Jhumpa Lahiri’s Review
Jhumpa Lahiri is an American, award-winning author who comes from a Bengali family. In graduate school and after she began publishing biographical fiction short stories. In 1999, nine of the short stories were put into a short story collection called “Interpreter of Maladies”. Which is the year 2000, “Interpreter of Maladies” won the Pulitzer Prize and The Hemingway Foundation Award. In her work, she opens the eyes of people who don’t understand how it feels to be an Indian-American. This collection of short stories shows all the characters’ paths trying to find love from America to India. She illustrates her stories to capture some of the steady recurring themes of problems that cause relationships to crumble.
“A Temporary Matter” is the first of the nine stories in Lahiri’s short story collection, told in a third-person point of view of Shukumar. This short story is about a married couple, Shukumar and Shoba, who are mourning the loss of their child. Their child was stillborn after Shoba gave birth. In six months, the couple had not discussed anything about the baby, Shoba drowns herself in work and Shukumar is at home procrastinating his job. After dealing with the burden on their own for six months, they found a way to expose their ugly truths in the nightly blackouts occurring in their neighborhood. Every time they tell secrets Shukumar realizes he is falling in love with his wife all over again. Lahiri expressed this by writing, “His heart quickened. All day Shukumar had looked forward to the lights going out.” (“A Temporary Matter” 15) This is what caught my eye, the confessions in the dark caused Shukumar to change his view on his marriage and wanted to stop it from deteriorating.
“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” is another short story in Lahiri’s collection “Interpreter of Maladies”. Told in a first-person plural view, focusing on a woman named Bibi Haldar who suffers from an unknown disease that no one understands. She could have seizures at any time, so she is forced to stay home with her cousin and his wife. Bibi is treated as an outcast and mistreated by her own family. She believes her cure could be relations and achieves a different relationship than she had in mind. Before Bibi comprehended everything would change with her “cure”, she isolated herself after her uncle and his wife were driven out of town by boycotters because of the way she was treated. Jhumpa Lahiri emphasized Bibi’s isolation by writing, “Some months passed. Bibi had retreated into a deep and prolonged silence” (“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”89). A few months before Bibi realized she had to change before she could maintain the relationship she longed for, she fell into depression because she was lonely.
“Sexy” is the fifth short story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection told in the third person point of view. This short story takes place in Boston and is about a young woman named Miranda who was having an affair with an Indian man named Dev, whose wife was in India. While Dev’s wife was away he and Miranda would spend every day together, and at one point he called her sexy. This made Miranda feel desirable and it caused her to feel like what they were doing was right. But after Dev’s wife returns, Miranda has to babysit her friend Laxmi’s cousin’s son, Rohin. After he begs her to put on a dress she recently bought he also calls her sexy, and she begins to look at her affair differently. I noticed this when Lahiri wrote, “‘He sat next to someone they didn’t know, someone sexy, and now he loves her instead of my mother.’”(“Sexy”59) This was a statement made by Laxmi’s cousin’s son Rohin, this statement made Miranda start pondering in her mind about her affair.
The persisting matter in the short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri is the characters realizing they need to change to save or start their relationships. Jhumpa Lahiri gives her readers a look inside people’s relationships and gives a taste of her background as well making her stories unique. Though it may not be the change the character was seeking, the outcome of the change benefited all characters in the short story collection. I recommend Jhumpa Lahiri’s work to anyone to likes an intriguing realistic fiction story. Though the book was originally published in 1999, original and e-book versions are available everywhere online today.
