"Boundary" - A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri- from her collection Roman Stories - 2023

 "Boundary" - A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri- from her collection Roman Stories - 2023

At the same time I wonder what they know about the loneliness here. What do they know about the days, always the same, in our dilapidated cottage? The nights when the wind blows so hard the earth seems to shake, or when the sound of rain keeps me awake? The months we live alone among the hills, the horses, the insects, the birds that pass over the fields? Would they like the harsh quiet that reigns here all winter? “ from “The Boundary”

Jhumpa Lahiri is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of contemporary authors.  So far I have read and posted upon these of her books:

Interpreter of Maladies 1999 A Collection of Short Stories, Pulitzer Prize Winner

The Name Sake 2003

Unaccustomed Earth 2008 A Collection of Short Stories 

The Lowland 2013

The Clothing of Books - a nonfiction work on book jackets 

Additionally I have read and posted on eight  of her short stories, mostly in The New Yorker besides those in her two collections.

Jhumpa Lahiri first wrote “The Boundary” in Italian, then translated it into English ( the link above includes a discussion of her involvement with Italian and her life in Rome).  There is no geographic setting given in the story so I decided it was set in the hills of Tuscany, or my version was.  The narrator is a late teenage girl.  She lives with her parents.  Her father is the caretaker at an estate.  Her mother takes care of a sick man.  The owner, a wealthy foreigner rarely visits.  (They live in a small house.: When he does he rides horses during the day and reads at night.  In the summer time, the main house is rented out.  The narrator takes care of getting the house ready and making sure the visitors have what they need.

The girl and her family are foreigners, just like the visitors.  We don’t learn where they are from but we do learn the narrator feels out of place in school as she “looks different”.  We learn something shocking and heartbreaking as the story closes. It made me rethink my experience of the story.

I was able to obtain this collection via a Florida library through the Libby Application 

Whereabouts: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri -2021-167 Pages

 Whereabouts: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri -2021- 167 pages - first published in 2018 in Italian by the author and then in her translation in 2021

"Here you are, in the heart of the city, surrounded by the dead: all those souls still wreathed and garlanded, lined up like boxes in the post office. You always occupied your own space. You preferred dwelling in your own realm, closed off. How can I link myself to another person when I’m still struggling, even after your death, to eliminate the distance between you and my mother?" Spoken by the narrator at her father's grave site

 Whereabouts is the fifth novel by Jhumpa Lahiri I have had the great pleasure of reading. I am close to saying it is my favourite. This maybe because of the profound feeling of aloneness wbich the passing of my wife have brought upon me and which is reflected in the narrative.  

Whereabouts follows the daily activities of a 46 year old woman,a professor. We never learn what she teaches. She has never married, is childless, we never learn her name or where she lives but it does seem she lives in Europe. Never has she been outside the city in which she resides. She has a relationship with an older, married man, a writer and a scholar. There seems little passion between them. His wife is frequently out of town and they meet in his apartment. It seems almost like a way to kill time.

The narrator loves swimming in the local pool, but afterward, in the locker room, she eavesdrops on the naked women who chat and confess their misfortunes, which robs her of whatever contentment she had found. “As I take in these losses, these tragedies, it occurs to me that the water in the pool isn’t so clear after all,” Lahiri writes. “It reeks of grief, of heartache. It’s contaminated.” A carefree vacation reminds her of her unhappy origins. A pharmacist encourages her to pamper her skin with a scented oil, and she buys pills for her headaches.

The numerous reviews of Whereabouts in major sources like The New York Time, The Harvard Review, The Guardian all talk a lot about what is to be made of the fact that Lahiri originally wrote the work in Italian then translated it into English.  

The narrator toward the end of the novel is given a grant to participate in a symposium in her field she will travel outside of her country.

Perhaps I am reaching but I see the narrator's teaching, her love of reading, her frequent visits to her mother, whose death will set a bookmark in her life, her residing in a presumably ancient city as meditation on death.

