Interpreter of Maladies: Stories: Jhumpa Lahiri

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The story is told from the first person perspective of Lilia, primarily in her 10th year. Choosing to tell this story through the eyes of a child somewhat mitigates the heavy topic. The war between India and Pakistan in 1971 is witnessed from a distance both geographically and emotionally. While Lilia’s parents fret over a skirmish thousands of miles away, Lilia is more concerned with her own life. The candy that Mr. Pirzada lavishes on Lilia becomes a prayer for the safety of his daughters. Her awareness of the contrast between her situation and Mr. Pirzada’s daughters opens her eyes to the complicated political struggle on a personal level. In this case, the lessons learned by Lilia are the same learned by the reader but in a more literary, less didactic way. Jhumpa Lahiri’s, “Interpreter of Maladies,” tells the story of a family on a trip who consistently face communication issues and Mr. Kapasi, a much wiser man, who is expected to repair the problems of the family. Throughout the story, we learn about the dysfunctions of both the Das and Kapasi family. While some may argue that Lahiri does not believe in the power of communication, it is self evident that Lahiri does in fact believe in the power of communication. The Third and Final Continent: The narrator lives in India, then moves to London, then finally to America. The title of this story tells us that the narrator has lived in three different continents and chooses to stay in the third, North America. You know a book's good when someone asks you for a synopsis, or snippet, or impression, and all you can do is smile there, enveloped in some subtle magic that only you know about, & kinda forget what it was all about altogether. This happened with "Interpreter of Maladies", a perfectly-titled collection of short stories about Indian Americans in India or in the U.S. Their ages & experiences range from children to marrieds to 103 year-olds, from tourism in the old world to the natural assimilation to a new one. pretty mediocre in my opinion but it's my first time reading Lahiri books and she has a flair for words.

A Temporary Matter: A married couple, Shukumar and Shoba, live as strangers in their house until an electrical outage brings them together when all of sudden "they [are] able to talk to each other again" in the four nights of darkness. Short story, on the other hand, is like literary speed dating; it only has so much time to set itself apart and make a somewhat decent expression. It's much easier for me to think of good novelists than good short story writers. Let's try - Hemingway, Poe, Bradbury, Chekhov, maybe a few more. Well, I guess Jhumpa Lahiri can join the exclusive club. Her novel The Namesake left me wanting more, but her short stories are very well-done. Apparently the Pulitzer people thought the same thing. That night, Lilia eats a piece of candy, letting it melt on her tongue while saying a prayer for Mr. Pirzada’s family. She falls asleep with sugar in her mouth, afraid to wash away the prayer by brushing her teeth. At school, Lilia is assigned a presentation on the surrender at Yorktown with her friend Dora. While at the library to read about the American Revolution, Lilia’s teacher Mrs. Kenyon catches her reading a book on Pakistan. She is chastised. Mr. Kapasi tells the Dases about his other job as an interpreter in a doctor’s office. Mrs. Das remarks that his job is romantic and asks him to tell her about some of his patients. However, Mr. Kapasi views his job as a failure. At one time, he had been a scholar of many languages, and now he remains fluent only in English. He took the interpreting job as a way to pay the medical bills when his eldest son contracted typhoid and died at age seven. He kept the job because the pay was better than his previous teaching job, but it reminds his wife of their son’s death. Mr. Kapasi’s marriage was arranged by his parents, and he and his wife have nothing in common. Mr. Kapasi, seduced by Mrs. Das’s description of his job as “romantic,” begins fantasizing about Mrs. Das. Her stories transcend the cultural & ethnic aspect of things, any person can relate to all these experiences. For me, Interpreter of Maladies is a humanistic book that highlights the common experiences of all people, not just the Indians, while at the same time show-casing a rich culture that some people are not familiar with. She made me feel attached and connected to these characters that had few similarities with me. She made me feel the bond with these people, their experiences, their sadness, their joys, their pain. She made me understand. She made me long for home. She made me feel human.

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The last story in the collection really showcases that journey of coming to terms with your new country. Interpreter of Maladies is a book collection of nine short stories by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri published in 1999. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in the year 2000. An important aspect to be noted about this story is the fact that the writer’s tone in presentation of this tale of grief, tragedy and deception is in totality neutral. This neutral tone is essentially employed to by the writer as the writer, I believe desires the readers form their own individual perspectives of each character and decide who and why they wish to empathize with. This style of presentation makes provision for an unbiased formation of a point of view on the part of the reader facilitated primarily by the writer. Many a times, writer tend to shadow their narrative with their personal and judgmental opinion which I believe that the writer here has refrained from doing so making this an exemplary work of art.

Mr. Kapasi begins to develop a romantic interest in Mrs. Das and conducts a private conversation with her during the trip. Mr. Kapasi imagines a future correspondence with Mrs. Das, picturing them building a relationship to translate the transcontinental gap between them. However, Mrs. Das reveals a secret: she tells Mr. Kapasi the story of an affair she once had, and that her son Bobby had been born out of her adultery. She explains that she chose to tell Mr. Kapasi because of his profession; she hopes he can interpret her feelings and make her feel better as he does for his patients, translating without passing judgment. However, when Mr. Kapasi reveals his disappointment in her and points out her guilt, Mrs. Das storms off. Importantly, the divide separating Mr. Kapasi from the Das family is not just cultural, but also one of affluence and wealth. Mr. and Mrs. Das are clearly of a higher economic status than Mr. Kapasi. For one thing, they can afford to go on a family vacation in India. Their clothes and the expensive accessories they carry (such as the camera with a “telephoto lens” that Mr. Das continually snaps pictures with), all signal their relative material comfort. There are certain things in life that bewilder and baffle us with their staggering normality. Things so simple yet unmistakably captivating, common-place yet elegant, subtle yet profound. Jumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories is one of those things. She writes with a grace and an elegance that transforms her simple stories into a delicate myriad of words and feelings. Each story transforming you into a singularity bound to its harmonious beauty. The different stories somehow seem to be explicitly woven together to make a sari of the most beautiful kind. I felt this cumulative effect of an interconnection between all these produced feelings. This delicious melancholy that only the deepest parts of our soul can feel.Thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my keen interest in working at Citigroup. It is a great pleasure to have a thorough conversation with you last Monday. Ketu H. Katrak reads Interpreter of Maladies as reflecting the trauma of self-transformation through immigration, which can result in a series of broken identities that form "multiple anchorages." Lahiri's stories show the diasporic struggle to keep hold of culture as characters create new lives in foreign cultures. Relationships, language, rituals, and religion all help these characters maintain their culture in new surroundings even as they build a "hybrid realization" as Asian Americans. [6] Once again, a very depressing storyline from yet another author of Indian origin. Remember! I am not being parochial here, I am Indian myself. Being very familiar with Indian cinematography and screenplays, I know that Indians are prone to over emphasizing on family sentiments and emotions. But what I fail to understand is how authors based out of other countries too have the same idea of applying sentiments in a very negative sense to their stories. It also beats me how this won the Pulitzer, just the same way it does to think that God of Small Things won the Booker!