat and removed the tip from the can of lighter fluid and doused herself, then buttoned and belted the coat. She walked over to the garbage barrel behind our house and disposed of the fluid, then returned to the middle of the yard with the box of matches in her coat pocket. For nearly an hour she stood there, looking at our house, trying to work up the courage to strike a match. It was not I who saved her, or my father, but our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Holcomb, with whom my mother had never been particularly friendly. She came out to rake the leaves in her yard, calling out to my mother and remarking how beautiful the sunset was. “I see you’ve been admiring it for a while now,” she said. My mother agreed, and then she went back into the house. By the time my father and I came home in the early evening, she was in the kitchen boiling rice for our dinner, as if it were any other day.
My mother told Deborah none of this. It was to me that she confessed, after my own heart was broken by a man I’d hoped to marry.
IndiaStar Review of Books
Interpreter of Maladies and other stories by Jhumpa Lahiri Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999198 pages; $12
Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia
Jhumpa Lahiri 's Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of nine stories, marks the debut of a remarkable Indian-American writer. A grand debut it is! Her title story has been selected for both the O 'Henry award and the annual Best American Short Stories. Topping this, the book, last month, won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2000.
Born in London of Indian parents and raised in Rhode Island, Jhumpa Lahiri studied at Boston University, receiving a Ph. D. in English. The stories in her first book focus on the intercultural miscommunications and conflicts all too often experienced by Indian immigrants and second generation Indian-Americans.
"Interpreter of Maladies," at 27 pages the longest in the collection, is a multi-layered story about a second-generation Indian-American couple, who along with their three children are visiting India and hire a tour-guide to see the famous Sun Temple at Konarak. Their guide, Mr. Kapasi (we never learn his first name), becomes curious about the couple who look Indian, yet dress like American tourists and speak with an American accent he had heard many times on American TV shows.
The opening sentences describe the bickering that symptomizes this failing marriage. Mr. Kapasi works as a tour guide only on weekends, and has another job during the weekdays as an interpreter in a doctor 's office -- translating the Gujarati spoken by some of his patients. Mina Das, the wife proclaims his job as an interpreter of maladies as "romantic."
Perked up, Mr. Kapasi, from whose point of view the whole story is told and whose own marriage is faltering, looks at her closely: "Her sudden interest in him, an interest she did not express in either her husband or her children, was mildly intoxicating. When Mr. Kapasi thought once again about how she had said 'romantic, ' the feeling of intoxication grew." He begins to fantasize a romantic relationship with her.
The couple invite him to be included in the photographs they take; Mina asks him for his address so they can send him copies from America. This feeds his fantasy.
At the crisis point of the story, when the two of them are in the car, Mina discloses (although the author uses the word "confesses") to Mr. Kapasi that one of the couple 's two boys was clandestinely fathered by her husband 's Punjabi-Indian friend during a brief visit. This is the malady which she hopes Mr. Kapasi will provide a remedy for. However, all the interpreter of maladies can come up with is: "Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?" After all, he is only a translator of native languages.
In the closing paragraph, Mr. Kapasi observes the little paper on which he had so carefully written his address slip out of Mina 's handbag. "No one but Mr. Kapasi noticed. He watched as it rose, carried higher and higher by the breeze, into the trees where the monkeys now sat, solemnly observing the scene below. Mr. Kapasi observed it too, knowing that this was the picture of the Das family he would preserve forever in his mind."
"The Third and Final Continent" is a first-person story of an Indian immigrant who looks back at his first few weeks in America, thirty years ago. In the late 1960s, at age thirty-six, he arrives to work as a librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after having studied for four years in London (his second continent). Just before coming to America, he takes a trip to Calcutta to "attend" his arranged marriage, staying there only a week, barely getting acquainted with his bride. She has to await her visa for six weeks before she can join him in America.On arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the narrator checks into the local YMCA and later rents a room in the home of a 103-year-old widow, Mrs. Croft, who lives by herself. She is a stay-at-home eccentric mother of a 68-year-old daughter, who thinks it improper that her visiting daughter wears a dress high above her ankle. "For your information, Mother, it 's 1969. What would you do if you actually left the house one day and saw a girl in a miniskirt?" Mrs. Croft sniffs: "I 'd have her arrested."
When the narrator 's wife, Mala, arrives from Calcutta, Mrs. Croft scrutinizes her "from top to toe with what seemed to be placid disdain. I wondered if Mrs. Croft had ever seen a woman in a sari, with a dot painted on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists. I wondered what she would object to. I wondered if she could see the red dye still vivid on Mala 's feet, all but obscured by the bottom edge of her sari. At last Mrs. Croft declared, with equal measure of disbelief and delight I know well: 'She is a perfect lady! ' "
It is this scrutiny that first evokes the narrator 's empathy with his bride for it reminds him of his own experiences as a bewildered stranger in London. Looking back, "I like to think of that moment in Mrs. Croft 's parlor as the moment when the distance between Mala and me began to lessen."
All nine of the stories are a showcase of elegant craft. =================================Jhumpa Lahiri 'sInterpreter of Maladies stories
(2) Reviewed by Amy McCurdy
[Editor 's intro: Amy McCurdy is a Berkeley-based writer who has been a bookseller and publicist for the past ten years. She has a bachelor 's degree from California State University, Fullerton, and a master 's from the University of Leicester, England. - - c. j. wallia]
A common thread running through Lahiri 's collection of stories is the experience of being "foreign." Her characters long for meaningful connection, but what they find is rarely what they expected. Those trying to adapt to an unfamiliar world don 't always succeed. Some are homesick, many are misunderstood. In "Mrs. Sen 's," Lahiri chronicles the struggle of a woman who finds herself cut off from her milieu. The narrator is 11-year-old Eliot, and Mrs. Sen is his after-school babysitter. Eliot 's mother was originally looking for someone to come stay with Eliot until she returned home from work each day. But Mrs. Sen, who recently moved with her professor husband from India to the small New England town, can 't drive. We learn early on that Mrs. Sen doesn 't need to work, she 's only looking for a way to fill up her lonely afternoons while her husband teaches all day.Eliot 's mother is skeptical at first. They go to the Sen 's home for an interview, and Eliot can 't help noticing the strangeness of the apartment: how shoes are lined up on a small bookcase by the front door, the TV and phone covered with pieces of fabric. Both Mr. and Mrs. Sen wear flip-flops, and Mrs. Sen is dressed in an elegant sari. "Yet it was his mother, Eliot had thought, in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd." Eliot quickly becomes aware of Mrs. Sen 's loneliness, her bewilderment in a strange new culture. She alarms him by asking: "Eliot, if I began screaming right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come?" At home in India, she explains, "...just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements." She spends a good part of the afternoon chopping vegetables for the elaborate meals she prepares for herself and Mr. Sen. She tells Eliot that she brought the huge blade she uses from India. Whenever there is a large celebration, "...my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night."Afternoons when Eliot gets off the bus at the edge of the complex, Mrs. Sen is already there, and seems to have been waiting for some time. She gives Eliot some snacks she produces from her pockets, and then they get into the car and she practices driving around the complex awhile. She is not allowed to drive onto the main road without her husband.Eliot becomes Mrs. Sen 's companion and confidante, and ultimately, witness to her unraveling. He discovers that she lives for the two things that make her happy: letters from home, and whole fresh fish from the sea. Since she can 't drive, Mrs. Sen must rely on her husband to take her to the fish market, but he is busy and resentful of her persistent requests. Once, she and Eliot take a bus instead, and on the way back, a passenger complains to the bus driver about the smelly bag Mrs. Sen carries in her lap. Through Eliot, we are able to feel compassion for Mrs. Sen, with "her odor of mothballs and cumin," her fear and frustration learning to drive, her attempts to connect with Eliot 's mother. She always insisted that his mother come sit in the living room and have some food she 's prepared. "His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen 's concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. 'It 's delicious, ' she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn 't like the tastes; she 'd told him so once in the car."In "A Temporary Matter," a young couple, whose marriage is at an impasse, receives a notice from the power company explaining that their neighborhood will be without power one hour each evening, at eight, for the next five days. On the first evening, they sit down to a candlelit dinner, their first meal together in months, Shukumar, the husband, tells us. He makes an effort, putting out embroidered place mats and special wineglasses. While he 's making these preparations, we learn that they had a baby who 'd died at birth. Shoba, his wife, used to be very capable and organized. She paid bills on time, and was always prepared for surprises. Now she was distracted, her clothes left lying around the house. Their responses to grief are opposite: as Shoba stays away, working late, burying herself in work even at home, Shukumar becomes a hermit, and cannot focus on his work at all. During dinner, Shoba proposes a game she used to play with relatives during power outages in India, in which each person takes a turn sharing something with the others. She suggests they tell each other something they 've never told before. She tells Shukumar that she 'd looked in his address book when they were first dating, to see if he 'd written her in. Shukumar reveals that he 'd forgotten to tip the waiter on their first date, and had had to return to the restaurant, in another town, the next day.What ensues is a series of disclosures exchanged between Shukumar and Shoba during the dark hour, revealing "the little ways they 'd hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves."Although Shukumar is wary of this game at first, he begins to look forward to their meals and this exchange with anticipation. "Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again." Shukumar becomes hopeful, seeing this as the beginning of the restoration of their relationship. On the fourth night, they make love.But Shukumar has misunderstood the point of Shoba 's game. For during this time, when he thinks they are growing closer, when it seems they might survive their grief after all, Shukumar learns through Shoba 's final admission that she has been planning to move out. She returns home on the fifth night to announce that she has signed a lease. "All this time she 'd been looking for an apartment, testing the water pressure, asking a Realtor if heat and hot water were included in the rent. It sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened."Shukumar reveals to us that Shoba 's one consolation was that they did not know the sex of their baby. She believed keeping that information a mystery lessened the blow somehow, the only thing she 'd ever wanted to remain a surprise. However, unbeknownst to Shoba, Shukumar had held the baby in the hospital before the doctor took it away, and he knew it had been a boy. Realizing they 've reached an impasse, Shukumar makes this his final confession to Shoba. "A Temporary Matter" is the most moving of the nine tales in Lahiri 's collection. It is so tenderly written that by the end, we feel sorrow for both Shoba and Shukumar, for what they shared and lost, "for the things they now knew."
Interpreter of Maladies