The narrator's observations about those she encounters are acute, things of beauty. The prose exquisite. The chapters are all quite short and named after where the narrator is located as she goes about her day.

"Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012, and named Commendatore Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic) by President Sergio Mattarella in 2019. Editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, she has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, both as a novelist and as a translator." From the publisher 

 

“The Boundary”- A Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri from The New Yorker - January 29, 2018

“The Boundary” by Jhumpa Lahiri -


Jhumpa Lahiri on The Reading Life

“At the same time I wonder what they know about the loneliness here. What do they know about the days, always the same, in our dilapidated cottage? The nights when the wind blows so hard the earth seems to shake, or when the sound of rain keeps me awake? The months we live alone among the hills, the horses, the insects, the birds that pass over the fields? Would they like the harsh quiet that reigns here all winter? “ from “The Boundary”

Jhumpa Lahiri is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of contemporary authors.  So far I have read and posted upon these of her books:

Interpreter of Maladies 1999 A Collection of Short Stories, Pulitzer Prize Winner

The Name Sake 2003

Unaccustomed Earth 2008 A Collection of Short Stories 

The Lowland 2013

The Clothing of Books - a nonfiction work on book jackets 

Additionally I have read and posted on eight  of her short stories, mostly in The New Yorker besides those in her two collections.

Jhumpa Lahiri first wrote “The Boundary” in Italian, then translated it into English ( the link above includes a discussion of her involvement with Italian and her life in Rome).  There is no geographic setting given in the story so I decided it was set in the hills of Tuscany, or my version was.  The narrator is a late teenage girl.  She lives with her parents.  Her father is the caretaker at an estate.  Her mother takes care of a sick man.  The owner, a wealthy foreigner rarely visits.  (They live in a small house.: When he does he rides horses during the day and reads at night.  In the summer time, the main house is rented out.  The narrator takes care of getting the house ready and making sure the visitors have what they need.

The girl and her family are foreigners, just like the visitors.  We don’t learn where they are from but we do learn the narrator feels out of place in school as she “looks different”.  We learn something shocking and heartbreaking as the story closes. It made me rethink my experience of the story.

You can at the link I posted listen to the author read the story and read it yourself.  I did both and this is what I suggest.  It is a wonderful story very much worth your time.

Mel u

The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri (Forthcoming November 15, 2016, 80 pages)

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Jhumpa Lahiri is as immensely  wonderful writer.  I have read both of her short story collections and her two novels as well as some short stories not yet included in collections.  Additionally I have read and very highly recommend her introduction to Malgudi Nights, a collection of the short stories of a true master of the form, R. K. Narayan. 

The Clothing of Books should be taken as required reading by authors, bibliophiles, publishers, literary agents, book store owners, librarians and publicists.  The old saying is "you cannot judge a book by the cover" but as Lahiri tells us it sure can impact sales and reader expectations.  Lahiri begins her work, taken from a lecture, explaining how she was impacted in her youth by her appearance in an area with few of Subcontinent descent.  She saw how people formed impressions based on her appearance.  She grew up surrounded by books, she talks about her father's work as a librarian.  After the opening chapter she talks about the cover jackets for her own books.  Even a writer as successful as Lahiri is not fully in charge of the jacket art.  I was surprised to read  that with the many translations of her work, there have been over 100 jackets employed for her first four books.   Some are bland, others tried to capitalize on her ancestory, casting her work in an stereotypical Indian background.  

Lahiri talks about the good and bad qualities in book jackets.  I was interested to learn that she reads only hard copy books but she also talks about cover images for E books.  In one very interesting segment she tells about her favorite series of books and their jackets.  

The Clothing of Books was very informative.  I learned a lot about book jackets, as art and as sales tools.  But best of all it was just so enjoyable to read the elegant ever so refined and deeply cultured prose of Lahiri.  

I was kindly given a review copy of The Clothing of Books.  If you love real books, ok I know E books are real, then you will enjoy this book.

