There are some books you fall in love with. It happened with me when I read ‘Pigs have Wings’ by Wodehouse, when I read ‘The Kite Runner’, when I read my first Harry Potter. And now I have fallen in love with Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’. I feel it is her best work till date, and considering her others works have been ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ and ‘The Namesake’, that’s saying something.
‘Unaccustomed Earth’ starts with a quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots in unaccustomed earth”.
But the 8 short stories do not go on to prove this quote right. They play with this quote, finding their own different meanings. The main characters are again Bengali Diaspora – first generation and second generation immigrants in the US. Like Lahiri’s earlier works, these stories are also mostly about loss, longing, rootlessness. The rootlessness of first generation immigrants in the US among strangers, the rootlessness of the second generation among their own people. There is a melancholic undercurrent that disturbs and fascinates at the same time.
The protagonists are all ordinary people, so ordinary that they are amazingly identifiable, so identifiable that we can see inside their heads, we can feel their tension. The complexity of relationships has seldom been so personal.
It is not easy to have full-fledged characters in short stories. But Lahiri’s way of detailing characters is amazing – the story may be about just two days in somebody’s life but we get a full account of what the protagonists are all about, their background, their feelings, their thinking processes. And hats off to Lahiri - inspite of packing so much into these short stories she never lets the narrative get heavy. It flows like water, taking the reader quietly with it.
The book is divided into two parts – the first one has 5 standalone short stories and the second part has three inter-connected stories (the second part is a mini-novel in itself). I am not describing the stories because all of them are multi-layered (another amazing thing to have in short stories). Explaining each story in a few lines will not do them justice. The readers need to find and explore the nuances on their own. But I want to mention a few lines that I really liked :-
The feelings of a father who has recently lost his wife and whose daughter wants him to move in with her family. But he “did not want to be a part of another family, part of the mess, the feuds, the demands, the energy of it. He did not want to live in the margins of his daughter’s life, in the shadow of her marriage. He didn’t want to live again in an enormous house that would only fill up with things over the years, as the children grew, all the things he’d recently gotten rid of, all the books and papers and clothes and objects one felt compelled to possess, to save. Life grew and grew until a certain point. The point he had reached now.”
In another story a daughter muses about her mother, “She had never worked, and during the day she watched soap operas to pass the time. Her only job, every day, was to clean and cook for my father and me. When my mother complained to him about how much she hated life in the suburbs and how lonely she felt, he said nothing to placate her. ‘If you are so unhappy, go back to Calcutta, ’ he would offer, making it clear that their separation would not affect him one way or the other. I began to take my cues from my father in dealing with her, isolating her doubly. When she screamed at me for talking too long on the telephone, or for staying too long in my room, I learned to scream back, telling her that she was pathetic, that she know nothing about me, and it was clear to us both that I had stopped needing her, definitively and abruptly."
Lahiri is often criticized for sticking to the same Bengali background in all her stories. But I feel that even if all her stories are centred around Bengalis, her characters have a universal appeal. The surname in a particular story may be Mukherjee but it could be Mehta, Malhotra or even Manfred – it will make negligible or no difference. The above excerpts could be the feelings of a father and daughter from any nationality.
My little advice - Don’t read the whole book in one go. Read one story and give yourself time to absorb it, let it haunt you for a couple of days and then move on to the next one.