Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of   Maladies”-

A Reflection of Contemporary Society

Mrs. Renuka Devi Jena*

Abstract

Literature is a reflection of the changing cultural, psychological and social thought process of modern society. Post modern literature reflects the inner conflicts and existential crisis as a result of changing cultural values. Political and economic changes affect the psychology of the people and literature is influenced by such changes. My paper will critically analyse the characters of the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’. She is an Indian American writer, her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri uses literature as a vehicle to transmit cultural identities, each of her stories in the collection presents a new cultural perspective of the Indian immigrant. Her speciality lies in her extraordinary craft of short story writing her psychological revelations and deep understanding of human nature.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999)

won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The collection is mainly concerned with

the existential challenges of isolation and desolation of postcolonial situation, of

the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans whose hyphenated Indian identity has

led them to be caught between the Indian traditions that they have left behind

and a totally different western culture that they have to adopt. The characters of

the short stories face cultural dilemma, they are perplexed, disconcerted and

confused, sentimental and homesick and show resistance also to the discourse of

power in various forms. However the dissatisfaction becomes less intense in the

second generation of characters, who adapt to the culture of the adopted

country. Lahiri is a second-generation immigrant who feels just as much at

home in her parents’ homeland as she does in her own, yet sometimes the

feeling of alienation, belonging nowhere exists. The migrant has become one of

the symbolic figures of the contemporary society world. It is through fiction

contemporary writers attempt to voice the immigrant’s issues and concerns.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories seems is an in depth study of visible

and invisible

frontiers that the characters must transgress in order to find their real self.

*The writer is an Associate Professor, Department of English, B.M.Ruia Girls’

College. She is a PHD Research Scholar of JJT University, Rajasthan.

Out of the nine stories, three are set in India, whereas six are set in America,

focusing on the lives of first or second generation Americans of Indian origin.

The writer resists the stereotypes of Indian-ness, the encounter between the East

and the West and probes the problems generated by the encounter between the

self and the Other, into the condition of the troubled modern self and, more

importantly, to investigate human nature. In this respect, Jhumpa Lahiri’s

writings are more about the existential angst of the individual, she is interested

in portraying the quintessence of the individual consciousness and in the self as

the converging point of various cultural forces.

Jhumpa Lahiri very efficiently brings

out the crisis of dual identity, the universal experience of Indian diaspora,

irrespective of religion or region and the inner conflicts of her characters. Lahiri

also emphasises through her characters, be it Shoba, Mr. Pirzada, Mrs. Das,

Mrs.Sen or Boorima that there are other individual issues that causes anxiety

and distress to people, ‘maladies’ that are of concern and thus gives us an

understanding of the people in general. Stories have in common certain themes

and motifs, such as exile, displacement, loneliness, difficult relationships, and

problems about communication. The loneliness, the sense of alienation, a deep

sense of remorse and emotional isolation that some of her fictional characters of

Jhumpa Lahiri go through, are common experiences of people especially those

who for various reasons are forced to live away from their own country. Jhumpa

Lahiri’s endeavour to interpret the maladies of the mind that people suffer from

and the unique manner in which she makes them realize their own flaws reflects

her remarkable insight, she delves deep into the psychological depths of her

characters and reveals their inner world.

The story "A Temporary Matter"

deals with the pain of losing a child and the subsequent emotional problems

pertaining to the couple’s relationship and divorce. The story is about an Indian

couple living in America, whose marriage is failing due to the loss of their child

at birth. A contrast is shown in the couple's relationship before and after they

lose of the baby. It went from a strong marriage, full of love, to a weak marriage

where Shukumar and Shoba (the Indian couple) become "experts at avoiding

each other" (4). They no longer speak to each other and have lost all lines of

communication. Due to some maintenance job in their residential area, the

electricity is cut for an hour in the evenings. In the first evening Shoba comes

up with the idea of a game in which each partner will tell something that they

feel, or have done which they have never shared before. Shoba using game to

tell her husband about her decision to leave him, she declares that she has rented

a separate house for herself and it breaks Shukumar’s heart. To this confession,

Shukumar gives her greater pain by telling her that their child was actually a

boy, and he had held the boy in his lap and had really hugged him for quite

some time. This is particularly painful to Shoba as she never wanted to know

these details. Shoba’s crisis was her inability to deal with her anger and

frustration of losing the baby for whose arrival she had planned elaborately. In

her state of disappointment and self pity, she did not care if her marriage fell

apart. It is only when Shukumar confesses his knowledge of the baby’s sex that

she finally relents the hold she kept on her emotions and sees the truth that the

loss of the baby has affected Shukumar as deeply as her. Letting out the pent up

feelings certainly acts like a catalyst in some ways. The marital discord is thus

skilfully shown to be a temporary matter just as the interruption in electric

power supply has been.

In ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to

Dine,’ Jhumpa Lahiri concentrates on the nostalgia for one’s homeland in the

character of Mr.Pirzada, from Dacca, which was a part of Pakistan, now the

capital of Bangladesh. The story makes an explicit reference to the Bangladeshi

war of independence in 1971 but Jhumpa Lahiri is not concerned with politics.

She is more concerned with the issues of identity and intercultural

communication, hybridity and multiculturalism rather than politics. The Indian

family’s desperation to invite someone from their homeland, their selecting

“discovered” Mr.Pirzada as their guest, their sense of community in the

company of Mr.Pirzada, is an existential tension that problematises the very

liberal and democratic claim of hybridity. The positioning of Pirzada actually

comes close to this in-between space creating sadness from a sense of absence,

which percolates across the subconscious of all the immigrants. This is more

applicable in the case of Lila, the narrator and, more importantly, a second

generation migrant. Lila is a child so the story is narrated from the point of view

of the child, her perception, her awareness and her consciousness in

understanding of the difference between the self and the other across the visible

and the invisible frontiers. Mr. Pirzada regularly visits his Bengali friend’s

house to dine and to listen to the news about the Bangladesh war. After the war

Mr.Pirzada becomes a man of no-nation. The narrator was completely taken

aback by her father’s words, ‘Mr.Pirzada is no longer considered Indian’. Lila’s

observation is intriguing when she says -

‘It made no sense to me. Mr.Pirzada and my parents spoke the

same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They

ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their

hands. ……’p.25

Pirzada’s case is more or less similar

to BooriMa, a refugee in Calcutta from East Pakistan , the protagonist of ‘A

Real Durwan’. She is a sixty-year-old woman, deported to Calcutta as a result

of the Partition, whose problems of adaptability to a new culture are brought to

the fore. She works hard throughout the day in an apartment building full of

middle to lower-middle class families, in her old age, a time comes when her

old bedding gets wet and turns into useless pulp, reducing her to sleep on

discarded newspapers spread over a hard floor and she does not even get a glass

of tea or any food from the apartment owners. Suffering from pangs of hunger

Boorima had already lost not only her country of origin but her family and all

her possessions. She claims of a rich past, having

belonged to an affluent zamindaar family of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh),

but the traumatic events of Partition have reduced her to the present pitiable

creature in Calcutta, at the mercy of ‘other’ inhabitants of the building. Her

experience of exile has left her stranded and estranged with the claustrophobic

trauma of memories and she continues to mourn the riches of her past when

compared to the insufficiency of the present. She tries to escape from the

hardships of the present by reminiscing about the past life. Boori Ma’s

exaggerated stories of her past are a momentary release from the traumatic and

claustrophobic existence in the present. She is like the migrants who “are

constantly negotiating their positions between nations, between ‘where they’re

from’, ‘where they are at’ and ‘where they are going’, and, in the process

creating identities that serve as momentary points of suture that stabilize the

flow . Boori Ma’s rejection by the residents of the building highlights her

alienation as she once again ends up being a refugee–homeless and displaced–

who painfully continues to be at odds with changed times.

The story of ‘Mrs. Sen’, is about

the Mrs. Sen an elderly Indian immigrant ,wife of an academic, who looks after

Eliot, an eleven-year-old boy, after his school time every day. The story deals

with her constant struggle to adapt to the new American cultural space and built

up her new identity. She steadfastly conducts her special Indian-cooking

practices, enjoys buying fish and having fish to assert her idea of homeland, her

ethnic identity. However, her final act of taking the courage to drive in order to

be independent from a seemingly busy patriarchal figure of a husband who is

not always there to help can be regarded as a revolutionary act. Mrs.Sen has

learnt that in order to survive in her new surroundings, she needs to open up

herself to the culture of the Other represented symbolically by the car towards

which she initially shows great fear – a fear much associated with the encounter

between the Self or Other culture. Her first attempt to cross the boundaries fails

but, no matter how traumatic the experience is, it at least makes her face the

trauma and possibly release herself from the vicious cycle of escape and

avoidance through being more open to the realm of the Other – what is

definitely going to prove useful in crafting and negotiating her new diasporic

identity and in encouraging her to embrace her new life in America. Alienation

refers to the state of exclusion, which arises when an expatriate does not grow

out of the phase of nostalgia. Her ethnic identity haunts her incessantly. Aware

of her differences, she cannot negotiate a new space or a new identity because

expatriation for her is

a state of mind.