       This cover makes me really want to read this 

        Book

     This cover does nothing for me

Mel u

     

"Year's End" by Jhumpa Lahiri (from The New Yorker, December 24, 2007)

My Posts on Jhumpa Lahiri

Since beginning my blo log in July 2009 I have read and posted on eight short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri as well as her recent excellant novel, Lowlands.  Most of her work focuses on highly educated India emigrants living in America, often in Boston or New York City.  Her work deals with the difficulty of maintaining one's cultural identity while striving for material success in a new country.  Often her work centers on the children of first generation emigrants. 

I was very happy to find in the recently and temporarily opened archives of The New Yorker a story by Lahiri I had not yet read.  "Year's End" easily lived uo to my high expectations.  The narrator is a college student attending Swathmore, an elite college.  His father emigrated from Bombay along with his mother.  He was born in The U. S.  His mother died just a few years after he was born and he can hardly recall her.  One day he gets a call from his father,fifty-five and a successful businessman, letting him know he is back from a family visit to India. The father shocks him by telling him that he has remarried and his new wife and her two young daughters are with him. The marriage was arranged by his family, just as that of his parents was.  The father tries to say his family coerced him into it but the son knows nothing would have happened had he not wanted it.  His new step mother, a widow, is twenty years younger than his father and has brought her two young daughters with her.  Christmas is coming soon and the father wants to be sure his son, an only child, will be home.  Of course the son is shocked.

Meeting your new step-mother and much younger step sisters is a a very emotional minefield for the son.  He tries hard not to hold this against his father,not  to see it as a betrayal of his mother.  He tries to see the girls as his sisters and it is clear they desperately want him as a big brother.  He ends up taking revenge on them in a heartbreaking way.

"Year's End" is a very rich, subtle highly nuanced story.  I have deliberately left out the just overwhelming second half of the story.  

You can read this story here, as long as the archives are kept open.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/years-end

Mel u

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (2013)

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in 1967. She is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama.   She has a PhD in Renaissance Studies.   

 

She is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies(1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; The Namesake (2003), adapted into the popular film of the same name; Unaccustomed Earth (2008); and The Lowland (2013), longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.  The Lowland has also been long listed for the National Book Award.  In 2008 the judges for the Frank O'Connor international Prize declared Unaccustomed Earth the winner, dispersing with a short list, saying that her collection was overwhelmingly the best.  

There is additional background information on her in my prior posts.  I have read both of her short story collections.

The Lowland is a very good novel, fully worthy of both a Booker Prize and a National Book Award.  Like much of her prior work, the central characters are highly educated Bengali immigrants to the USA, in this case Rhode Island.  There are already numerous blog posts and reviews detailing the plot so I will not.   The novel covers sixty years or so in the lives of its central characters.   The characters are brilliantly developed.  It is about the power and pain of families, about immigration, about the love between brothers, about the impact of mothers, about trying to preserve your culture against the power of America.  There is a lot to be learned about Indian politics from this novel.  

I loved it when the novel moved briefly to Ireland.  The Lowland is a step up from her powerful short stories, which is saying a great deal.   The prose is exquisite.  

I think people will be reading The Lowland for many years to come.  I hope to read her first novel, The Namesake soon.  

"Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008, 60 pages)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

Jhumpa Lahiri

My Prior Posts on Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) won The Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies in 1999.   Her first novel Namesake, was made into a movie.   Many of her devoted readers say that the stories in her 2008 collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth show a significant advance in quality and depth from her first collection.  (There is some background information on Lahiri in my prior posts on her work.)

  Lahiri is a second generation Bengali Indian American.   Most of her stories focus on similar people.   All of the people in her stories I have so far read, with one exception, are driven to succeed high achievers dealing with the struggles to fit in a new society without losing your cultural heritage.   Her stories also focus on the conflicts of parents and their adult children.   Almost all of the parents had arranged marriages and it is hard for them to accept that their children will find their own spouses.  