Jo-Ann Stubbings The Age
April 19, 2010

One of the intriguing aspects of the short stories in Interpreter of Maladies is Jhumpa Lahiri 's ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. Chopping vegetables to make a soup, unpacking documents from a briefcase, a flimsy dress slipping off a coathanger become unlikely fascinations in the hands of this elegant writer.
Unlike fellow Indian writer Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, Lahiri shies away from linguistic tricks, keeping her writing simple, tight and gently humorous. What pushes forward these stories based on themes of displacement, loneliness, alienation, cultural differences, unfulfilment, yearning, nostalgia and fantasy is the filmic technique Lahiri employs. Like an eastern Alfred Hitchcock, Lahiri zooms in on the small to accentuate the large in each story.
Perspective is an important technique and in this short collection we are treated to a range of narrators or characters through whom each story is told. There is the jaded husband in A Temporary Matter, the 10-year-old girl in When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine, the taxi driver in Interpreter of Maladies, the mistress in Sexy, the neighbour in A Real Durwan and the young boy in Mrs Sen 's.
In most cases the stories are told through the eyes of the character-observer, rather than first-person narrator, watching and reacting to others in the ' 'scene ' ' and giving a personal version of events. From this technique Lahiri plays with the idea that everyone is an observer, everyone indulges in mind talk, and everyone is being observed.
Throughout A Temporary Matter the husband reflects on the changes in his wife after the death of their baby. Again his observations have a cinematic quality, almost reading like stage directions: ' 'Shukumar moved her satchel and her sneakers to the side of the fridge. She wasn 't this way before. She used to put her coat on a hanger, her sneakers in the closet, and she paid bills as soon as they came. But now she treated the house as if it were a hotel. ' '
In Interpreter of Maladies, Indian taxi-driver Mr Kapasi closely observes the family dynamics of the Das family, privately contrasting their adopted American ways with his own.
These private observations have the effect of drawing the reader closer to the action and it is no surprise that such introspection is complemented by mainly closed, sometimes claustrophobic, environments in each story - flats, apartments and in Mr Kapasi 's case, the taxi. The themes of loneliness and isolation are effectively underscored.
Lahiri reserves for one character in each story - not necessarily a major character - a minutely detailed physical description that occasionally verges on a costume designer 's brief. Mr Kapasi 's summing up of Mrs Das seems a little unlikely for a cab driver-interpreter: ' 'He observed her. She wore a red-and-white-checkered skirt that stopped above her knees, slip-on shoes with a square wooden heel, and a close-fitting blouse styled like a man 's undershirt. The blouse was decorated at chest level with a calico applique in the shape of a strawberry. ' '
More convincing - and imaginative - is the narrator 's description of Mrs Croft 's daughter in The Third and Final Continent: ' 'The backs of her legs were mapped with dark blue veins, and her upper arms sagged like the flesh of a roasted eggplant. ' '
The focus on one object or a set of objects is a major technique employed by Lahiri. There are the candles in A Temporary Matter, the rice nibbles in Interpreter of Maladies, the lollies and the pumpkin in When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine, the wash basin in A Real Durwan, the blade in Mrs Sen 's, the piano stool in The Third and Final Continent, and the set of religious curios in the ironically titled This Blessed House.
These objects symbolise tensions within each story, and become their anchor or recurring ' 'musical note ' '. The rice nibbles Mrs Das feeds on and refuses to share with her family are offered to Mr Kapasi only when she confides in him. When Mr Kapasi fails to ' 'interpret her malady ' ', Mrs Das storms off, unwittingly scattering the puffed rice along the track. This attracts the monkeys who end up attacking the son - the source of her ' 'sinful ' ' confession - whom she ultimately cares for.
The blade Mrs Sen so cleverly wields when peeling her vegetables, a skill young Eliot admires, symbolises the ultimate severing of ties the reader is led to anticipate. Mrs Sen loses her lifeline in an isolated world; Eliot loses his experience of a loving Indian mother figure.
Contrasts are another favourite technique, used particularly effectively to define personal relationships and on a broader scale the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. Twinkle and Sanjeev (even their names are at odds) represent the most yawning marital gulf. Twinkle 's free spirit and Sanjeev 's fastidiousness make for excruciating yet humorous reading: ' 'He stood watching her as she left the room, with her poster and her cigarette; a few ashes had fallen to the floor where she 'd been standing. He bent down, pinched them between his fingers, and deposited them in his cupped palm. The tender fourth movement, the adagietto, began ... He heard the toilet flush. 'By the way, ' Twinkle hollered, 'if you want to impress people, I wouldn 't play this music. It 's putting me to sleep. ' ' ' The Christian ornaments that Twinkle discovers in their new home and treats as adorable trinkets are not a criticism of the Christian faith in the face of Hinduism but a reflection of Twinkle 's simple joie de vivre. In this story, Lahiri 's ' 'objects ' ' move beyond symbols to become major players in the plot.
Flights of fancy are typical of many characters, anticipation of what might be, an effective tension builder. Clearly, the greater the fantasy, the greater the fall. InThe Treatment of Bibi Haldar the unfortunate Bibi fantasises about becoming a bride. In Sexy Miranda fantasises about Dev leaving his wife and living with her. The bridal dress and the cocktail dress, both unworn, respectively denote the characters ' broken dreams. Mrs Sen 's empty new life in a new country is similarly reflected in the unused saris that hang in her wardrobe.
All is not hopeless, however, and Lahiri reserves her most optimistic story - the coming together of two cultures and fulfilment in the new country - for the last in the collection. The narrator summarises how the extraordinary is born of the ordinary: ' 'Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. ' '
Dr Jo-Ann Stubbings is a freelance writer-editor and director of language consultancy Language Australis.
Further readingsA Flag on the Island by V. S. NaipaulThe God of Small Things by Arundhati RoyContemporary Indian Short Stories in English by Shiv K. KumarHow to Write Short Stories by Ring W. Lardner

 http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/039592720X.asp July 11, 1999
Subcontinental Drift

Most of the characters in these stories move between India and the United States.

Related Link
 First Chapter: 'Interpreter of Maladies '

By CALEB CRAIN marriage is easy to start. Fate, in the form of friends, relatives or lust, arranges a match. But after the wedding, how do you stay engaged? Books are easy to start, too, and they pose a similar challenge. No marriage is as arbitrary and accidental as one between a writer and a reader, set up by a brief infatuation in a bookstore or the enthusiasm of a third party. Perhaps because of this congruence, ill-advised marriages have been one of fiction 's most fertile subjects, ever since Squire B. abducted Pamela.
Samuel Richardson 's latest heir is Jhumpa Lahiri. Her debut collection of short stories, ' 'Interpreter of Maladies, ' ' features marriages that have been arranged, rushed into, betrayed, invaded and exhausted. Her subject is not love 's failure, however, but the opportunity that an artful spouse (like an artful writer) can make of failure -- the rebirth possible in a relationship when you discover how little of the other person you know. In Lahiri 's sympathetic tales, the pang of disappointment turns into a sudden hunger to know more.
It is a hunger the reader will share, because Lahiri 's characters are charmers. Only a heart of stone would not go out to Mrs. Sen, for example. The 30-year-old wife of a mathematics professor, Mrs. Sen baby-sits and dices vegetables in gorgeous saris, the part in her hair properly powdered with vermilion. She is a formal, precise, modest woman, unsettled by only one thing: her unruly passion for fresh fish. Unfortunately, she does not know how to drive, and her husband is too busy to chauffeur her to market. ' 'It is very frustrating, ' ' Mrs. Sen explains. Lahiri ingeniously finds a story about the ferocity of desire in what this indefatigable wife will do for the sake of halibut. ' 'Power, ' ' Emerson once wrote, ' 'resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state. ' ' Like Mrs. Sen, most of Lahiri 's characters move between the Indian subcontinent and the United States. They date, vacation, emigrate and work across cultural and national borders. In the parallax of this double perspective, a shattered jack-o '-lantern may obscure a child 's understanding of, say, Bangladesh 's war for independence. Obscure, but not erase: Lahiri 's stories are rendered more powerful by the sense of cultural transition and loss. ' 'Everything is there, ' ' Mrs. Sen says of India, but her story begins with the fact that she herself no longer is. Lahiri 's Indian-Americans struggle for dignity out of their element, like ornate shells left behind by the tide -- still lacquered and colored with the wealth of the sea, incongruous on a beach of democratic sand where the only decorations are patterns of drift.
As is natural for a young writer, Lahiri spends some of her time exploring the terrain staked out by her literary precursors. Like Carver, she writes about a young couple who have fallen out of love and are playing a bittersweet game amid the detritus of their life together. Like Hemingway, she writes about a tour guide who has more heart than the bourgeois couple who hire him; he is seduced by the wife 's glamour and then appalled by her cruelty. Like Isherwood, she writes about an earnest young man studying his landlady, whose calcified habits at first unnerve him and then draw out his tenderness. But none of her stories are apprentice work. Lahiri revises these scenarios with unexpected twists, and to each she brings her distinctive insight into the ways that human affections both sustain and defy the cultural forms that try to enclose them.
My favorite in the collection is ' 'This Blessed House. ' ' The star of the story is Twinkle, a lackadaisical 27-year-old. An ambitious corporate vice president named Sanjeev has recently, rashly married her, because they both liked P. G. Wodehouse, they both disliked sitar music and Sanjeev was lonely. As her new husband soon learns, Twinkle cooks without recipes, leaves her undergarments on the floor when she gets into bed and feels no hurry to unpack the boxes in their new home. Her state of mind is ' 'content yet curious, ' ' which drives the methodical Sanjeev nuts.
Serious trouble starts when Twinkle discovers a white porcelain Christ left behind by the previous tenants. Twinkle is charmed; Sanjeev, dismissive. The husband and wife are ' 'good little Hindus, ' ' as Twinkle teasingly concedes, and Sanjeev hopes she will get rid of it. Sanjeev underestimates the tenacity of his wife 's whim. He is also unaware that in the religious tchotchke department, their new home is a minefield. Twinkle 's discoveries of St. Francis postcards and Noah 's ark light-switch plates multiply into a treasure hunt. Fearing for the dignity of his home, Sanjeev finally threatens to dispose of a plaster Virgin Mary on their front lawn by force.
But ever since Pamela wound Squire B. around her little finger, force has been no match for sentiment, however defenseless sentiment may seem. During the showdown, Twinkle wears a bright blue facial mask while soaking in the bathtub. ' 'I hate you, ' ' she tells her husband. Nonetheless, he insists on his threat, cruelly, until he notices that ' 'some of the water dripping down her hard blue face was tears. ' ' Lahiri is not out to convert Hindus here, nor is she indulging in sarcasm at the expense of sincere belief. But not even religion is sacred to her writerly interest in the power of a childlike sympathy, going where it ought not go. Blue-faced Twinkle has become the Madonna statuette that she is so taken with. She has breathed her own life into the Christian icon 's plaster, not deliberately and not ironically but humanely, and she demands that her husband respond to this achievement with mercy and respect.
Lahiri 's achievement is something like Twinkle 's. She breathes unpredictable life into the page, and the reader finishes each story reseduced, wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters. There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics. To use the word Sanjeev eventually applies to Twinkle, Lahiri is ' 'wow. ' '

