Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories in Interpreter of Maladies are full of muted, revealing scenes, with slightly peculiar characters. A young girl prays for the first time despite no-one ever having told her how to do so. A bride and groom are still strangers after one week of their new life together in the US. A young mother tells a total stranger (the interpreter of maladies) about the illegitimacy of her youngest son.
The same can be said of Mira Nair ‘s very well received movie The Namesake, which not surprisingly, was adapted from the novel by Lahiri.
Nair’s movies and Lahiri’s writing clearly fall under the genre of ethnic stories. Several decades ago, if there ever was an ethnic category in American literature, it would be the Jewish experience. Otherwise, the burden of a label would have fallen on “Southern.” But ethnic writers now inundate that genre, and usually from an angle of non-inclusion rather than the anguished attempts at fitting in that Jewish writers were so intent on doing. Gone are the days when writers are trying for the Great American Novel.
Lahiri, throughout her short stories, and especially in her novel, writes about the inability of her characters to ever attain the status of the non-hyphenated American, even in the second generation offspring that inhabit most of her tales. American-born Gogol from The Namesake realizes that his talent lies in architecture after visiting the Taj Mahal, not Notre Dame de Paris or St. Paul’s Cathedral, or even one of the great Russian Orthodox Churches (to acknowledge his name) whose onion domes resemble the Eastern architecture he learns to admire. This is a turning point in his maturity, because his most important decision is not based on a Western aesthetic, but on an Eastern, or Indian one.
There is a very telling moment in the short story When Mr. Prizada Came to Dine, where the young Lilia is begrudgingly recounting all the American history and geography she has to learn, and yet knows nothing of the Pakistan-Indian war that is taking place on her TV screen. One day, at the library, she abandons her project on the American Revolution and starts reading a book on Pakistan, when her teacher comes up to her and takes the book away. We realize that this will be a bitter memory for Lilia. But Lilia and Gogol are really alter egos of Lahiri, who has had to internalize these disappointments, and thus refuses to let go of the Eastern identity that she was so much expected to hide, and is now determined to reveal fully for the whole world to see, and sympathize with.
And sympathize we do. With the lonely life Gogol’s parents live, the existential disconnect that Lilia faces with a war half a world away, and even with Lahiri, who is obsessed with a country she can never call her own, and with another that insists she hyphenate herself.
Yet despite this sympathy, there are bigger questions to ask. For example, to what god is Lilia praying? In The Namesake, when Gogol’s mother Ashima learns that her husband has died, she runs out of her house bare feet into a yard glittering with Christmas decorations. Nair says in an interview that she feels alienated by Christmas, and that is why she used the glittering lights at this nadir of Ashima’s life.
Throughout these stories, we are slowly being acclimated to foreign gods and alien architecture. The insistence on hyphenation which Lahiri and Nair, and all their characters, pursue is surely spilling out of these stories and into our reality. Well, at least they’re entering into mainstream movie theatres, and no longer relegated to screenings in film festivals.
Lahiri is now married to a Hispanic-American editor of a Spanish language paper. She has a daughter, Noor and a son, Ocatvio. What was most revealing about her marital status is not the dual ethnicity shown in her children’s names . It is her wedding ceremony. This was an entirely Hindu affair, on location in Calcutta, with the bride and groom in full Indian wedding regalia. If there ever was a match of ethnicities, it seems that Lahiri has won hands down. And that, in multi-ethnic world, is really what happens. If “American” has been relegated to an ethnic condition, then the Lahiris and Nairs are certainly ahead in the race. Predictably, Lahiri promises that her next work will resume the theme of her hyphenated heritage with full force.
I wonder how Lahiri’s children, now second generation immigrants, will find their calling? Will they, like Gogol, have to travel across the world to the respective countries of their namesakes? Will our Western horizons be dotted with strange shapes based on alien gods?
In these stealthy ways, these are the messages that are revealed to me as I contemplate the consequences of Lahiri’s life and writing.