The title story in the collection, "Unaccustomed Earth" is one of her longest stories.   The central characters are a seventy year old widower born in Calcutta and his thirty something daughter, a law school graduate, who lives in Seattle and is married to an American hedge fund manager who dotes on her but is rarely home. They have one child and she is now pregnant.   The father, who lives alone on the east coast of the USA, comes for a visit.   The daughter knows that Indian custom requires that he be invited to live with them.   Her husband says it is fine.   The father has spent his retirement years going on tours and he has met a Bengali woman, sixty five and he has formed a relationship with her.   The characters are wonderfully realized.   

Part of the story is with the problems people have of letting go of the memories of their childhood and the dynamics that can emerge when an adult child things his or her parents needs help to live.   It is also about the guilt that those whose spouse has died feel when the do form other bonds.

This is a very rich story with lots of great small details.   The people in the stories of Lahiri are very intelligent but they use their intelligence in such subtle ways that it is not always easy to see it.   

I loved this story and looking forward to reading all of her work.   

Mel u

"Real Durwan" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Real Durwan" by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999, 13 pages)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

The Short Stories of Jhumpa Lahiri

My Prior Posts on Jhumpa Lahiri

My Prior Posts on Indian Literature

After a bit of pondering I have decided to include my posts on the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri as part of my project on Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent.   She was born in England to parents from India and is a citizen of the USA.   Her stories are mostly about Indian immigrants to America.   I am currently reading her first collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies and posting on the short stories in the work.    (There is some background information on her in my prior posts on her stories.)  Upon  completion of the nine stories in this collection, I will then read the stories in her second collection, The Unaccustomed Earth.   

"Real Durwan", from The Interpreter of Maladies, is the first story by Jhumpa Lahiri that I have read that does not deal with Indian immigrants.  I will just post briefly on it.   The central character is an old woman who works as a durwan in an apartment building in in India.   A durwan seeps the stairs in the building and keeps the common area clean and does whatever else the residents want of her.   She also serves as a kind of watch person.   The building is not in a fancy part of the city, the residents are all struggling to make a living.    The durwan is allowed to sleep where ever she can in the building, either on the stairs  or sometimes out on the yard or on the roof.   People give her food scraps to eat.    The durwan tells everyone about how she used to be very rich and live in total luxury.   People do not really believe her but no one cares enough about her to challenge her claim.   Something tragic happens in the story.


This is another very good story that takes us into the lives of ordinary people.

Mel u

Two Short Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

"When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" (1999, 20 pages)

"Interpreter of Maladies"  (1999, 27 pages)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

The Short Stories of Jhumpa Lahiri

My Prior Posts on Jhumpa Lahiri

My Prior Posts on Indian Literature

After a bit of pondering I have decided to include my posts on the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri as part of my project on Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent.   She was born in England to parents from India and is a citizen of the USA.   Her stories are mostly about Indian immigrants to America.   I am currently reading her first collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies and posting on the short stories in the work.    (There is some background information on her in my prior posts on her stories.)  Upon  completion of the nine stories in this collection, I will then read the stories in her second collection, The Unaccustomed Earth.   

"When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dinner" is set in 1971.   It is told by the daughter of a professor, living and teaching in the United States and is about their relationship with Mr. Pirzada, a frequent dinner guest.   Mr.  Pirzada is from Dacca, then part of Pakistan and is a  Mulslim. The host family are from Indian and are Hindus.    In Dakka Mr. Pirzada had a wife of twenty years, a lectureship in botany and six daughters.   He was in the USA on a grant to write a book about the changing of the leaves in New England.  The grant was modest and he lived in a dorm room.   Back home in Dakka teachers were being dragged into the streets and shot, girls were being taken into barracks and raped in religious riots.   He has not heard from his family for months.   The Indian family was in the habit of having him over for dinner.    When war started between Indian and Pakistan they kept up the custom but the old openness was a little lost.  I will not tell more of the plot of this great story.   It a wonderful account of a man coping with terrible stress and off how a war far away, a war that makes little real sense changes so many lives.  It is also about religious conflicts as Mr. Pirizada is a Muslim and his hosts are Hindus.