Caleb Crain writes regularly for Lingua Franca and is at work on a book about early American friendships. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/11/reviews/990711.11craint.html Tuesday, Jul 27, 1999 09:00 PDT
"Interpreter of Maladies"
In a stunning debut collection about Asians in America, an author casts an empathetic eye on assimilation.
By Charles Taylor
The impulse that courses through Jhumpa Lahiri 's beautiful debut, "Interpreter of Maladies," might be called the ardor of empathy. In the 10 stories that make up this collection, Lahiri displays a steadfast curiosity about human behavior and a healthy respect for its mystery. Shrewd but not judgmental, she has the grace to make us feel close even to foolishness and timidity and naiveti and the wit to make actions logical without being predictable. (The most hapless of her characters, the maltreated shopgirl in "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" who dreams hopelessly of winning a husband, surprises us with her unexpected tenacity.)
The best humanist artists have the gift of erasing boundaries between character and audience and the concomitant power to wound us by making us share the characters ' tragedies. If Lahiri hasn 't yet fully achieved that kind of power, it may be because she hasn 't yet placed her characters in the direst circumstances. But you can 't read "Interpreter of Maladies" without imagining that someday soon she 'll write something that scars us with its beauty of perception.
Her characters are Asians, many of whom have come to America for a job or for school (she 's note-perfect on the academic life of Boston and its suburbs) or because of a political crisis. As you might expect, the way people assimilate is a major theme. In one story, a young girl can 't believe that her American school teaches nothing about the Pakistani civil war that preoccupies her parents and the gentleman who joins them every night for dinner. But Lahiri doesn 't write jeremaids about the loss of cultural identity; her characters are both relieved when they adjust to their new world and regretful at the separation from their original cultures.
Food in these stories is a talisman, a reassuring bit of the homeland to cling to. Spices and flavors waft through like themes in a piece of music:
From the kitchen my mother brought forth the succession of dishes: lentils with fried onions, green beans with coconut, fish cooked with raisins in a yogurt sauce. I followed with the water glasses, and the plate of lemon wedges, and the chili peppers, purchased on monthly trips to Chinatown and stored by the pound in the freezer, which they liked to snap open and crush into their food.
The whole fresh fish that the young woman in "Mrs. Sen 's" purchases almost daily from a seafood store is the only recognizable signpost left in her life. The connection Lahiri makes between that lonely woman and the friendless American boy she cares for may be too explicit, but it 's never calculated or sentimental.
If I haven 't said anything about Lahiri 's style, that 's because the identification she establishes between her readers and her characters requires the kind of simple, direct prose whose refinement is invisible. In the last words of the collection 's last story, "As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." Lahiri 's gift is to invest the ordinary with an emotion that makes us feel we 're seeing it anew. What is beyond her empathy is not yet apparent.

 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/07/27/lahiri/index.html Jhumpa Lahiri

 Biography
Growing up in America under the supervision of a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, it is no surprise that Jhumpa Lahiri puts so large an emphasis on the 'stories of Indians in what for them is a strange land ' (Rothstein 1). Publishing her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999, Lahiri has become a quick international success and an award-winning author. Jhumpa Lahiri was born in 1967 in London but raised in South Kingstown, RI by her father, a librarian, and her mother, a teacher. The influence of frequent childhood visits to India and parents who are still a part of the Indian world despite their immigration to America thirty years ago shaped her book (People Weekly 138). Lahiri 's role as a writer developed in grade school when she began to '[write] 10-page "novels" ' during recess with her friends ' (Patel 80). Later in her school years, Lahiri busied herself with the school newspaper. After graduating from Barnard college, Lahiri continued at Boston University to obtain her masters degrees in English, comparative literature, and creative writing and later her PhD in Renaissance studies. Following the PhD program, she did a two-year fellowship at Provincetown 's Fine Arts Work Center. During completion of her doctorate thesis in 1997, she worked for Boston magazine as an intern and was given little trust 'as a real writer ' (Flynn 173). The joke seems to be on Boston magazine and any others who doubted her after the release of her first book which began to receive awards almost immediately following publishing. Among the first received in 1999 was the PEN/Hemingway award for the best fiction debut of the year. The title story, 'Interpreter of Maladies, ' was chosen for the O Henry Award for best American short stories. Lahiri was a recipient of the Transatlantic Review award from Henfield foundation and the fiction prize from Louisville Review. The New Yorker has published three of her stories and named her as 'one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40. ' The greatest tribute to her talent thus far has been the award for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She is the first Indian woman to receive this award.
In January of 2001, Lahiri married the deputy editor of Time Latin America, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. The author arranged a traditional Bengali wedding in the Singhi Palace in Calcutta, a place she has never considered 'a foreign city [since she] has been coming [there] since [she] was two years old ' ("Oh Calcutta!" 1). Jhumpa Lahiri continues work on a second book but said that she could not comment because 'it 's only after [she] finishes something that [she] can actually describe it in words ' (Aguiar 3).

Interpreter of Maladies
The stories of Jhumpa Lahiri 's first book whisper and scream traces of India through the details of the characters who become fictional testaments to the 'complex and conflicted world of Indian immigrants in the United States ' (Rothstein 1). The title for the book came to Lahiri years before she actually began to formulate it when she ran into 'a friend who acted as a Russian liaison in a Boston doctor 's office ' (Flynn 100). She says that the phrase, 'Interpreter of Maladies, ' was 'the closest [she has] ever come to poetry ' (Flynn 100). Her characters often exist simultaneously in two cultures: the American reality and the sphere of Indian tradition (Aguiar 2).


Jhumpa Lahiri says that her experiences in Calcutta 'nourished [her] interest in seeing things from different points of view ' (Patel 80). Such ability is what allows Lahiri to write from the perspectives of such seemingly different characters. Her points of perspective range from a cab driver/tour guide in 'Interpreter of Maladies ' to that of an adult recounting her child-like fascination with a recurring visitor in 'When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine. ' Lahiri uses character details in order to make assertions about the sense of isolation that governs each story 's events. 'Mrs. Sen 's ' speaks to the many isolated immigrant women of not just Indian descent, but of universal origin, through its poignant depiction of a woman trying to assimilate but unwilling to let go of the aspects of her life in India that 'do not fit. ' In the United States, Mrs. Sen baby-sits in her home wearing the intricate saris brought carefully from India which have no remaining purpose. It is the trips to the fish market and letters from India that keep her feeling whole while illuminating her very emptiness. The reaction of Indian audiences to readings by Lahiri have been concerned with ideas of identity and representation, issues surely experienced by all immigrants trying to adapt to a new culture. Lahiri said in an interview with Newsweek that the main character in 'Mrs. Sen 's ' found its basis in her mother as a babysitter of American children.
One particular story whose setting is not primarily a US Northeastern coastal city is 'The Treatment of Bibi Haldar. ' An epileptic woman in Calcutta with few relations remains in the grudging care of her cousin and his wife while attempting to find herself a husband and a cure for her ailments. While it remains consistent with Lahiri 's overall theme of isolation, she says herself that 'the story is basically about the town 's involvement ' in Bibi 's search for a husband and her own sense of happiness (Aguiar 2). Community solidifies the identity of Bibi Haldar because she has no real family. Through the communal device, Lahiri identifies the accentuated isolation of this character in her native city even when surrounded by the same people that have always surrounded her.
The final story of Lahiri 's first collection of nine, 'The Third and Final Continent, ' addresses the realities of arranged marriages and the long process of assimilation into American culture from an Indian perspective. Perhaps modeled upon aspects of her parents ' lives in the United States, Lahiri 's presents a first person account of an Indian man arranging for the arrival of his new bride as he lives under the roof of an aged American landlady. The vivid differences between his bachelor life in a room in this woman 's house and the journey that he takes while learning who his bride is boldly comments on the cultural differences and similarities in the two cultures. Senses of isolation and a coming together in order to survive are evident in both of these relationships. At the end of the story, Lahiri introduces the idea of loss of cultural identification through passing generations by mentioning the college aged child of the couple. They bring him home to 'eat rice with his hands and speak Bengali ' which are 'things [they] sometimes worry he will no longer do after [they] die ' (Lahiri 197). Lahiri presents a couple whose only remaining connection with the country of their origin has a definitive death with their own end because the assimilation of their son into American culture leaves no room for their own cultural orientation.

