two reviews of

Interpreter of Maladies
and other stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999
198 pages; $12

Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of nine stories, marks the debut of a remarkable Indian-American writer. A grand debut it is! Her title story has been selected for both the O'Henry award and the annual Best American Short Stories. Topping this, the book, last month, won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2000.

Born in London of Indian parents and raised in Rhode Island, Jhumpa Lahiri studied at Boston University, receiving a Ph. D. in English. The stories in her first book focus on the intercultural miscommunications and conflicts all too often experienced by Indian immigrants and second generation Indian-Americans.

"Interpreter of Maladies," at 27 pages the longest in the collection, is a multi-layered story about a second-generation Indian-American couple, who along with their three children are visiting India and hire a tour-guide to see the famous Sun Temple at Konarak. Their guide, Mr. Kapasi (we never learn his first name), becomes curious about the couple who look Indian, yet dress like American tourists and speak with an American accent he had heard many times on American TV shows.

The opening sentences describe the bickering that symptomizes this failing marriage. Mr. Kapasi works as a tour guide only on weekends, and has another job during the weekdays as an interpreter in a doctor's office -- translating the Gujarati spoken by some of his patients. Mina Das, the wife proclaims his job as an interpreter of maladies as "romantic."

Perked up, Mr. Kapasi, from whose point of view the whole story is told and whose own marriage is faltering, looks at her closely: "Her sudden interest in him, an interest she did not express in either her husband or her children, was mildly intoxicating. When Mr. Kapasi thought once again about how she had said 'romantic,' the feeling of intoxication grew." He begins to fantasize a romantic relationship with her.

The couple invite him to be included in the photographs they take; Mina asks him for his address so they can send him copies from America. This feeds his fantasy.

At the crisis point of the story, when the two of them are in the car, Mina discloses (although the author uses the word "confesses") to Mr. Kapasi that one of the couple's two boys was clandestinely fathered by her husband's Punjabi-Indian friend during a brief visit. This is the malady which she hopes Mr. Kapasi will provide a remedy for. However, all the interpreter of maladies can come up with is: "Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?" After all, he is only a translator of native languages.

In the closing paragraph, Mr. Kapasi observes the little paper on which he had so carefully written his address slip out of Mina's handbag. "No one but Mr. Kapasi noticed. He watched as it rose, carried higher and higher by the breeze, into the trees where the monkeys now sat, solemnly observing the scene below. Mr. Kapasi observed it too, knowing that this was the picture of the Das family he would preserve forever in his mind."

"The Third and Final Continent" is a first-person story of an Indian immigrant who looks back at his first few weeks in America, thirty years ago. In the late 1960s, at age thirty-six, he arrives to work as a librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after having studied for four years in London (his second continent). Just before coming to America, he takes a trip to Calcutta to "attend" his arranged marriage, staying there only a week, barely getting acquainted with his bride. She has to await her visa for six weeks before she can join him in America.

On arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the narrator checks into the local YMCA and later rents a room in the home of a 103-year-old widow, Mrs. Croft, who lives by herself. She is a stay-at-home eccentric mother of a 68-year-old daughter, who thinks it improper that her visiting daughter wears a dress high above her ankle. "For your information, Mother, it's 1969. What would you do if you actually left the house one day and saw a girl in a miniskirt?" Mrs. Croft sniffs: "I'd have her arrested."

When the narrator's wife, Mala, arrives from Calcutta, Mrs. Croft scrutinizes her "from top to toe with what seemed to be placid disdain. I wondered if Mrs. Croft had ever seen a woman in a sari, with a dot painted on her forehead and bracelets stacked on her wrists. I wondered what she would object to. I wondered if she could see the red dye still vivid on Mala's feet, all but obscured by the bottom edge of her sari. At last Mrs. Croft declared, with equal measure of disbelief and delight I know well: 'She is a perfect lady!' "

It is this scrutiny that first evokes the narrator's empathy with his bride for it reminds him of his own experiences as a bewildered stranger in London. Looking back, "I like to think of that moment in Mrs. Croft's parlor as the moment when the distance between Mala and me began to lessen."

All nine of the stories are a showcase of elegant craft.

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Jhumpa Lahiri's
Interpreter of Maladies  stories

(2) Reviewed by Amy McCurdy

[Editor's intro: Amy McCurdy is a Berkeley-based writer who has been a bookseller and publicist for the past ten years. She has a bachelor's degree from California State University, Fullerton, and a master's from the University of Leicester, England. - - c. j. wallia]

A common thread running through Lahiri's collection of stories is the experience of being "foreign." Her characters long for meaningful connection, but what they find is rarely what they expected. Those trying to adapt to an unfamiliar world don't always succeed. Some are homesick, many are misunderstood.