"The Interpreter of Maladies", the title story in the collection, is about a married couple, Mr and Mrs Das from India, now living in the USA in New Jersey, who have come back to India on vacation, along with their kids.   Mr. Kapasai  is their guide.   He cannot help but notice the shaved, largely bares legs of Mrs. Das, who has adopted a purely American style.   They are on their way to see the Sun Temple at Konarak.  The guide notices how young the couple is, under thirty, they have a daughter and two sons.   They looked Indian but dressed like foreigners.   Mr. Kapasai often guides tourists for an agency as he has an excellent command of English.   We see the family trying to get used to India.  One of the boys sees a goat by the side of the road and wants to give it a piece of gum.   The guide, in his fifties, is fascinated by Mrs. Das, she is so much bolder than most Indian women.   It is not just that but she takes a personal interest in him, asking him about his life.   She finds out he has another job also.  He works as an interpreter for a doctor.  Many of the doctor's patients speak a language the doctor does not and the guide's job is to translate for the patients and the doctor.   On the way to the temple the couple and their children are amazed when they see some monkeys and horrified when their son is attacked by one of the monkeys.    Mrs Das tells the guide something shocking.     As the trip process she asks for his address and tells him she will send him pictures of the trip.   He begins to imagine they will develop a close bond via letters.   I will not tell the ending of this story but it is really a profound commentary on colonialism, among other things.

Do you have a favorite story by Jhumpa Lahiri?   

Mel u

"A Temporary Matter" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"A Temporary Matter" by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999, 22 pages)

Jhumpa Lahiri is a very highly regarded short story writer and novelist.   Her first collection of stories, in which "A Temporary Matter" is included, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 her second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, won the Frank O'Connor Prize for best collection of short stories.     Most of her stories are about Bengali immigrants living in The United States or their children.   Her parents were from India, she was born in London and is now a US citizen.   (There is more information about her very distinguished career here).   There are nine short stories in Interpreter of Maladies, I have already posted on one of them, "Sexy", and hope to post on the other eight in relatively short order.

"A Temporary Matter" is about an immigrant couple, living in Baltimore, Maryland in the  USA.  The man is in his six year in  graduate school working on his PhD.   The couple has just gotten a notice from the power company saying repairs to the system will require the power to be cut off everyday for a while, starting at eight P. M.   The wife works outside the home, they are childless, the wife having miscarried six months ago.   The wife was three weeks from her scheduled delivery date when her husband needed to go to an academic conference.  He did not want to go but his wife insisted as it would be good for networking.   She miscarried  while he is at the conference and he returned just at the end of her labor.   He and his wife tried to keep their feeling of closeness but somehow events like this often have bad consequences for weak marriages.   He and his wife do not fight but they somehow become "experts at avoiding each other".   He no longer looked forward to weekends when they could be together.   At first he hopes it will pass.   They still have sex but it feels like it is more because they think it is something they should do .   They take the occasion of the hour of darkness to try to re-bond.   They cook each other special meals and than something the enjoy. The husband thinks it is working, that the marriage is mending.   Then his wife tells him that, just as a "temporary matter" she has found and will move into her own apartment.  He knows now all of her behavior of seeming to want to repair their marriage was a lie as she had been arranging her apartment the whole time.   He takes a terrible revenge on her, a stab at the heart not the body.

This is a wonderful story about the loss of feeling in marriage, about deception and emptiness.

I look forward to reading her other stories.

Mel u

"Gogol" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Gogol"  by Jhumpa Lahiri (June 16, 2003, 12 pages in The New Yorker)

"Gogol" is the fourth short story by  Jhumpa Lahiri  (all can be found on the web page of The New Yorker) I have read so far.   (There is background information on her in my other posts).   I liked all three of her prior stories a lot    I liked  "Gogol" a good bit more than her other three stories.   Like her other stories, it is set among Indian immigrants to Boston.    The men in the stories are often engineers and the women are either stay at home mothers or professional women.