Selected Reviews of Interpreter of Maladies
Salon Books: Charles Taylor
An interesting exploration of some thematic and stylistic elements of Lahiri 's first book. Taylor explores the author 's ability to 'erase boundaries between character and audience ' as it relates to her purposely simplistic stylistic mechanisms. By pointing out the fact that Lahiri 's characters are not at a loss for cultural identity but rather 'relieved when they adjust to their new world and regretful at the separation from their original cultures, ' Taylor names assimilation as a major theme. Finally, the review correctly highlights the imagery and abundant references to rich Indian food as a marked difference between the American culture to be embraced and the Indian culture that must be savored.
New York Times Book Review: 'Subcontinental Drift ': Caleb Crain
Mainly focusing on the power of relationships and the personal connections of Lahiri 's diverse characters, Caleb Crain says that the author 'breathes unpredictable life into [her pages leaving] the reader…wishing he could spend a whole novel with its characters ' (Crain 12). The review explores how characters like Twinkle in 'This Blessed House ' obtain something worthwhile out of relationships seemingly doomed to failure. Crain concentrates on Lahiri 's presentation of the 'force ' of relationships rather than their 'sentiment ' as he asserts that not even religion is as powerful as Twinkle 's tears of protest. It is Lahiri 's ability to create characters with whom the audience can relate that makes the book magic. Lahiri uses character description in her stories in such a fashion that she is able to effectively and passively comment upon human relationships.
New York Times: 'Liking America, but Longing for India ': Michiko Kakutani
Kakutani effectively draws upon not only the theme of cultural displacement, but also the disconnected feelings that exist within all the relationships in every story. Presenting several examples of the stories of Interpreter of Maladies illustrates the manners in which Lahiri 's characters struggle to relate to one another, themselves, and their changing positions in life. The themes of loss and isolation are evident in this review as Kakutani describes the methods through which Lahiri looks at people 's dualistically structured lives in two countries, primarily India and the United States. The review does present some criticism of the author 's use of coincidence as a crutch to explain occurrences in her characters ' lives but says that this small failing does not take away from her ability to present and handle her intricate web of characters.
The Village Voice: Megan O 'Grady
Although brief, this review focuses on the details of the book as they relate to people who feel like foreigners 'at home or abroad. ' O 'Grady focuses on Lahiri 's ability to employ subtlety as a tactic for interpreting human relationships in order to avoid being overbearing or overly moralistic. She presents evidence for the feelings of disorientation associated with immigration through details that Lahiri again subtly employs in order to emphasize the cross-cultural differences that become telling factors in plot development. In the realm of relationships, O 'Grady focuses on marriage. It is a recurrent domain in Lahiri 's stories and so therefore is used to convey information again about dislocation and isolation in a new culture or lifestyle.

Works Cited
Aguiar, Arun. "One on One With Jhumpa Lahiri." Pifmagazine.com. Interview. 28 July 1999. Pifmagazine. 8 Oct. 2001 .
"Breakthroughs 2000: Jhumpa Lahiri, author." People Weekly 25 Dec. 2000-1 Jan. 2001: 138.
Crain, Caleb. "Subcontinental Drift." New York Times Book Review 11 July 1999: 104.28 : 11-12.
Donahue, Deirdre. "Painfully Beautiful Passages from India." USA Today 12 Aug. 1999: 7D.
Flynn, Gillian. "Passage to India." Entertainment Weekly 28 Apr/5 May 2000: 100.
Flynn, Sean. "Women We Love: Jhumpa Lahiri." Esquire Oct. 2000: 172-173.
Kakutani, Michiko. "Liking America, but Longing for India." New York Times 6 Aug. 1999: E2: 48.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
O 'Grady, Megan. "Interpreter of Maladies." The Village Voice 44.24 (1999) : 104.
"Oh Calcutta! The ONLY place to wed." Asiaweek 26 Jan. 2001: 1.
Patel, Vibhuti. "The Maladies of Belonging." Newsweek 20 Sep. 1999: 80.
Rediff.com. News report. 11 April 2000. Rediff.com. 8 Oct. 2001 .
Rothstein, Mervyn. "India 's Post-Rushdie Generation." New York Times 3 July 2000: E1.
Steinberg, Sybil S. "Interpreter of Maladies." Publishers Weekly 19 Apr. 1999: 59-60.
Taylor, Charles. "Interpreter of Maladies." Salon Books. 27 July 1999. .
Recent Publication:
The Namesake. Houghton Mifflin, 2003

Reason and Respect
Volume 3, Issue 1 2007 Article 9
WINTER 2007
Interpreter of maladies: a commonplace for cultures
Cora Tetreault__Roger Williams University
Copyright c 2007 by the authors. Reason and Respect is produced by The Berkeley Electronic
Press (bepress). http://docs.rwu.edu/rr
Interpreter of maladies: a commonplace for cultures
Cora Tetreault

Abstract
Imagine living a double life – being pulled in all different directions, between your past and your present, your family and your friends, your two different cultures. Jhumpa Lahiri knows that double existence and shows individuals living it in her book Interpreter of Maladies. Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories that focuses on Indian and American cultures and the people who get caught between the two.

Interpreter of Maladies: A Commonplace for Cultures by Cora Tetreault
Imagine living a double life-being pulled in all different directions, between your past and your present, your family and your friends, your two different cultures. ]humpa Lahiri knows that double exisrence and shows individuals living it in her book Interpreter of Maladies. Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories that focuses on Indian and American cultures and the people caught between the two. Lahiri herself is an Indian-American; her parents emigrated from India to America themselves, and she therefore is able to draw from her own personal experiences to make her stories truly come to life. She stated in an article for Newsweek that "I felt neither Indian nor American. Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen."

Lahiri is the epitome of a civically engaged storyteller who uses her writing as a form of service to society. Civic engagement itself is a person 's attempt to better his or her community through providing a service to that community. Although some may argue that telling a story isn 't civic engagement because it lacks service, I tend to disagree. If a storyteller creates a story in order to better society, the act of writing that story is in fact a service because the writer has to put work into producing it. It is evident that ]humpa Lahiri is a civically engaged storyteller because she wrote Interpreter of Maladies to show readers that alrhough people come from different cultures, we are all still human beings.

Lahiri uses commonplaces in her stories to show the links that bind the human race together as one collective community. As defined by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, a commonplace is any statement or bit of knowledge that is commonly shared among a given audience or a community (430). Through commonplaces, Lahiri is able to show that different cultures have similarities despite all of their differences. For instance, Lahiri puts characters in emotional situations where they experience pain. Readers are able to identify and thus sympathize with these situations-therefore, a commonplace is made between ethnic communities. The story "A Temporary Matter" is an example of an emotional commonplace. The story focuses on an Indian couple living in America, whose marriage is failing due to the loss of their child at birth. The first few pages of the story describe the couple 's relationship before and after they lose 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. Shukumar, the husband, attempts to save his marriage, but it is unsalvageable. In the end of the story, Shoba, Shukumar 's wife, decides to leave Shukumar, and it breaks his heart.

Sympathizing with this story is easy because it deals with the hardships of marriage, the pain of losing a child, and the issue of divorce, which are all common emotional situations that humans face. Divorce is especially connected to American culture: in America the divorce rate is about 50% compared to the divorce rate in India of approximately 1%, which are quite different statistics ("Divorce Rate"). I found it interesting that Lahiri would have her characters divorce when it is such an uncommon Indian practice. I believe she chose for the couple to divorce to show that people are naturally influenced by the customs that surround them, regardless of the culture in which they were raised. One magazine, Village lIoice,describes Lahiri 's writing as "Subtle scenic tales about people trying to reconcile the traditions they 've inherited with barRing new cultures" (opening page Interpreter). The Indian couple reacts in a way more common to an American couple because they reside in America. Making this connection, Lahiri shows the conflict of deciding between the culture in which one is raised and the culture in which one lives in. Immigrants from any country can identify with such inner struggles between past and present, making cultural conflict another commonplace found in Interpreter of Maladies.

Often, instead of choosing one culture over the other, people will try to incorporate ethnic traditions into their new community. In Lahiri 's story "Mrs. Sen 's" eating and preparing Indian food is what keeps the characters connected daily with their homeland ofIndia. Mrs. Sen, an elderly Indian immigrant, has only one daily link to India while living in America, and that is to cook. She dedicates hours each day to chopping vegetables and creating elaborate Indian feasts for just her husband and herself for dinner. She even decides to get her driver 's license in America just so she is able to drive to the fish market to get the specific type of fish she needs for her recipes. Making those traditional recipes allows her to balance the two cultures she is living and to feel closer to home.

Since recipes and traditions involving food are often passed down in families throughout the years, it is not uncommon for people to celebrate their cultures through preparing their own ethnic dishes. Using food as a replacement for home and family isn 't limited to Lahiri 's writing, and in fact can be seen as a commonplace in many cultures in real life. My boyfriend 's parents, for example, immigrated to America from Portugal about twenty-five years ago and have very much adopted an American way of life. They speak fluent English, wear clothing found at local malls, watch the New England Patriots religiously, and follow American politics. Although the Camara family has become Americanized in so many ways, Mrs. Camara refuses to cook anything but Portuguese food and insists on having a large Sunday dinner every week. It is the link to her culture and family that she does not want to give up, like Mrs. Sen. Every night of the week Mrs. Camara prepares a traditional Portuguese meal from scratch and every Sunday prepares a Portuguese feast for her family. She has even taken the initiative to teach my boyfriend to make the cultural meals himself, because it is important for her American children to have that connection with their heritage as well.

Lahiri states that she believes being a writer makes her an emotional interpreter, and the heart of Interpreter of Maladies is "the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves" ("A Conversation"). I tend to disagree. I don 't believe that ]humpa Lahiri is an emotional interpreter because she is a writer. I believe she is an emotional interpreter because she is able to connect human beings from all walks of life under one culture by finding the commonplaces that nestle in between them all. If civic engagement is the act of bettering one 's community through service, then ]humpa Lahiri 's Interpreter of Maladies, is a civically engaged text because it provides readers with a deeper understanding of the commonplaces that connect the human race.

"A Conversation with ]humpa Lahiri." HoughtonMifflinBooks.com. 2006. Houghton Mifflin. 6 Dec. 2006
.
Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. 3rd ed.,
Boston: Pearson, 2004.
"Divorce Rate in India." DivorceRate.org. 6 Dec. 2006 http://www.divorcerate.org/divorce-rate-in-india.html.
Lahiri, ]humpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Lahiri, ]humpa. "My Two Lives". Newsweek World News. 6 Mar. 2006. Newsweek. 8 Dee.