In "Mrs. Sen's," Lahiri chronicles the struggle of a woman who finds herself cut off from her milieu. The narrator is 11-year-old Eliot, and Mrs. Sen is his after-school babysitter. Eliot's mother was originally looking for someone to come stay with Eliot until she returned home from work each day. But Mrs. Sen, who recently moved with her professor husband from India to the small New England town, can't drive. We learn early on that Mrs. Sen doesn't need to work, she's only looking for a way to fill up her lonely afternoons while her husband teaches all day.

Eliot's mother is skeptical at first. They go to the Sen's home for an interview, and Eliot can't help noticing the strangeness of the apartment: how shoes are lined up on a small bookcase by the front door, the TV and phone covered with pieces of fabric. Both Mr. and Mrs. Sen wear flip-flops, and Mrs. Sen is dressed in an elegant sari. "Yet it was his mother, Eliot had thought, in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd."

Eliot quickly becomes aware of Mrs. Sen's loneliness, her bewilderment in a strange new culture. She alarms him by asking: "Eliot, if I began screaming right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come?" At home in India, she explains, "...just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements."

She spends a good part of the afternoon chopping vegetables for the elaborate meals she prepares for herself and Mr. Sen. She tells Eliot that she brought the huge blade she uses from India. Whenever there is a large celebration, "...my mother sends out word in the evening for all the neighborhood women to bring blades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormous circle on the roof of our building, laughing and gossiping and slicing fifty kilos of vegetables through the night."

Afternoons when Eliot gets off the bus at the edge of the complex, Mrs. Sen is already there, and seems to have been waiting for some time. She gives Eliot some snacks she produces from her pockets, and then they get into the car and she practices driving around the complex awhile. She is not allowed to drive onto the main road without her husband.

Eliot becomes Mrs. Sen's companion and confidante, and ultimately, witness to her unraveling. He discovers that she lives for the two things that make her happy: letters from home, and whole fresh fish from the sea. Since she can't drive, Mrs. Sen must rely on her husband to take her to the fish market, but he is busy and resentful of her persistent requests. Once, she and Eliot take a bus instead, and on the way back, a passenger complains to the bus driver about the smelly bag Mrs. Sen carries in her lap.

Through Eliot, we are able to feel compassion for Mrs. Sen, with "her odor of mothballs and cumin," her fear and frustration learning to drive, her attempts to connect with Eliot's mother. She always insisted that his mother come sit in the living room and have some food she's prepared. "His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen's concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. 'It's delicious,' she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn't like the tastes; she'd told him so once in the car."

In "A Temporary Matter," a young couple, whose marriage is at an impasse, receives a notice from the power company explaining that their neighborhood will be without power one hour each evening, at eight, for the next five days.

On the first evening, they sit down to a candlelit dinner, their first meal together in months, Shukumar, the husband, tells us. He makes an effort, putting out embroidered place mats and special wineglasses. While he's making these preparations, we learn that they had a baby who'd died at birth. Shoba, his wife, used to be very capable and organized. She paid bills on time, and was always prepared for surprises. Now she was distracted, her clothes left lying around the house. Their responses to grief are opposite: as Shoba stays away, working late, burying herself in work even at home, Shukumar becomes a hermit, and cannot focus on his work at all.
During dinner, Shoba proposes a game she used to play with relatives during power outages in India, in which each person takes a turn sharing something with the others. She suggests they tell each other something they've never told before. She tells Shukumar that she'd looked in his address book when they were first dating, to see if he'd written her in. Shukumar reveals that he'd forgotten to tip the waiter on their first date, and had had to return to the restaurant, in another town, the next day.
What ensues is a series of disclosures exchanged between Shukumar and Shoba during the dark hour, revealing "the little ways they'd hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves."

Although Shukumar is wary of this game at first, he begins to look forward to their meals and this exchange with anticipation. "Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again." Shukumar becomes hopeful, seeing this as the beginning of the restoration of their relationship. On the fourth night, they make love.

But Shukumar has misunderstood the point of Shoba's game. For during this time, when he thinks they are growing closer, when it seems they might survive their grief after all, Shukumar learns through Shoba's final admission that she has been planning to move out. She returns home on the fifth night to announce that she has signed a lease. "All this time she'd been looking for an apartment, testing the water pressure, asking a Realtor if heat and hot water were included in the rent. It sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened."

Shukumar reveals to us that Shoba's one consolation was that they did not know the sex of their baby. She believed keeping that information a mystery lessened the blow somehow, the only thing she'd ever wanted to remain a surprise. However, unbeknownst to Shoba, Shukumar had held the baby in the hospital before the doctor took it away, and he knew it had been a boy. Realizing they've reached an impasse, Shukumar makes this his final confession to Shoba.

"A Temporary Matter" is the most moving of the nine tales in Lahiri's collection. It is so tenderly written that by the end, we feel sorrow for both Shoba and Shukumar, for what they shared and lost, "for the things they now knew."

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