"Gogol" starts out in India.    We learn about a father that anybody in the reading life would love to have had or maybe in some cases try to emmulate.  The father got his love of reading from his own father.   He read all of Dickens as a child, contemporary writers to him like Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham  (both coming soon on my blog) but his real love was for the Russians.        His favorite writer was Nickolai Gogol.

I think a lot of people will read this story so I will not tell any of the plot (other than to say structurally it is a perfect circle).     It is a very powerful story of the immigrant experience, of the power of naming and memory.    It is about how what we read (or do not) gives depth to our lives and perceptions.    It is about family binds and tradition.    It is about generational gaps.    It is about America and India.

I just loved this passage and from it you can judge from it if you like the prose of Lahiri:

"As a teen-ager he had gone through all of Dickens. He read newer authors as well, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, .. But most of all he loved the Russians. His paternal grandfather, a former professor of European literature at Calcutta University, had read from them aloud in English translation when Ashoke was a boy. Each day at teatime, as his brothers and sisters played kabadi and cricket outside, Ashoke would go to his grandfather’s room, and for an hour his grandfather would read supine on the bed, his ankles crossed and the book propped open on his chest, Ashoke curled at his side. For that hour Ashoke was deaf and blind to the world around him. He did not hear his brothers and sisters laughing on the rooftop, or see the tiny, dusty, cluttered room in which his grandfather read. “Read all the Russians, and then reread them,” his grandfather had said. “They will never fail you.” When Ashoke’s English was good enough, he began to read the books himself. It was while walking on some of the world’s noisiest, busiest streets, on Chowringhee and Gariahat Road, that he had read pages of “The Brothers Karamazov,” and “Anna Karenina,” and “Fathers and Sons.” Ashoke’s mother was always convinced that her eldest son would be hit by a bus or a tram, his nose deep into “War and Peace”—that he would be reading a book the moment he died."

I have read comments on Lahiri that say her focus as a writer is to narrow to achieve true greatness one day.   I could not disagree more.    I think there is one more story in the open to the public portion of the web page of  The New Yorker (some of these stories are in her collections) which I hope to read soon. 






You can read this story Here

"Once in a Life Time" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Once in a Life Time" by Jhumpa Lahiri (May 8, 2006, 10 pages, The New Yorker)


Short  readers of the world owe a great debt to The New Yorker.    In a true show of generosity they make many of the wonderful short stories they have published available for anyone to read for free on their web page.    Several of  of the stories of Jhumpa Lahiri can be read there.    I have previously posted on her "Heaven and Hell" and very recently on "Sexy".     I loved both of these stories.   I read a third of her stories "Once in a Life Time"  yesterday.

Like almost all of her work, "Once in a Life Time"  deals with highly educated Bengali immigrants to the USA.   Most of the men in these stories are engineers.   The women are divided among stay at home mothers dedicated to preserving the traditions of their culture and modern career women.    The characters in the story are very driven to succeed and often do indulge in conspicuous consumption to demonstrate their wealth.   The children are rapidly Americanized.

To be very brief  in this post (I hope!)  "Once Upon a Life Time" is narrated by the early teenage daughter of a couple.     Her parents have been friends for many years with another couple who used had left the USA and returned to India.   Years later they decide to return to the USA as the man has landed a very good job.    They ask if they can stay with their old friends until they get settled and find a house of  their own.    The  couple from Indian bring with them their teenage son.  

The story is about the relationship of  the couples and of the two teenagers.   It is a story of perception and confusion.    Lahiri's portrayal of the relationships in the story are really well done.   There is a tragic ending to the story that will powerfully impact many readers of the story.  