Partition of India
August 15, 1947 was a very significant day for Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and many others.
It marked the day of the British partition of India into a Muslim-controlled Pakistan and a Hindu-dominated India. India won its freedom from colonial rule, ending nearly 200 years of British rule. Many different events lead to the final decision of the partition.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the British gained full power over India. Bitterness towards the British developed as Hindus and Muslims were denied jobs and high positions in the government and army.
The Indian National Congress (INC), lead by Jawaharlal Nehru, was created by the end of the 19th Century. Indians demanded equal opportunity and freedom from colonial rule.
The British wanted to make the Muslims their allies in order to counter the perceived threat of the Hindu educated class. The British feared the potential threat from the Muslims, since the Muslims were the former rulers of the subcontinent and ruled India for over 300 years under the Mughal Empire. In order to win them over to their side, the British helped support the All-India Muslim Conference. They instilled the notion that the Muslims were a separate political entity and by the beginning of the 1900s they gave the Muslims separate electorates in local government all over British India. Thus the idea of the separateness of Muslims in India was built into the electoral process of India.Muslim leaders led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah felt that the Hindus, by dominating the Indian National Congress, were beginning to dictate decision-making in British India. The Muslims felt they should have their own state in order to protect their Islamic heritage. So in 1940, the All-India Muslim League declared its desire for a separate state. Hindus began to feel uncomfortable about being a minority in a majority Muslim State. Relations between the two groups began to deteriorate. On August 16, 1946, in its demand for a separate Pakistan, the Muslim League called for "Direct Action" day. Direct Action day witnessed thousands of Muslims and Hindus fighting in mixed areas. Calcutta became the scene of the most brutal violence in what became known as the great 'Calcutta killings '. Within 72 hours, more than 5,000 people died, at least 20,000 were seriously injured, and a hundred thousand residents of Calcutta City alone were left homeless. As Jinnah remarked "If not a divided India, then a destroyed India". More violence followed as the rioting spread to the rural areas of Punjab and the Ganges valley.British and Indian leaders such as Nehru and Valla Bhai Patel decided that the only solution to the conflict was a partition. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, was given full power by one of the British leaders to negotiate any agreement he could to help come to some sort of conclusion. Mountbatten saw that the only way for the British to withdraw was to transfer power to two governments, not one. With this in mind, he pressured and finally persuaded congress to accept the idea of a divided India. He made the announcement of the partition and declared the boundaries, which would divide India into two. His plan was to create two separate wings in the areas where the Muslims were the most numerous, in northwest India and in eastern Bengal which together would form Jinnah 's Pakistan. This meant that both Bengal and Punjab would be divided between India and Pakistan.Thus, August 14, 1947 saw the birth of the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan- a Muslim nation separate from the predominantly Hindu India. At midnight the next day (on Aug. 15, 1947) India won its freedom from colonial rule. Pakistan was made up of two regions: West Pakistan on the Indus River plain, and East Pakistan, which is now known as Bangladesh.In a speech to the nation in the night of August 14th, Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India said "A moment comes which comes but rarely in history, when we step from the old to the new, when a age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed, finds utterance."
For Indians, the partition was the logical outcome of Britain 's policies of dividing and ruling. For Pakistanis it was their founding moment. It was the outcome of the struggle of Muslims to have their separate identity recognized by both the British and the Indian nationalist movement. For the British, the partition was a necessity because they could no longer afford the cost of maintaining colonial rule. It was unquestionably a very significant event for many.The partition can also be seen from a different perspective; on a more personal level. "Cracking India", a novel written by Bapsi Sidhwa, is a fascinating account of the violent racial-religious clashes created by the partition of India and Pakistan as seen through the eyes of Lenny, an eight-year-old girl. The experiences, hopes and fears of Lenny provide an intense image of the period. Lenny is growing up rich in pre-partition Lahore (the Punjabi city that saw some of the bloodiest pogroms) in 1947. This story is unique in that it not only comes from the point of view of a child, but also from within an impartial community. Lenny, belonged to the minority sect of 'Parsees ', who are new there and emigrated from Persia during the 9th century in order to escape religious persecution following the rise of Islam. The Parsees were not allied with any particular ethnic group during Partition and thus tried to remain neutral among the warring Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. Being neither Hindu nor Muslim, the Parsees were able to keep out of the sectarian divide and stayed on the sidelines; they were not targeted by the mobs nor forced leave. The story begins with the British preparing to quit their empire in India and the process of splitting British India into Independent India and Pakistan is about to begin. Lenny 's family is well off and maintains friendly relations with various religious groups. But later, these relationships begin to turn sour. Everyday jokes and innocent games between friends of different ethnic and religious backgrounds are replaced by bickering and harsh remarks over religion and family bloodlines. The serious killing begins. Lenny and her nanny, Ayah see Sikhs slaughtering Muslims, Hindus butchering Muslims and Muslims burning Hindus alive. Men betray one another. Rising tensions are inflamed with reports of murder, rape, and rioting mobs wrecking homes, shops and temples and mosques. "One day everybody is themselves," Lenny observes, "and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols."Ayah (a Hindu), is the kind of woman who is desired by every man. She has two main admirers in this story, one a Hindu (Hasan), and the other a Muslim (Ice Candy Man). Ice Candy Man turns into a madman when Ayah falls in love with Hasan. He becomes one of the many roaming the streets of Lahore with vengeance and murder on their minds. Enraged by jealousy, he leads a group of Muslim rioters to Lenny 's house to demand the removal of all Hindu servants, including Ayah. The servants attempt to protect Ayah, claiming that she has left the house; but trusting the Ice Candy Man, Lenny admits that Ayah is still in the house. The young nanny is dragged off to her death. Lenny 's innocent mistake will haunt her for the rest of her life. This story vividly portrays how the process of partition claimed many lives in the riots. It shows it in an up close and personal level. All in the name of religion and nationalism, people who had lived together in relative harmony for centuries committed mindless acts of violence against each other. It was a tragic experience because over a million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were killed. Twelve million people were forced to move-Hindus to India, and Muslims to Pakistan. Both groups moved because they feared being ruled by leaders of the other faith. If a Hindu, Muslim or Sikh was caught on the wrong side of the dividing lines, they were driven out of their homes. The journey was long and torturous. Many people were forced to leave their possessions or trade them for water. Hunger, thirst and exhaustion killed others. An estimated 75,000 women were raped. The two countries lost many of their most dynamic leaders, such as Gandhi, Jinnah and Allama Iqbal, soon after the partition. Pakistan had to face the separation of Bangladesh in 1971. Even the imposition of an official boundary has not stopped conflict between them. A war between India and Pakistan continues to this day. Boundary issues, left unresolved by the British, have caused two wars and continuing conflict between the two countries. Over the past fifty years, India and Pakistan have been in a state of constant hostility, fighting three wars in 1947-48, 1963 and 1971. In the last decade, they have fought over the possession of Kashmir and the drawing of boundaries in the high Himalayas.
Anjali Gupta October 5, 2000

ESSAY TOPICS ON INTERPRETER OF MALADIES

1. Interpreter of Maladies explores how one culture adapts to living within another. Discuss.

2. Interpreter of Maladies examines the impact of acceptance and rejection on people. Discuss.

3. Lahiri’s stories show the importance of communication in relationships. Discuss

4. The settings of Lahiri’s stories are crucial in helping us understand their key concerns. Do you agree?

5. Interpreter of Maladies shows that all relationships are fraught with difficulties. To what extent do you agree?

6. It is Lahiri’s use of the smallest of details that make her stories so powerful. Do you agree?

7. The strength of this collection lies in Lahiri’s exploration of the daily dramas of everyday life. Discuss.

8. Happy, fulfilled characters are impossible to find in Interpreter of Maladies. Do you agree?

9. Although many of Lahiri’s characters live abroad, their connections with their place of birth cannot be broken. How is this shown in Interpreter of Maladies?

10. Whilst all the characters in the stories carry burdens in their hearts, few are able to find peace within themselves. Discuss.

11. The clash of family values between old culture and the new creates tension between many of the characters. How is this shown in the stories?

12. Jhumpa Lahiri has said; ‘The characters I’m drawn to all face some barrier of communication.’ How are communication barriers explored in the collection?

13. “Tell me the secret. I want to know.”
To what extent do the secrets the characters keep affect their lives?

14. What do Lahiri’s stories suggest is important and valuable to people?

15. “In time she would reveal the disappointment of her marriage, and he his.” The stories present a particularly negative view of marriage. Does your reading of the stories support this view?

16. A character’s identity and sense of belonging is intrinsically linked to their place of origin. To what extent do the stories support this view?

17. To belong is to be happy. How does Lahiri support or contradict this idea in her stories?

18. The truth and essence of a person can never really be known. Discuss.

19. Loneliness and alienation pervade the lives of many characters in these short stories. Do any of the characters find a way out of this misery?

20. “She guessed that he was used to it now, to the sound of a woman crying.” The women in the collection seem to struggle more than the men. Is this how you see the stories?

21. The clash of family values compromises many of the characters ' sense of belonging. Do you agree?

22. The void between the old culture and the new world leaves many characters feeling displaced. Do any of the characters ever solve this dilemma?

23. How does Lahiri show that family tensions are exacerbated when there is a clash of cultural values?

24. Why are a number of the characters in the stories treated as outsiders?

25. “It was hard to believe they were regularly responsible for anything other than themselves.” Many of the parents in the collection seem to focus more on their own needs than those of their children. Do you agree?

26. The stories in Interpreter of Maladies are rich in symbolic meaning. How does Lahiri achieve this?

27. Do the stories in Interpreter of Maladies work as a collection, or are they too distinctly different from each other?

28. Though the general pace of the stories is quite slow, Lahiri builds up a strong sense of anticipation in many of them. How does she achieve this?

29. Why do some characters find contentment in their lives while others remain bewildered by life?

30. The endings of Lahiri’s stories often convey important messages to the reader. What are some of the most important messages?