Lahiri shows that in any

relationship the two partners must have enough patience to tolerate each other’s

differences. This is even more so in an arranged marriage, where the couple

must develop mutual love and respect. Through describing Twinkle’s taste for

Christian artefacts, Lahiri implies that Sanjeev also must develop a more

tolerant attitude toward his new culture if he is to adapt successfully. As

Sanjeev’s character shows, the immigrant experience is often painful and the

adjustments frequently overwhelming. The story, "This Blessed House", is a

about a newly married couple who move into a house only to find out that the

house is special and a blessed one.

Jhumpa Lahiri uses the house moving metaphorically, a movement into

America, which is not after all an empty space but contains within it elements of

culture – the here and there Christian artifacts the couple discover upon arrival.

Belonging to different generations of immigrants, Sanjeev and Twinkle seem to

be at different stages of their transformative identities and therefore their

different attitudes towards the findings of biblical artifacts. Twinkle’s parents

have long lived in California and she belongs to the second-generation

immigrants, she is simply an American of Indian origin. While Twinkle is

delighted by these objects and wants to display them everywhere, Sanjeev is

uncomfortable with them and reminds her that they are Hindu, not Christian.

This very temporal difference and variation in exposure to the culture of the

Other makes Twinkle to be an embodiment of hybridity – a stage which is yet to

come for the first-generation female immigrants like Mrs. Sen or even for the

first-generation male immigrants like Twinkle’s own husband, Sanjeev, who

has come to America as a college student and his parents still live in Calcutta.

As “a more recent immigrant” then, Sanjeev like Mrs. Sen is a manifestation of

liminality and is, therefore, a stage behind Twinkle . It is this dynamic positive

hybridity present in Twinkle that makes her survival definite and gives her a

superiority and charm over other female characters whose confrontation with

the Other either involves them in cycles of escape or at worst in a total

Otherness. The story ends with her and the other party guests discovering a

large bust of Jesus Christ in the attic. Although the object disgusts him, he

obediently carries it downstairs.

“Sanjeev pressed the massive silver face to his ribs, careful not to let the feather

hat slip, and followed her.”p.157 This action can either be interpreted as

Sanjeev giving into Twinkle and accepting her eccentricities, or as a final,

grudging act of compliance in a marriage that he is reconsidering.

  T he hybrid identity of those like Twinkle

is formed gradually, it only a matter of time and the amount of exposure to the

culture of the Other. So we can say that there is still time and hope of survival

for those like Sanjeev and Mrs. Sen to pass through the threshold of liminality

into the hybrid space. Twinkle’s success in negotiating a hybrid identity is the

hopeful future for all those whose present experience of the culture of Other is

that of threat and confusion.

“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”, is

about the plight and anxiety of the female subaltern as it follows the aftermaths

of the globalization process in the life of a native Indian woman who is a victim

of both destitution and homelessness. Bibi Haldar is a woman living in India, in

her own homeland, but is more or less exposed to the Othering process.

Interestingly then, Bibi’s neighbours, a group of philanthropic caring Indian

housewives of the same building where Bibi is living as a marginalized sick

inhabitant, are much more eager than her own so-called relatives to offer help.

Bibi has long suffered from a strange unknown ailment, and while numerous

possible treatments have been suggested, none has proved to be useful. Bibi

longs for a normal life in which she can have a husband and bear children.

The twist though comes at the end of the story when Bibi, who has led a life of

solitude and isolation on the roof of the building, gets pregnant and, giving birth

to a son, is finally yet curiously cured. Bibi’s identity-crisis comes to surface

when she wants to negotiate a new identity by embracing these gender codes of

the Other. In this story Lahiri has chiseled out a character so delicately that the

final revelation hardly jolts the reader. Rather it fills him with a greater

understanding of the workings of human psyche. Deprivation of fulfillment of

certain desires makes misfits of some people. The birth of a son cures Bibi

Haldar of a mysterious disease in spite of being deprived of marriage.

‘Sexy’ tells the story of a young

woman, Miranda, who gets involved in an affair with a married Indian man

named Dev. The story is about sexual relationship between Dev and Miranda

and the hopelessness of extra-marital affair. As portrayed in Miranda’s

fascination with Indian culture upon meeting Dev, native Self covertly takes an

interest in knowing and locating the immigrant Other. Miranda, who in the

beginning of the story knows quite a little about the Other Indian culture, is

soon intrigued by the thrill of exploring the Other – a sense of thrill which

causes her to visit an Indian grocery or go to an Indian restaurant or to try, in

any possible way, to learn more about India and Indian culture. This Self/Other

confrontation then posits Miranda’s identity on the verge of an open-ness to the

Other. The relationship between the English girl Miranda and the Indian Dev

dies a quiet death when Miranda realizes that she cannot expect more than

physical fulfilment from Dev.

