Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Random House
338 pages
Rs450

There’s been a load of humbug written about how Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories are about the ‘diasporic experience’. Those who retail such facile commentary should be whacked on the head with their keyboards and force-fed fifty printouts of their own McCriticism.

Because to say that Lahiri describes ‘the trials and tribulations’ of Indian/Bengali migrants in the US is like saying that Moby Dick describes the trials and tribulations of whaling. Not only is it misleading and idiotic, it is unfair to the writer, for how many of us are really interested in reading about whaling?

True, like Interpreter Of Maladies, her first collection of stories, and her novel, The Namesake, Lahiri’s third book mines the experience of Bengalis planted, thousands of miles away from their land of origin, on unaccustomed American earth.

But the migrant experience is only the difficult, unpredictable sea where each of Lahiri’s modest little Ahabs battle their own individual Moby Dicks. The scale may be less epic, the battle not so spectacular, but let the authorial eye focus long and hard on the dead skin of everyday routine, and sure enough, it peels off. What you see beneath is what Lahiri’s books are about.

The eponymous opening story, for instance, sets in relief the welter of feelings that define the relationship between a retired father living by himself following the death of his wife, and his married daughter, who has to cope with the responsibility of raising a family on her own in a land which she still cannot call her home; a situation not very different from what her mother faced when she moved from India to America decades ago.

The father sees his wife in his lonely, struggling daughter; the daughter recognises the typical American man in her widower father who is now seeking companionship with another woman.

The most miraculous feature of Unaccustomed Earth is the prose. Seldom has language so plain unearthed emotional landscapes so bleak in their desolation. Though the stories are all set in the US, and the characters mostly Bengali-Americans, the travails of the migrant, in Lahiri’s hands, ultimately become a metaphor for the universal human struggle of learning to cope with the traumas of life; something which no one, not even the Bengalis of Gariahat and Tollygunge — thriving in a cultural gravy cooked long, long ago in the mustard oil of the famed Bengal Renaissance — can escape.  

By far the best story in the book is ‘Nobody’s Business’, a love story that also explores the dynamics of relationships that form between housemates. Sang (short for Sangeetha) is in love with Farouk. Sang’s housemate, Paul, harbours a secret crush on her.

One day Paul answers a call — on the common phone — from Deirdre, a woman who claims to be Farouk’s lover. Should he tell Sang about the call? Won’t she suspect his motive if he did so? But if he loved her, or even if only as her friend, shouldn’t he tell her about her two-timing boyfriend? But then, as a housemate, is it any of his business?

The barely acknowledged guilt over an old act of cruelty, a sudden fear that glides across a face like the shadow of a bird, a sense of loss that seems to have no discernible origin — Lahiri misses nothing, her finely tuned prose teasing out emotions that would barely register on the Richter scale of consciousness.

And it is in simple daily events, such as studying for an exam, washing clothes, shopping, or making dinner, that Lahiri finds the telling detail that opens up a character. In ‘Only Goodness’ an innocent — and not so uncommon — bonding ritual between two siblings, Sudha and Rahul, comes back to haunt the former when her brother becomes an alcoholic, is thrown out of college, and ends up a ‘failure’ living off his father. Her parents still cannot disown him, but she is stunned to discover that she can. 

Lahiri demonstrates that the bonds of love, family, friendship — much as we like to romanticise them in our ‘Indian’ sentimental way of thinking — all have their tensile limits. Perhaps, starved of native cultural nutrient, they have become weak.

But they are, nevertheless, newly vulnerable in an alien soil. In Lahiri’s Zen-like vision of life, the truth about our selves is to be found not in our grand passions, but in the little attachments: “In the end, that was life: a few plates, a favourite comb, a pair of slippers, a child’s string of beads.”

Unaccustomed Earth is a bleak book. Those who dislike depressing films and read fiction primarily to escape from the stress-inducing detritus of the workplace will not find this collection appealing.

In purely literary terms, however, this volume is flawless. With these stories, Lahiri has managed to refine further her own fictional universe which, though it has no name, is as distinctive as RK Narayan’s Malgudi or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or Haruki
Murakami’s mysterious urban landscapes.

She can now afford to spend the rest of her life populating this world with more and more brooding, sensitive, middle-class Bengali-Americans. What matters is whether you like the world she creates with words. Given the maturity and elegance of her craft, this can only be a question of taste, not merit. If you are open to some unaccustomed reading pleasure, the eight stories in this collection could leave you in a mood of sweet and meditative melancholy.
sampath@dnaindia.net