31. Many of the characters struggle to find love in the stories. Why is love so elusive for them?

32. “He looked at her...a woman not yet thirty...who had already fallen out of love with life.” In what ways does Lahiri give the audience hope that her characters can carry on despite the disappointments they face?

33. Does the short story genre compromise the audience’s capacity to really know the characters in Interpreter of Maladies?

34. “...Mr. Pirzada stopped bringing me candy, and...my mother refused to serve anything other than boiled eggs with rice for dinner.” How does Lahiri use food as a motif to reflect the state of the characters’ lives?

35. In what ways does Lahiri show through her stories that joy can be found in the simple things in life?

36. “They wept together for the things they now knew.” How do Lahiri’s characters show that knowing can change a person’s life irrevocably?

37. Lahiri’s stories show that all people face challenges no matter where they live in the world. To what extent do you agree?

38. How do the individual narrative perspectives of the stories influence the audience’s reading of them?

39. “When I was your age I was without knowing that one day I would be so far. You are wiser than that, Eliot. You already taste the way things must be.” How do the characters in the stories come to terms with the realities they must face?

40. Do the stories end too abruptly to give the audience a satisfying conclusion?

41. In seeking to improve their lives, some of the characters in the stories lose sight of what they truly value. Do you agree?

42. In Interpreter of Maladies the vulnerable characters invariably become scapegoats when life becomes difficult for others. Do you agree?

43. The characters have many different ways of dealing with loss. How is this shown in the stories?

44. It is those who leave their homeland who struggle the most in Interpreter of Maladies. Do you agree?

45. The stories set in India convey more vivid imagery for the audience than those set in America. Discuss.

46. It would seem that many of the children in Lahiri’s stories are forced to grow up more quickly than they should. Why is this the case?

47. Though the plots of the stories are primarily driven by one key event or memory, does this detract from their power to engage the audience?

48. Changing one’s life will always come at some cost. Discuss.

49. Many of the characters in Interpreter of Maladies find personal fulfillment and growth as a result of the adversity they experience. Discuss.

50. Lahiri paints a bleak picture of the lives of Indian women in the modern world. To what extent do you agree?

51. What are the maladies that afflict so many of the characters?

52. “Now he had one [a wife], a pretty one, from a suitably high caste, who would soon have a master’s degree. What was there not to love?”
The couples in arranged marriages are invariably more content than those who marry of their own free will. Do you agree?

