Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri; Random House; Price: Rs.450; 333 pp
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The themes of cultural alienation, adjustment and the immigrant experience continue to preoccupy Brooklyn (New York)-based author Jhumpa Lahiri. These themes, which Lahiri first explored in her Pulitzer Prize winning debut collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies and persisted with in The Namesake, are again predominant in Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of eight narratives.
Artful and poignant, her latest oeuvre treads familiar ground, chronicling the emotional upheavals of middle class Indian-(Bengali) immigrants, presumably driven out of their beloved Sonar Bangla by the communist regime and its stranglehold over the electoral process in West Bengal. Now far from home, they are struggling to adjust with the American dream and with their US-born and reared children. Though they embrace the opportunities and affluence which America offers, there’s nostalgia for the life they have left behind in the motherland.
In the title story, the disconnect between Bengali immigrant parents and their America-born children is sensitively recounted. Ruma, a lawyer who defied her parents to marry an American, frets that her widowed father would “become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way that she was no longer used to”. And the father, while visiting his daughter’s immaculately manicured suburban home in Seattle, is surprised to find that his once rebellious daughter with all her assertions of selfhood, has given up work to raise a three-year-old son and is pregnant again. He had always assumed that her life would be far from humdrum, yet it isn’t too different from how it would have been in Kolkata.
“Growing up, her mother’s example — moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household — had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.” In an ironic turn, he advises her to find work and become “self-reliant”, and declines her invitation to live with her, preferring his new found independence.
Strange customs and perceived betrayal is also the theme of ‘Hell-Heaven’, which tells the tale of a young American-born Bengali woman who recalls her mother’s unrequited love for one Pranab Chakravorty, a student at MIT, and her disgust at his marrying an all-American girl (Deborah). Subsequently after Pranab leaves Deborah for a married Bengali woman, her mother confesses her hopeless love to her daughter whose own heart has been broken by a man she’d hoped to marry.
‘A Choice of Accommodations’ narrates the story of Amit, an editor of a medical journal who disappointed his doctor parents by dropping out of Columbia med school, and his coming to terms with his successful and ambitious American wife Megan, who persisted at Columbia and is now a very busy doctor. Such complications are rare, if not unimaginable back home in India, and are captured by Lahiri through sensitive writing, language and poetic intelligence.
The last three short stories form a trilogy and are grouped under ‘Hema and Kaushik’. The lives of Hema, a Latin professor at Wellesley, and Kaushik, a photojournalist with an international magazine, criss-cross over the years and they fall in love. They first meet in 1974 when she is six and he is nine years of age, and again seven years later when Kaushik and his parents come to live for a month with Hema’s family in Massachusetts. The family has returned to live in America after seven years in India and as Hema’s mother observes, “Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had”. During those few days, the teenage Hema is drawn towards the 16-year-old lanky and taciturn Kaushik. Finally after leading separate lives for several years, Hema who is now a 37-year-old academic on an assignment in Rome, runs into Kaushik and they fall in love. But she is engaged to marry Navin, a man approved by her parents and chooses stability and custom over Kaushik, a globe-trotting war photographer.
Though each narrative is self-contained, they are linked by the central themes of exile, alienation and people struggling to straddle two cultures. A deep undercurrent of loss, tragedy and insecurity permeates the stories which highlight the conflicts between immigrant parents clinging to Indian mores and traditions and their US-born children, who apart from their mandatory annual holidays in India, have little in common with the land of their fathers.
Lahiri is insightful in her observation of cultures and traditions and with consummate skill, she weaves her protagonists through the breadth and depth of the immigrant experience. There is little that she doesn’t know about her characters, because they are like herself — of Bengali descent, attend Ivy-league universities, are well-educated, and inhabit the upper echelons of American society. Lahiri was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and went to study at Boston University. Thus there is no acknowledgement in this anthology of Indian migrants who drive taxis and slave in kitchen restaurants in New York and elsewhere. Nor is there a realisation that immigration, racism and alienation have acquired new meaning and significance in post-9/11 America.
Nevertheless although Unaccustomed Earth is about affluent Bengali settlers in the US and their bi-cultural experiences, these narratives of growing up, isolation, falling in love, losing loved ones and the struggle to build secure and happy lives in new unfamiliar environments are universally appealing. In particular they will prompt middle class Indians, bedazzled by success stories of subcontinentals in the US, to become aware that the grass on the other side of the Atlantic is not as green as it seems.
Summiya Yasmeen