"Once in a Life Time" can be read HERE


Mel u

"Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri  (8 pages, 1998 in The New  Yorker)


In April of last year I read and posted on Jhumpa Lahiri's short story "Heaven and Hell".   I am glad to have now read a second of her stories.   Lahari  was born in 1967 in London, the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants.   When she was three the family moved to the USA.   Lahiri has a Ph.D. in renaissance studies from Boston University.   She won the Pulitzer Price in 2000 for her first collection of short stories  Interpreter of Maladies. Her second collection Unaccustomed Earth won the Frank O'Connor International Price for best collection of short stories in 2008.    Most of her stories deal with Bengali immigrants to the USA.   She has also written a novel, The Namesake.


"Sexy" is told in the first person by an American woman,  rather than Lahiri's normal Bengali narrator.    She is friends at work with a lady from India and she is basically her only source of knowledge about India. On day she meets a to her an exotic looking man.   She does not at first realize he is from India.   Knowing he is married she starts an affair with him.   His wife is living in India.    She slowly begins to realize that the man wants her only for sex.   One has to assume the man somehow feels less guilt in having an affair with an American woman than with an Indian woman.   She begins to feel guilty when her Indian friend at work tells her that her husband is leaving her for another woman.   In just a few pages Lahiri brings the characters to life and creates a world for them to abide in.

The story is beautifully written and deeply insightful.    At the end the woman achieves a kind of insight and feels a sense of shame about her affair.    It is a lesson she learns from baby sitting for the eight year old son of a cousin of her work friend.    I will soon, I hope, read and post on another of her New Yorker stories and I do plan to read all of her work.  

I think Lahiri may well be one day considered one of the truly great short story writers.

It is generous of The New Yorker to allow the story to be read for free HERE.

If you have read some of her work, please leave a comment with your experience.

Mel u

"Heaven and Hell" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Heaven and Hell" by Jhumpa Lahiri is from her second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (2008).   She won the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.    Dailylit.com has this story available in ten installments and it can be read there for free.    I read the first installment yesterday and was so taken into the world of the story that I read the other nine today.    The story seems like it would be about twenty pages long in book format.   I am grateful to Dailylit.com and Jhumpa Lahiri for making this story available for free.  ( It was a suggestion of Christina T of Reading Extensively that alerted me to look for work by Jhumpa Lahiri and I thank her for her great suggestion)

I voiced the "complaint" some time ago that I feel the reason I have not read more short stories in the past is that when reading I like to enter the world of the characters and the story.   It seems to me the vehicle of the short story was not suitable for this purpose so I over the years have not really read many short stories at all.   I now see that the vehicle of the short story can be used to to develop a complete world, in the hands of a master.   

Most of her stories are about Bengali immigrants adjusting to live in America while struggling to maintain their cultural identity as Indians.   There are five main characters in "Heaven and Hell".   Pranab Chakrobarty is a graduate student at M I T, a super prestigious technical college in Boston.   He is very homesick for India, especially the food.   One day he sees a Bengali woman and her little girl on the street.  He speaks to them and explains to the mother how home sick he has become.   The woman,  Usha, is homesick herself and invites him to join her and her husband for a meal.   Usha's husband is a research scientist, emotionally detached and interested in little more than his research.   Pranab becomes a regular visitor to the house and the little girl comes to see him as her uncle.   The mother falls in love with him  (her marriage to husband was arranged as is the custom among her social class).   Her husband is too involved in his research to see what is going on.   Lahiri does a great job of bringing  these people to life.   The use of food to convey a sense of culture is masterful.  (I read somewhere that an immigrant to a new country will give us his religion, his language, his culture, and other things but not his food!)   

The story covers about 25 years in the lives of the characters and we really do feel we know what is going on in their lives.   A lot of very interesting things happen and I do not want to give away any more of the in fact exciting plot.    Reading this story on line for free at Dailylit.com was a great way for me to sample her work.   I will for sure now buy her two collections of short stories and perhaps her novel, The Namesake (2003) also.  

Lahiri (Nilanjana Sudeshna is her real name) was born in London in 1967.   Her parents were Bengali immigrants and they moved to the United States when she was three.  Her father was a librarian in Rhode Island.   She has stated that she considers herself an American.    She had a PH.D from Boston University in Renaissance Studies.