SAMPLE ESSAY 1 INTERPRETER OF MALADIES
TOPIC: ‘Families are central in each of the stories in Lahiri’s, Interpreter of Maladies.’ Discuss
The exploration of family and familial relationships is quite often central to each of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories in the Interpreter of Maladies, as the family is seen as such an integral part of the individual’s self discovery process. Each story provides us with a different take on how someone’s behavior can affect their relationship with their family members and vice versa. Lahiri makes a point of delving into the shifting of gender roles within the relationship between husband and wife when conflict arises, as seen in A Temporary Matter’. She also reflects on the repercussions of unfaithfulness in a relationship on the family as a whole in ‘Interpreter of Maladies’, as well as the value of accepting those from other families temporarily into yours in the face of adversity, demonstrated in ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’.
‘A Temporary Matter’ sees marital breakdown and its effects on the family when Shoba gives birth to a stillborn baby. The loss of a child had the impact of causing their household to lapse into disarray, with both Shukamar and Shoba’s relationship becoming about ‘avoiding’ contact with each other and always spending their time on ‘different levels’ of the house; Shukamar in his study and Shoba in front of the TV with her ‘coloured pencils’. Here, Lahiri is exploring just how rapidly relationships can take a turn for the worst, but also on the ability of the family unit to function after such a tragedy. They call themselves ‘family’, yet their relationship has become purely about enduring day to day life, with little interest in the other party’s doings. Also interesting to note is the reversal of traditional gender roles within the family, as a sort of coping mechanism. Whilst Shoba would be content with ‘a bowl of cereal’ for dinner, Shukumar abandons the preconceptions of a man’s role within the family and begins to ‘defrost bags of frozen meats’ bought from the market when their family was still in the process of flourishing. Thus Lahiri’s short story is about the innate instinct we have to protect our ‘family’, no matter how rough the times are, but also how one terrible event like the death of a child can strip a promisingly love-filled family of its substance and ultimately end in its destruction.
Lahiri’s focus also strays to the consequences infidelity has on the family in ‘Interpreter of Maladies’. Mr. and Mrs. Das are part of a modern family; one that from far away would appear normal, but anyone who observes them appears quite confused. Mr. and Mrs. Das play a key role in this story as parents, but not in the traditional sense – Mr. Das is like a ‘larger version’ of his son, quite childlike, and Mrs. Das is often depicted as extremely immature and selfish. Neither seem to fit or adhere to the role of parents, demonstrated in their ‘arguing’ over ‘who should take…Tina to the bathroom’ – it is evident that both have no experience in the area. However, for Mr. Das, his lack of skills are compensated for by his willingness to try, and to participate within the family unit. He is constantly ‘photographing’ the children with his fancy camera, playing with them, caring for them, and in effect he is the glue that holds their family together. The same, however, cannot be said for Mrs. Das. It is her secret of her affair with Raj’s friend that keeps her from fully being able to connect with her husband and children, as she is both plagued by guilt and is bitter towards the reminder Robby poses towards her of her infidelity. In this instance, Lahiri highlights how this guilt can affect the quality of relationships between her and her family, and hence the functioning and well-being of it. Mrs. Das’s indifference towards her children deeply impacts how they behave, evident when Tina pleads with her mother to paint her nails, and Mrs. Das ‘flicks a drop of nail polish on the tip of her fingernail’ and tells her to leave her alone, as she is annoying her. Tina is growing up without a strong mother figure in her life, and this affects her behavior towards others, as she mirrors her mother’s behavior. Also important is Mr. Das’ relationship with Bobby, although he is not his. Here, Lahiri is trying to communicate that family and the parent-child relationship isn’t solely dependent on blood relationship. She contrasts this again with Mrs. Das and Tina who are related, but have little intimacy in their relationship – to outsiders it would not be evident that were mother and daughter. Lahiri does in fact also explore how the realizing of the truth, a wake up call, can also cause the individual to step up to their expected role, in Mrs. Das’ case her maternal role, and breathe life back into relationships. The catalyst in this situation was Mr. Kapasi’s question of whether it was ‘pain’ Mrs. Das felt, or was it ‘guilt’? Immediately after, she jumped back into the family with a fervor and concern for the others as if it had always been that way. Therefore, Lahiri leaves us with the rebuilding of the collective family relationship, and considering the importance of this rebuilding in spite of one’s past behavior or actions. She convinces us that even the weakest of family bonds can be re-strengthened if the individual wishes it.
Lahiri also reflects on one family’s ability to expand itself in order to accommodate those in need in ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’. Lilia and her parents have no blood ties to Mr. Pirzada, and literally find him in a phonebook, searching for Indian surnames in the area, yet they welcome him into their home without question. His own family has been more or less ‘lost’ in the war, and so they invite him to spend his evenings with them. Lilia’s parents and Mr. Pirzada grow so close that the ‘three of them (begin) to function as one person’, demonstrating that it is possible to become like family with a near stranger, when confronted with conflict, a common cause to believe in. Lahiri also focuses on Lilia’s position in the family, one which reflects Indian culture. She is very much treated as a child, contrasting for example the Das children’s dominant ideas in their family, and it is important to note just how attached she becomes to Mr. Pirzada, as well as his daughters and wife, whom she has never even met. Supporting Lahiri’s view on traditional Indian familes is the fact that Mr. Pirzada confuses his children’s names often, symbolic of the fact that family means something different, larger in Bangladesh.
Lahiri’s exploration of family through these three stories has great impact on character development as well as the reader’s ability to connect with them as a family or as individual characters, and so her reflection on many different familial structures and the relationships within them have great importance. It is evident she wishes the reader to reflect on this too.
SAMPLE 2:
TOPIC: ‘Families are central in each of the stories in Lahiri’s, Interpreter of Maladies.’ Discuss
Woven throughout Lahiri’s poignant and potent short stories is the recurring theme of family and all that it encompasses. Whether it be through the traditional conventions of marriage or the importance of children’s legacy, one can clearly see Lahiri’s value driven contention; that her characters place in a family, ultimately defines them. Despite the apparent importance of the family unit; however, Lahiri chooses to highlight inherent problems of this convention, with many of her family based characters often remaining lonely. This central theme of family is explored throughout, venturing into the modern American families of the Das’, Shoba and Shukamar, Twinkle and Sanjeev, as well as the unconventional displaced lives of Mr Pirzada and Boori Ma. Lahiri’s sensitive and humanistic portrayal of characters truly lends itself to the in depth discussion of family she presents in this collection of stories.
Arguably, the most central idea portrayed in this collection is how Lahiri’s characters are shaped and defined by their family and the role they play in their respective families. Recurring throughout, both subtly and more apparently is how one’s confines as a wife, a husband, a parent or a child dictates who the characters are, intrinsic to the both the reader’s and their own understanding of ‘self’. Boori Ma, an elderly woman, living alone in an apartment block as a stairsweep, is constantly defining herself by her past life with the family from who she is now separated. Always exclaiming of ‘luxuries you couldn’t dream of’ and her child’s wedding; she is reaffirming who she was, not who she is, as a mother and wife of luxury. Despite being obviously separated from that aspect of her life for a considerable time, Boori Ma continues to view herself as a part of a family, rather than facing the brutal truth that she is, in fact, alone. This same behavior is again mirrored in Lahiri’s Pakistani character, Mr. Pirzada. Mr. Pirzada, though living on a different continent to his wife and seven daughters who reside in war-torn Dacca, is still portrayed as a father character, bringing sweets to Lilia, a child who ‘cannot be spoilt’ and dressed in a suit prepared ‘to see all seven of his daughters’. In this sense, the reader is led to assume that even removed from the family unit, a character is still difined by who they were to that family, rather than anything else. It is only when Mrs. Das accepts her place in the family, at the end of ‘Interpreter of Maladies’, she is able to be happy. Isolated from that identity, she is in constant ‘pain’. Lahiri explores characters’ place in different types of families, spanning from Mr. Pirzada’s brood of nine to the seemingly simple family of just man and wife.
Many of Lahiri’s stories maintain a focus between the central familial relationship of man and woman. All facets of this convention are displayed to the reader; newlyweds, married couples and adulterers; however, in accordance with Lahiri’s stark and somewhat pessimistic tone, these relationships are illuminated to expose the fundamental flaw in each of these. ‘This Blessed House’ presents a view on new marriage pertaining to one of compromise and sacrifice. Twinkle’s airy child-like demeanour is in brittle contrast with Sanjeev’s conservative, methodical personality, creating an ambience in the house; not of blessings but of dissatisfaction. Sanjeev, admitting his loneliness at age 33 decides to find a wife, initially through profiled arranged prospects, until he becomes enamoured with Twinkle, a ‘wow’ girl. Despite this, Sanjeev experiences ‘pangs’ of regret and unhappiness with Twinkle and her eccentricities, during the party wishing to shut them up in the un-swept attic, clean up and listen to his ‘new Bach’. This ‘outsider’ feeling towards new marriage lends itself to ‘This Blessed House’s’ resolution, compromise and placid contentment, continued to the foreshadowing of ‘A Temporary Matter’, a story which contemplates the durability of a relationship brutalized with tragedy. Shoba and Shukumar ‘go nowhere together’, a telling statement of the state of their relationship. After suffering an unimaginable loss of a child through still birth, their relationship steadily dims to a state of darkness; a state of disrepair. This portrayal of marriage shows the fragility of family, a viewpoint discussed on occasion by Lahiri, again in the middle short story, ‘Sexy’. ‘Sexy’ once again highlights how unstable a marriage is, riddled by secrets and on the cusp of destruction. Through the parallel of Miranda and Dev and Rohin’s parents, Lahiri displays the utmost fragility of relationships barely maintained by her characters.
The traditional family unit of parents and children is also widely explored through the standpoint of the importance of children in maintaining a family. Children’s roles in a family are quintessentially central in Lahiri’s exploration of family, often suggesting it is the presence of children which often keep a family together. In the title story, Lahiri once again discusses adultery, however, the resultant Bobby, deems the situation intrinsically more complex. Mr. and Mrs. Das behave ‘more like brother and sister’ than man and wife, alluding to the troubled nature of the marriage. Mrs. Das later reveals to Mr. Kapasi that, she has been unfaithful and that Bobby is in fact, not Mr. Das’ son. Despite this; however, Mrs. Das chooses to go to her family and resume her place as wife and mother to her children. One can assume, however, without the existence of her children, her choice may have differed. In contrast, it is the loss of a child and thus the non-existence of their baby which ultimately destroys Shoba and Shukumar’s marriage. By comparing these two stories, the reader can unequivocally see Lahiri’s view that often children are the most important aspect of “the family”.
Despite the clear importance Lahiri places on being part of a family, many of her characters experience loneliness within the family unit, inferring that despite its importance, families are always flawed. Mrs. Das, mother of three and wife to Raj, exclaims “Eight years I’ve been in pain” relating to her perceived isolation from her family. From this, the reader is led to conclude that despite family ties, Mrs. Das is desperately unhappy. Dev, from ‘Sexy’ also seeks extra-marital partners, revealing his discontentment with his marriage and life. Lahiri presents a double vision with the majority of her characters; though firmly placed in a family, they often feel constrained, lonely, dissatisfied and unfulfilled in their families, who supposedly hold so much importance. The reader is only illuminated in the final story, ‘A Third and Final Continent’, where despite initial unhappiness, in retrospect the narrator is contented with his life, suggesting despite hardships and unhappiness, there comes happiness and love.
Perhaps this is Lahiri’s final statement on her exploration of family; it has to encompass it all; joy, sadness, fidelity, distrust; like life, family has its good and bad, its light and darkness. It is only through the final resounding message of Lahiri’s closing story, the reader can fully understand her contention, the family’s true importance; that despite sadness, there will inevitably be happiness, a true ‘yin yang’ of life, the duality and co-existence of good and bad, joy and grief within the family unit.
SAMPLE ESSAY 3
‘Every Character is Afflicted with a Malady’. To what extent is this true of Lahiri’s short stories?
Jumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” is based around the central theme of individual hardship and burdens. Lahiri explores the way in which physical and emotion impediments can impact on the individual and community. The themes of unrealised dreams and lack of connection to others and to culture are burdens that are commonly experience by many of Lahiri’s characters.
At times an individual’s pleasing exterior and amiable nature suppress their inner feelings. Underneath Mrs Sens “beautiful” appearance and “shimmering sari” lies an everlasting sense of pain. Mrs Sen cannot adjust to life in America as the culture differences between America and India are too vast. Mrs Sen experiences immense degrees of loneliness. She has been isolated from India where “everything” important to her continues to remain and she cannot assimilate into a society which is completely unfamiliar. Mr Sens expertise in mathematics allows him to find a sense of connection to the American way of life and enables him to call America home. To Mrs Sen “home meant India,” rather than her small “university apartment, located on the fringes of the campus.” Mrs Sens inability to drive restricts her to existing in the confines of her quiet apartment which is a distinct contrast to the “laughing”, “gossiping” and “chatter” that prevailed in India. Mrs Sen attempts to relive the experiences of her childhood through her meticulous preparation and consumption of sensual foods such as “breaded mincemeat with raisins” and “semolina halva.” Food became “one of the two things” that filled Mrs Sen with the feeling of momentary contentment, along with the “arrival of a letter from her family”. Mrs Sens strong relationship with Eliot reduced her loneliness and isolation from others and allowed her to rediscover true companionship.
Many people in highly consumerist cultures never experience the level of interpersonal connection that is often experienced in countries such as India where an apparently lower quality of life is experienced. Although Eliot is only “eleven” and may not truly understand what it means to feel belonging he experiences everlasting loneliness. He is largely friendless and the relationship between him and his only close family – his mother- is obviously lacking in love and support. Eliot is unable to develop a personal relationship with any of his babysitters as they do not last an adequate length of time for Eliot to connect. His beach property is merely a “house” composed of physical structures, rather than a “home” filled with belonging and joy. Eliot’s mother places emphasis on Eliot being able to “feed” and “entertain” himself, but does not understand her child’s lonesomeness, as she herself lacks the ability to connect to others. She exists only in a corporate setting involving noting information on a “steno pad”, dressing in “transparent stocking” and “shoulder padded suits” and becomes absent when she must face the world outside of her “job”. She satisfies her need for human interaction by spending “the night” with a “man from her office” whom Eliot never saw again. Mrs Sen educated Eliot on what true belonging comprises making him equip to one day seek fulfilment.
In some instances individual’s intense yearning to gain a sense of connection leads them to exert amoral actions and become blinded to the degree of pain that they ignite. In “Sexy” Miranda’s longing for interpersonal connection provides a justification for her affair with Dev. Dev’s words “I know what it’s like to be lonely” provides an emotional connection between the two otherwise strangers. She becomes entrance by Dev’s age and supposed wisdom. Her lack of personal identity and self belonging allow her to undergo physical and emotional transformations. She proceeds to become the person she believes Dev wants her to be through the purchasing of “black high heels”, a “silk robe”, “sheer stockings” and a “slinky silvery” “cocktail dress”. The purchasing of these things makes Miranda feel “sexy”, as Dev had described her. Miranda’s monotonous job in the fund raising department of a public radio station provide her with ample time for her to fantasise about her future with Dev. Miranda’s romantic fantasies prevent her from acknowledging the objective reality of the situation, of Dev being essentially uninterested in her welfare, and more concerned with maintaining his view of her “long legs.” Rohin is the only individual able to inform her that “sexy means loving someone you don’t know” and inadvertently encourage her to break connection with her lover. It is through Rohin’s presence that Miranda was able to find a cure to her malady and ultimately discover a true sense of self.
Often an individual’s intense desire to find a cure to their troubles causes them to extend to extreme lengths. Bibi Haldar’s “ailment” and malformed physicality prevent her from successfully assimilating into society and causes her to experience great degrees of estrangement. Haldar’s physical illness that causes her to become “hysterical” confines her to the inside of the particular “flat building” in which she exists. Her yearning for a cure to her illness leads her to go to extreme lengths to fulfil the doctors “outrageous” diagnosis that “marriage would cure her”. This diagnosis leads to become obsessed with gaining a husband and “reducing her waistline”, “smoothing her lips” and purchasing new clothes in the hope that they will render her more attractive to a prospective husband. Her mediocre exterior of “thin upper lip”, “protruding gums” and “teeth to small” prevent any man to being “persuaded to engage”. Bibi Haldar was not even equipped to participate to society economically as her daily occupation consisted of recording “inventory” and made her become dependent on her cousins financial support. It was only Bibi Haldar’s mysterious pregnancy that provided her cure to her desolation and interpersonal segregation.
The concept of burdens and woes are explored throughout all of Lahiri’s short stories. Although many characters experience lifelong affliction Lahiri also provides a sense of hope. She demonstrates that troubles can be overcome through stories such as “the third and final continent” and “the treatment of Bibi Haldar”.

