Unaccustomed Earth (Aut. Jhumpa Lahiri)

In this book, a collection of eights stories in two parts, Jhumpa Lahiri outdoes the humane literary genius she displayed in The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. Like her previous tales, the most recent ones are about first and second-generation Bengali immigrants in the United States. Her narrative style pays close attention to small, seemingly trivial items that compose the domestic sphere and populate the lives of dis/placed migrants. This sphere is the fragile zone where the negotiation of cultural identity and inter-generational conflict takes place. Also important is the subtlety in the writerly staging of this conflict as rarely do we come across shouting matches or catastrophic events. Instead, there are siblings growing apart, spaces left by dead mothers that the surviving members of the family struggle to fill, inter-cultural marriages and relationships that are often not very different in their love-strife dichotomy from unions arranged by parents, lives variously taken over by lovers and careers, and children who inherit both a heritage and a sense of loss.

As the book progressed, the stories seemed to become more tragic rather than being simple chronicles of the migrant condition. When the flawed hero of the final story jumped into the fatal tidal waves of the oncoming tsunami, I was compelled to confront this question - Are these stories life-affirming or simply realistic? While I, as a displaced reader, would like to cling to any remnant of hope, it appears that Lahiri is keen for this hope to emerge from the loss itself. The loss then, whether cultural or human or material, becomes an absence with the potential to be filled with something else. Something equally flawed, equally tangible.