Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Bloomsbury, $29.95
After Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, you know what to expect from Jhumpa Lahiri—simple yet poetic prose, characters haunted by isolation, dislocation, regret, insecurity, unarticulated love and an overbearing sense of loss.
It would be simplistic to say her latest collection of eight stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is about the migrant experience. Though her characters are repeatedly Bengali migrants in America, the stories are really about the dislodgement of the security her characters develop in relationships or in their current situations, and then find crumbling.
In the title story, Ruma, builds a successful career, working fifty-four hour weeks, earning six figures—only to give it up and move to Seattle for marriage and children, much like her own mother. “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.”
As her father questions her choices, she feels her mother would have understood her decision—and this seems to forge a bond that did not exist, in her mother’s lifetime. As Ruma learns about her father’s interest in another woman, I find myself, despite my usually liberal ideologies, questioning if I would be comfortable if one of my parents were to “move on” after the death of the other.
In my favourite story, Hell-Heaven, a Bengali-American daughter, constantly at war with her mother in her childhood, gets a glimpse into her mother’s sacrifices and tormenting passion for the Bengali student Pranab, when her own relationship collapses. Her mother’s scepticism of the American girl who marries Pranab touchingly reveals the notion of “the other” that all migrants develop for the natives of their new land. “She will leave him,” her mother declared after their engagement. How many times have you made a judgment about the laid back, over-spending and casually drinking Australian?
Only Goodness is about a sister, crumbling under the guilt of introducing her younger brother during their casual adolescent games, to alcohol—to which he is now completely enslaved.
The last three stories, in the second section titled "Hema and Kaushik" follow the two protagonists as they meet and part and meet again, at significant stages in their life. Kaushik and Hema’s parents forge a friendship based on the fact that they come from the same city in India. They would have had little in common if they had met in their home town, yet in the new land, they were close friends. When Kaushik’s family leaves for Bombay, only to return a few years later, Hema’s parents see this as a failure—at home and abroad.
Living together again, the differences in the two families get even more acute: Hema’s parents find that “Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had.” —while they had remained staunchly Indian, even after years in America.
In the next story, Year’s End, Lahiri touches upon the loss of a parent again, as Kaushik has lost his mother to Cancer, and must accept as his father’s new bride, whose presence is accentuated by ever such slight changes in the home decor. “She (Kaushik’s mother) had never allowed a cloth to cover the table, but now there was one...”
Finally, in Going Ashore, Hema, now a Latin professor, meets Kaushik, now a war photographer, who is constantly travelling across the world to cover terrible events. Both are in transition—Kaushik, leaving his ’on the move job’ for an editorial desk job in Hong Kong and Hema on her final holiday, before she goes to India to marry a man she barely knows. Here they share their lives, dreams and nightmares and discover their own rootlessness “I’ve never belonged to any place that way,” says Hema. Kaushik laughed, “You’re complaining to the wrong person.”
The stories then, are really about finding, losing and rediscovering your roots. On the surface they could just be geographical roots, but as Lahiri steps closer, deeper into each character’s soul, the stories are about transitions—Rumas who have lived in the same town all their life could face the dilemma of accepting a father moving on into another relationship. And Hemas everywhere, must often chose between a romance of passions and a marriage of convenience.
Lahiri traverses the emotional upheavals of her characters, leaving you questioning your own choices, raising ghosts from your own past, and unsettling every personal tragedy—big or small—you may have safely hidden away from yourself from a long time ago, in your own subconscious.
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