58

· World Heritage Sites - Konarak - Sun Temple
Built in the thirteenth century, it was conceived as a gigantic solar chariot with twelve pairs of exquisitely-ornamented wheels dragged by seven rearing horses. The temple comprised a sanctum with a lofty (presumably over 68 m. high) sikhara, a jagamohana (30. m. square and 30. m. high) and a detached nata-mandira (hall of dance) in the same axis, besides numerous subsidiary shrines. The sanctum and the nata-mandira have lost their roof. The sanctum displays superb images of the Sun-god in the three projections which are treated as miniature shrines. The sanctum and the jagamohana together stand on a common platform studded with an intricate wealth of decorative ornaments and sculptures, often of a highly erotic type.
Plot
Sanjeev and Twinkle, a newly married couple, are exploring their new house in Hartford, which to appears to have been owned by fervent Christians: they keep finding gaudy Biblical paraphernalia hidden throughout the house. 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 agreement reveals other problems in their relationship; Sanjeev doesn’t seem to understand Twinkle’s spontaneity, whereas Twinkle has little regard for Sanjeev’s discomfort. He is planning a party for his coworkers and is worried about the impression they might get from the interior decorating if their mantelpiece is full of Biblical figurines. After some arguing and a brief bout of tears, a compromise is reached. When the day of the party arrives, the guests are enamored with Twinkle. Sanjeev still has conflicting feelings about her; he is captivated by her beauty and energy, but irritated by her naivete and impractical tendencies. 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. 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.
What is the focus of this story? (a single incident, moment in time, an epiphany-moment of truth, a key event etc)

Sanjeev and Twinkle, a recently marriaged couple move into their first home. The story revolves around how they interact when Twinkle begins to find Christian artefacts hiden around the house and she begins to display them against Sanjeev’s wishes as they are Hindu.Sanjeev is constantly evaluating Twinkle and the merits of his life with her. The ending shows Sanjeev most likely accepting his fate.
How is this story structured?
Does it have a clear beginning (opening section), middle (characters, situation and ideas are developed) and end (draws story to a conclusion)?
How does the story open?
Does it hold the reader’s attention? How?
How does it set the tone of the story?
Is there suggestion and implication used rather than direct description?
Does the story launch straight into the narrative?

It is a third person narrative that is told strictly from Sanjeev’s perspective as his internal monologue and observations are continually shared with readers. Readers are somewhat prejudiced against Sanjeev as the portrayal of him is quite coloured/negative, even though it is mostly his point of view that is explored.
There is no traditional beginning, rather the story opens with the first discovery by Twinkle, a ‘porcelain effigy of Christ’ which is the first step on the path to the widening divergence between the couple.
Nonetheless, the story has quite a natural flow and is somewhat complete when viewed in its entirity as there is a build-up of tension and a climax quickly followed by a resolution of sorts.
The story is quite engaging as the gaps/differences between Sanjeev and Twinkle are presented, and curiosity is generated through the promise of more artefacts being discovered.
The tone of the story is one of frustration as Sanjeev becomes increasingly angry with Twinkle’s determination to display the Christian items against his will
Who is telling the story? (narrative viewpoint)

An omnipotent author, but it swaps frequently from an objective recount to Sanjeev’s viewpoint/thoughts, which subjectifies the narrative in terms of readers’ evaluation of characters. These two intermingling parts are edmbellished by authentic, intermittent dialogue.
Which characters are in the story? How has the writer presented them?
Do they develop/ change?
Is there an event/ experience that leads them to personal development? Is there a moment of epiphany?
How do they relate to each other?
Do they appear in other stories?

The central protagonists are Sanjeev and Twinkle. Other than his ‘mother’, her ‘ex-boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriends’, only a couple of other characters who attend the party are mentioned by name, ‘Douglas and Nora’, ‘Lester’, ‘Sunil’ and most importantly ‘Prabal’ who labels Twinkle as ‘wow’.

Both central protagonists are well-defined, there is no major change in either of them (crux of a debate), but Sanjeev does become more accepting and his love/admiration for Twinkle becomes concrete.

They are strangers to some extent, married for four months and so there are adjustments made as they define themselves in relation to each other. Sanjeev is quite sarcastic and critical, whereas Twinkle is more emotional and unpredictable.

They make no appearance in other stories.

Comment on the language and style of the writer. How is language used? To what effect?
The style of writing is realistic with accessible language and brief concise descriptions of different objects or actions that subtely say much about the characters.
Much is revealed about Sanbjeev through his own disutations about his previous experiences, current situation and most significantly is critical judgements about Twinkle. Less is of revealed of Twinkle, but this fits with her character who is less consumed by anxieties, living from moment to moment.
Although, every day events are captured, other external information away from their lives at this point in time, are only referred to briefly
‘Lately he had begun noticing the need to state the obvious to Twinkle.’
‘She planted a kiss on top of Christ’s head’
‘recently abandoned’
‘using only the top fork in his cutlery draw’
‘Then he noticed that some of the water dripping down her hard blue face was tears.’
Instead of figurative language there is a focus on the mundane, but important interactions between the couple and their reactions, thoughts and feelings are presented with sincerity and insight.
Obviously, symbolism is used in relation to the Christian items, food, smoking. music and shoes.

Does the story reach a climax?
Does it use the anti-climax and leave the ending open to a number of interpretations and questions?

Definitely, although there is no heated exchange in the final conflict, rather Sanjeev recognises how their lives with pan out and accepts his eventual.
So, unless as reader is quite cynical and pessimistic the ending is rudimentary and hopeful as Sanjeev, ‘followed her’.
How does the story end?

Somewhat ambiguous depending on the readers’ take on Sanjeev’s reaction. However, the most obvious ending is that he accepts Twinkle’s need to celebrate and display the Christian discoveries. He realises that she is ‘wow’ and that regardless of her idiosincracies he somewhat begrudgingly loves her.

What ‘maladies’ can you see in this story?
Comment on who ‘interprets’ the malady. Is it the author, you as the reader, the narrator, characters within the story?
A Temporary Matter

When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine

Interpreter of Maladies

A Real Durwan

Sexy

Mrs Sen’s

This Blessed House

The Treatment of Bibi Haldar

The Third and Final Continent

INTERPRETER OF MALADIES: Stories - Jhumpa LahiriHoughton Mifflin Co Literary FictionISBN: 039592720X
Receiving the Pulitzer Prize, according to first-time author Jhumpa Lahiri, was a complete surprise. However, to anyone who has read these meticulously crafted short stories, it 's no surprise at all.INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, lovely from the cover on in, is redolent of India itself. Teeming with all manner of humanity, it is in turn frank and subtle, bold and understated. There is an immediacy to Lahiri 's style that bridges any gulfs between the more structured traditions of Indian culture and the brashness of American life.This debut collection opens with "A Temporary Matter," a sharply poignant tale in which the sheltering darkness of a Boston electrical outage encourages newfound intimacy in a grieving couple. Going from the intensely personal to the political, the next story deals with a young girl 's perceptions of far-off Pakistan as its civil war bombards her home via television in "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.""What I remember during those twelve days of the war was that my father no longer asked me to watch the news with them, and that Mr. Pirzada stopped bringing me candy, and that my mother refused to serve anything other than boiled eggs with rice for dinner. I remember some nights helping my mother spread a sheet and blankets on the couch so that Mr. Pirzada could sleep there, and high-pitched voices hollering in the middle of the night when my parents called our relatives in Calcutta to learn more details about the situation. Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear."Jhumpa Lahiri 's finely tuned ear for irony is readily apparent throughout INTERPRETER OF MALADIES. Her ability to fuse this sense of irony with compassion for her characters is particularly adept in two stories: "A Real Durwan," where Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell and teller of tall tales, falls victim to the greed and envy of the apartment building dwellers; and "Sexy," where coincidence breeds introspection in a woman having an affair with a married man.The effect of one 's culture and the expectations it imposes, particularly on its female members, is deftly highlighted in "Mrs. Sen 's," a tale of an immigrant whose fear of driving puts her in conflict with her university professor husband, and "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar," an almost frightening story burnished with a patina of absurdity. Bibi Haldar, a woman who "suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, gem therapists, prophets, and fools," is so much a victim of her culture that when "anticipation began to plague her with such ferocity...the thought of a husband, on which all her hopes were pinned, threatened at times to send her into another attack.""This Blessed House" and "The Third and Final Continent," the stories, respectively, of a Hindu couple who discover gaudy Christian artifacts in their new home and of a Bengali bachelor whose new American landlady baffles him with her eccentricities, are particularly delightful while still provoking thought.It is, however, with the title story --- chosen for both THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES and THE O. HENRY AWARD STORIES --- that Lahiri 's penetrating knack for emotional nuance is at its glorious best. An Indian tourist guide begins to see himself differently when a female passenger, after hearing of his other job at a doctor 's office, describes him as an "Interpreter of Maladies." "Mr. Kapasi had never thought of his job in such complimentary terms. To him it was a thankless occupation. He found nothing noble in interpreting people 's maladies, assiduously translating the symptoms of so many swollen bones, countless cramps of bellies and bowels, spots on people 's palms that changed color, shape, or size." Looking at his profession from a new perspective leads Mr. Kapasi to recount various experiences to his captive audience of American tourists as they drive toward the Sun Temple at Konarak. During the long journey, Mr. Kapasi comes to believe that Mrs. Das and he are destined for a different relationship:"She would write to him, asking about his days interpreting at the doctor 's office, and he would respond eloquently, choosing only the most entertaining anecdotes, ones that would make her laugh out loud as she read them in her house in New Jersey. In time she would reveal the disappointment of her marriage, and he his. In this way their friendship would grow, and flourish. He would possess a picture of the two of them, eating fried onions under a magenta umbrella, which he would keep, he decided, safely tucked between the pages of his Russian grammar. As his mind raced, Mr. Kapasi experienced a mild and pleasant shock. It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered by his own efforts. In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life 's mistakes made sense in the end. The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief.""Interpreter of Maladies" takes us through the countryside of India, where heat and dust can seem languorous or onerous and where monkeys can change in an instant from magical creatures to ominous ones. Throughout this ride to Konarak, we are treated to the mental and emotional machinations of an under-appreciated man, starving for recognition and affection. As the trip becomes more arduous, the family in his vehicle becomes more querulous, and the self-doubt that blossomed into hope begins to droop under the weight of reality. This is a brilliant story, infused with wisdom and tinged with, but not burdened by, the brush of intelligent cynicism.Jhumpa Lahiri is an exceptional Jhumpa Lahiri. With each story she draws believable characters in both ordinary and extraordinary situations, making the task seem sweetly effortless in the process. The range of her talent and imagination is broad but never loses focus in its execution. She has the unique ability to paint the worlds of both the immigrant and the native in miniature, allowing for immersion in detail while simultaneously placing them in a grand, sweeping perspective of universal truth. As the protagonist of "The Third and Final Continent" so wisely notes: "Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."INTERPRETER OF MALADIES takes us beyond our own imaginations and we are all the better for it. --- Reviewed by Jami Edwards