"In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. 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."
Excerpt from "The Third and Final Continent" by Jhumpa Lahiri
One of the highlights of my time in AAS 232 was reading Jhumpa Lahiri's work for the first time, in the form of three selected short stories called “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," “Interpreter of Maladies” and “The Third and Final Continent,” all of which are richly textured with human experience and deceptively simple details. The influence of history, food, and location are all essential to much of the narratives as they are the conversation topics of many characters, and demonstrate an extreme realism that makes each story convincing, tying the material objects of the everyday to the movements of characters within society. The divides of immigration and war are enlarged through narrative details, such as in "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" where historical context about the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is seen through the child narrator Lilia's eyes:
He told me that during Partition Hindus and Muslims had set fire to each other's homes. For many, the idea of eating in the other's company was still unthinkable. It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands...Nevertheless my father insisted that I understand the difference, and he led me to a map of the world taped to the wall over his desk. He seemed concerned that Mr. Pirzada might take offense if I accidentally referred to him as an Indian, though I could not really imagine Mr. Pirzada being offended by much of anything.
The commonalities between individuals are shown beyond the boundaries of national identity and historical conflict as Mr. Pirzada becomes an established element of the family and then just as quickly vanishes from their lives apart from a card expressing gratitude. When the narrator experiences transference of the feeling of longing for an individual from Mr. Pirzada, the emotional impact of immigrants separated over oceans becomes distilled more forcefully for the child narrator, who experiences Mr. Pirzada's presence and absence with a sense of bonding beyond borders. Initially, she cannot sense the significance of the Partition of India and Pakistan in the protective and familial presence of Mr. Pirzada, yet world events poignantly impact their relationship, only to be fully realized with his forever departure back to his native land.
Cultural traits such as collectivism are reflected in moments such as the seamless unity of Mr. Pirzada and the narrator's parents as they endure the crisis of the twelve-day war between India and Pakistan: "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 stories perfectly capture the cultural traits of life as it is lived through immigrants, including the ways family attempt to remedy their isolation through unique actions such as flipping through the university directory to invite people with one's country's surnames to their home.
The conception of national identity and its relationship to cultural identity continues to be mulled over in the other two stories, as the narrator examines the life of an immigrant through three continents in "The Third and Final Continent." Throughout, journeys through time and space are emotionally impactful, articulated through the lyricism of the language and covering topics ranging from interracial interactions to the physical and cultural distance between countries. In "The Third and Final Continent," the lives of recent immigrants are depicted realistically and movingly, as well as the cross-racial friendship with the unnamed narrator's landlord Mrs. Croft. The significance of Mrs. Das's affair in "Interpreter of Maladies" is enhanced when she connects with the titular interpreter Mr. Kapasi while touring India with her family, due to immigrant ideals of life and love being transformed by movements across oceans. Each detail captures character with an intense meticulousness, and lends naturally to film as well as the imagination as readers compare and contrast what they witness to their existing knowledge of reality and understanding of culture.
The stories in my opinion almost become especially polished and relatable for individuals with knowledge of immigrant backgrounds that never breaks its veneer of calmness. This style seems appealing for people of all ages instead of taking any risks in potentially negative representation, such as more innovative language or the depiction of immigrant children who do not attend elite colleges or are not involved with relatively peaceful narrators who let the setting and situation speak for them. When you compare the tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's stories with knowledge of the messages conveyed in Orientalism by Edward Said, they seem to operate as microresistances in a way, to trends of Western superiority most frequently on the personal level demonstrated in microaggressions:
He told me that during Partition Hindus and Muslims In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.
The history of depictions of the East as inferior to the West becomes important to consider in the development of Jhumpa Lahiri's writing style, as a relatively successful Indian American immigrant to the United States herself. Her soothing tone narrates the impact of historical conflicts and cross-cultural encounters on individual families, and realism lends to these stories' power, yet their likability and popularity reflects a motive of humanizing immigrants for an American audience.
Lahiri seems to write with the "upper hand" this time as per Said's terms in being the financial benefactor of book sales with the 2000 Pulitzer, resisting demeaning objectification of the East instead of being in an inferior position to Western culture. As a result, her stories are so precise that they are reminiscent of the "complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum" as she records details for posterity, with a lesser investigation into conflict and emotion, that, to be fair, does characterize Western styles of storytelling more than Eastern literature. I truly enjoyed the glimpse into the lives of Indian immigrants that Lahiri has granted us, as she expands the often understated influence that historical events and everyday observations have on our lives. It made me wonder whether the COVID-19 pandemic will be immortalized in immigrant literature, as significant as the moon landing and the Indian-Pakistani conflict, and is a reminder that we live in interesting times and that our temporal and spatial location may influence us beyond our conscious awareness.
Citations:
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. “Interpreter of Maladies.” Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Penguin Books, 1979.
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