Belonging to two worlds seems to offer greater possibilities for the writer than being restricted to one. In Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories - her first, Interpreter of Maladies, won a Pulitzer Prize - the culture depicted is that of the American-Bengali community. India is described only in retrospect: a place left behind and which is visited only as an obligation to family.
In the title story this process is reversed when an elderly man, released by his wife’s death from the ties that bound him to his native land, visits Ruma, his married daughter, in Seattle. Here, feelings of displacement are experienced not by the old man, whose capacity to adapt is demonstrated by his tending of his daughter’s neglected garden, but by Ruma - lonely and uncertain of her role in her new life. Equally subtle in its account of the tensions between the old world and the new is Hell-Heaven, in which the wife of a Harvard academic falls in love with a bachelor friend who has attached himself to her soon after his arrival from India - only to lose him to an American girl.
Variations on this theme are to be found in A Choice of Accommodations, in which a married man revisits his passion for a former classmate; Only Goodness, where the central dynamic is between a woman and her troubled younger brother; and Nobody’s Business, in which a shy loner becomes obsessed with his beautiful Bengali housemate. But it is the last three stories, featuring the same two characters, glimpsed at different times, which are perhaps the most successful - offering a novella-length account of intersecting lives. The first of these, Once in a Lifetime, is seen from the point of view of Hema, 13, who develops a crush on Kaushik, the slightly older son of family friends, which is destined to last a lifetime. Year’s End picks up the story from Kaushik’s perspective, as - now a student - he goes home for Christmas to meet his father’s new wife. Going Ashore brings both central characters together. Here, as elsewhere in this sharply realised collection, it is the details that give the narrative its bite: a dying woman smoking a clandestine cigarette in the bathroom; an abandoned dinner service wrapped in The Times of India.
Christina Koning
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Bloomsbury, £7.99; 352pp Buy the book
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