The Fiction of Arrival

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Random House India
Pages: 333
Price: Rs 450

Jhumpa Lahiri has an uncanny gift for turning ‘unaccustomed earth’ into her familiar habitat of fiction where she consorts with upwardly mobile immigrant Bengalis enacting their exquisite little dramas of belonging and un-belonging, of losing and finding themselves all over again, only to know the same place for the first time.

The eight stories in her new collection of short stories, a genre she has finessed since her debut Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Melodies, illuminates transformations intrinsic to the immigrant experience when seemingly rooted people are transplanted into the new American soil. The title story ‘Unaccustomed Earth,’ links up to the epigraph to the novel taken from The Custom House by Nathaniel Hawthorne that suggests human nature may atrophy if they continue to toil in the same worn-out soil. Hawthorne’s exhortation – strike your roots into unaccustomed earth – serves as an anthem for her cast of upper middle class expatriate Bengali suburbanites venturing into foreign shores – read the Boston-New York corridor - to rebuild their homes and identities afresh.

In the accomplished title story, a widowed father visits his grown daughter, who has recently moved to Seattle with her husband and son. When the daughterly impulse strikes her, she is solicitous about her father as he takes off on frequent package tours to various European countries and wants him to move in with her. Initially, she is not sure whether this is the right move. “Ruma feared that her father would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way she was no longer used to.”

But even as she juggles with her fears and concern, she discovers that her father has found a private world of his own with a spirited Bengali widow and has come to a point where he thinks he can live without the cloying comforts of a family fussing over him. In a sense, the father moves into unaccustomed territory where his daughter finds hard to reach him. 'The entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start,' her father muses.

In Heaven-Hell, the author gently dramatises a Bengali housewife’s affair with a much younger Bengali man to bring out the loneliness and the ache of longing in an alien land. The fiction of cultural assimilation comes apart when the young lover gets married to an American woman, stays with her for over two decades before divorcing her. Cultural divides are not easy to bridge in trans-cultural marital unions. 'I was so horribly jealous of you back then, for knowing him, understanding him in a way I never could,' the American woman confesses to her ex-husband’s Bengali love.

The theme of female jealousy is again amplified in A Choice of Accommodations in which a Bengali man married to an American woman goes to attend the wedding of his prep school crush and finds his wife secretly obsessing about the persisting psychic hold of childhood romance on her husband. In her three stand-alone stories, grouped together as 'Hema and Kaushik,” the daemons of love and longing wrestle with implacable realities of the present, making the reunion of lovers a prelude to an acceptance of a final rupture.

In a crowded intellectual mart with their genre cafes, it would be easy to label Lahiri’s stories as yet another variant of immigrant fiction coalescing kindred themes of cultural hybridity and uprootedness, but the universality of her themes and emotions they conjure up lift them to a much larger dimension of human experience of finding 'kinship and beauty in unexpected places.' In other words, these stories could be located anywhere and speak not just to those who are familiar with the culturally schizophrenic world of immigrants.

“Being a foreigner is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts,' reflects the mother who has been moved from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachussetts, in Lahiri's novel, The Namesake (2003) that was made into a movie by Indian director Mira Nair. Shuttling between there worlds – born in Britain, raised in Rhode Island and taken on long visits to India – has made Lahiri all too aware of 'intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new.” The 41-year-old author knows how to transmute this sense of cultural dividedness into her imaginary worlds of fiction. This simultaneous feeling of being at home in unaccustomed surroundings and a larger existential homelessness that seems to the fate of the global vagabond in this globalized world of vanishing frontiers and boundary crossings is at the heart of Lahiri’s new collection of stories that eschew all temptations to be anything else than stories well told.

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