Interpreter of Maladies: Stories: Jhumpa Lahiri

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The balance seems to shift decisively in favor of a happy ending when, on the fifth evening, the narrator declares, “They had survived a difficult time.” Shoba’s silence that evening has been interpreted as the calm after a storm. But that interpretation is as misleading as Shoba’s behavior has been. Readers, like Shukumar, have been given mixed signals and only learn at the end which set of clues was reliable. It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months.” The Third and Final Continent: The narrator lives in India, then moves to London, then finally to America. The title of this story tells us that the narrator has lived in three different continents and chooses to stay in the third, North America.

Lahiri, Jhumpa (1999). Interpreter of maladies: stories ([Book club kit ed.]ed.). Boston [u.a.]: Houghton Mifflin. pp.Praise For. ISBN 0-395-92720-X. Importantly, the divide separating Mr. Kapasi from the Das family is not just cultural, but also one of affluence and wealth. Mr. and Mrs. Das are clearly of a higher economic status than Mr. Kapasi. For one thing, they can afford to go on a family vacation in India. Their clothes and the expensive accessories they carry (such as the camera with a “telephoto lens” that Mr. Das continually snaps pictures with), all signal their relative material comfort. Customs shared by Lilia and her parents are also shared by Mr. Pirzada. From Lilia’s perspective, the division of Pakistanis and Indians is arbitrary. When her father tells her that Mr. Pirzada is no longer Indian, she inspects him and his actions for clues of difference. This echoes her own relationship with her father, who worries that her American education is making her no longer Indian. However, America allows for Mr. Pirzada and Lilia’s father to dine together, worry together and laugh together. Assimilation is seen as both positive and negative.As these examples of deception are revealed throughout the story, it is clear that Shoba and Shukumar’s emotional estrangement began before the loss of their baby. They have always dealt with difficult situations and unpleasant emotions by lying and keeping secrets. When Shoba breaks the stalemate that their grief has caused by initiating a deceptive game, she is following an established pattern. Throughout the week of power outages, Shoba appears to be reaching out to Shukumar. In truth, she is engineering her final separation from him. A Temporary Matter: A married couple, Shukumar and Shoba, live as strangers in their house until an electrical outage brings them together when all of sudden "they [are] able to talk to each other again" in the four nights of darkness. As I end, let me borrow from the book's goodreads summary. I do believe that this paragraph captures that very essence of Ms. Lahiri's beautiful craftsmanship.

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Interpreter of Maladies: Mr. and Mrs. Das, Indian Americans visiting the country of their heritage, hire a middle-aged tour guide Mr. Kapasi as their driver for the day as they tour. Ketu H. Katrak reads Interpreter of Maladies as reflecting the trauma of self-transformation through immigration, which can result in a series of broken identities that form "multiple anchorages." Lahiri's stories show the diasporic struggle to keep hold of culture as characters create new lives in foreign cultures. Relationships, language, rituals, and religion all help these characters maintain their culture in new surroundings even as they build a "hybrid realization" as Asian Americans. [6] The beauty which lies in this story are that the protagonists are real people and not larger than life characters and hence the readers can identify with them and emphasize with their plight. The reader is engrossed in the storyline to such an extent that he no longer remains a reader but a mute spectator in the story travelling with the characters. Such is the strength of presentation of the writer. Noelle Brada-Williams notes that Indian-American literature is under-represented and that Lahiri deliberately tries to give a diverse view of Indian Americans so as not to brand the group as a whole. She also argues that Interpreter of Maladies is not just a collection of random short stories that have common components, but a " short story cycle" in which the themes and motifs are intentionally connected to produce a cumulative effect on the reader: "...a deeper look reveals the intricate use of pattern and motif to bind the stories together, including recurring themes of the barriers to and opportunities for human communication; community, including marital, extra-marital, and parent-child relationships; and the dichotomy of care and neglect." [5]