This Blessed House Assimilation
Written Task 2
999 Words
What experiences define an immigrant? A few may be loss of country, separation from loved ones, and most importantly, assimilation into a new culture. All of this can cause immigrants to feel isolated and unable to communicate with others. No other group experiences this more than Indian immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri writes about this inability to communicate emotions in her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri presents Indian immigrants as poor emotional communicators though the characters of Ms. Sen in Ms. Sen, and Sanjeev in This Blessed House. She does this to establish the psychological toll forced relationships and assimilation takes on these characters.
Ms. Sen cannot communicate with …show more content…
They say opposites attract but this is not true in terms of Sanjeev and Twinkle. Twinkle is a curious and outgoing, the Christian “treasures” in their home fascinate her. Twinkle is a rebel; she does not care what other people think. Whereas Sanjeev is organized and self-conscious. The very existence of those artifacts “irritate” him and “ruin” the atmosphere in his home. He is the kind of person that listens to classical music just to impress people. Sanjeev can tell twinkle “Oh God, no. Twinkle, no” (146) when arguing over the placement of the artifacts but cannot tell her why “they meant nothing to him” (145). All they do id argue over the Catholic junk, they are too different to sit down and have a conversation about why they disagreed. Moreover, Sanjeev is a bad communicator because he does not love Twinkle. “Sanjeev was lonely, with an excessively generous income for a single man, and had never been in love.” (143). His mother tells him he makes money for three families. All of this pushes Sanjeev to marry twinkle in less than a year. Sure, he was lonely but it is uncharacteristic to spontaneously marry a girl he didn’t love. He married her because he thought he had to. This made the health of their relationship unimportant. He needed a wife; he did not need to understand
999 Words
What experiences define an immigrant? A few may be loss of country, separation from loved ones, and most importantly, assimilation into a new culture. All of this can cause immigrants to feel isolated and unable to communicate with others. No other group experiences this more than Indian immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri writes about this inability to communicate emotions in her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri presents Indian immigrants as poor emotional communicators though the characters of Ms. Sen in Ms. Sen, and Sanjeev in This Blessed House. She does this to establish the psychological toll forced relationships and assimilation takes on these characters.
Ms. Sen cannot communicate with …show more content…
They say opposites attract but this is not true in terms of Sanjeev and Twinkle. Twinkle is a curious and outgoing, the Christian “treasures” in their home fascinate her. Twinkle is a rebel; she does not care what other people think. Whereas Sanjeev is organized and self-conscious. The very existence of those artifacts “irritate” him and “ruin” the atmosphere in his home. He is the kind of person that listens to classical music just to impress people. Sanjeev can tell twinkle “Oh God, no. Twinkle, no” (146) when arguing over the placement of the artifacts but cannot tell her why “they meant nothing to him” (145). All they do id argue over the Catholic junk, they are too different to sit down and have a conversation about why they disagreed. Moreover, Sanjeev is a bad communicator because he does not love Twinkle. “Sanjeev was lonely, with an excessively generous income for a single man, and had never been in love.” (143). His mother tells him he makes money for three families. All of this pushes Sanjeev to marry twinkle in less than a year. Sure, he was lonely but it is uncharacteristic to spontaneously marry a girl he didn’t love. He married her because he thought he had to. This made the health of their relationship unimportant. He needed a wife; he did not need to understand