The ‘Interpreter Of Maladies’ is the title of a particular story in the collection

causing it to have multiple meanings within the text. The story centres upon

interpretation and its power. The interpreter, Mr. Kapasi’s occupation is to

interpret patients’ ailments in a hospital where little Guajarati is spoken. His

work enables correct diagnosis and treatment by understanding the pains and

troubles of patients—effectively, he enables the saving of lives .Within the story

he is giving a tour to a family, Mr and Mrs. Das and their three children. Mrs.

Das looks for understanding from him, seeking absolution for the secret of her

adultery. In confessing to Mr. Kapasi, she endows him with a sort of priestly

power, expecting her confession to draw out forgiveness and consolation. Mrs.

Das confides that one of their sons is not her husband’s child and asks Mr.

Kapasi for his help with this malady, her secret. He admits, however, that he is

only an interpreter of languages, not of her guilt. When she tells Mr. Kapasi that

she feels relieved of the pain that she was subjected to for seven long years by

disclosing the secret that shrouded the birth of her second son, he says: Is it

really pain you feel Mrs. Das or is it guilt? Mr. Kapasi’s question makes her

furious and she walks away in a huff. But its effect is more far-reaching than

expected. She is no longer the brooding and disinterested woman we first met.

Obviously she is relieved of her burden of guilt for the first time in seven years.

She is whipped into action and gets her son , Bobby. Lahiri in this story deals

with one of her major themes – that of disjunction between cultures. Through

this story, Lahiri is able to deepen the connection between her narratives.

Lahiri explores the idea that identity,

especially for immigrants, is something that must be sought. We gain a sense of

identity through family, society and culture. For the culturally displaced, this is

a difficult endeavour. Interpretation also becomes a means of communication

and connection, something for which both Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das yearn. Both

feel a disconnect from their spouses and their families, unhappy and dissatisfied

with their lives. Yet, although Lahiri’s work may be interpreted as essentially

focusing on the problems of immigrants but she lays emphasis on

communication problems of individuals. It is not so much the visible frontiers

that the writer seems to be obsessed with as the invisible ones that do tend to

keep people apart.

The speaker in ‘The Third and Final

Continent’ searches for his identity across continents. He is born in Asia, travels

to Europe to study, and finally immigrates to North America. Although he has

adapted to the British way of life as a student, it is not a true cultural integration

as he lived with other Bengali bachelors like himself. He attempts to keep his

cultural identity intact by keeping the most trivial of Indian traditions alive,

such as eating ‘egg curry’. His search for identity is further strained by his

arranged marriage, more or less en route to his new job in America, to a woman

he has never met. In America, his cultural conflict is manifest in his refusal to

eat ‘hamburgers or hot dogs’ , as the consumption of beef is sacrilegious

according to his Hindu beliefs. The speaker is burdened with a fragmented

sense of identity; constantly pulled in opposite directions between Indian culture

and the need to assimilate in America.

When the narrator meets his

centenarian landlady, Mrs Croft, he is bewildered by her age and her repetitious

phrases while admiring her strength in surviving for so long. In contrast to his

relationship with his own mother, whose rejection of life had further

exacerbated the speaker’s sense of emotional isolation, through his fondness for

Mrs Croft, and his admiration for her ability to accept the inevitable. In contrast

with the speaker, his wife Mala is able to maintain her identity because she

takes on the role of a traditional Indian wife. In this story Jhumpa Lahiri

portrays a relatively positive story of the Indian-American experience. The

obstacles and hardships that the protagonist must overcome are much more

tangible, such as learning to stomach a diet of cornflakes and bananas, or

boarding in a cramped YMCA. Mrs. Croft makes a point of commenting on the

protagonist’s sari-wrapped wife, calling her “a perfect lady”. Croft’s daughter

Helen also remarks that Cambridge is “a very international city,” hinting at the

reason why the protagonist is met with a general sense of acceptance. In the

ending on a cultural tone of social acceptance and tolerance, Lahiri suggests that

the experience of adapting to American society is ultimately achievable.

‘The Third and the Final

Continent’ contain moving pictures of life. The Calcutta boy reminds us of

many Indians who by trial and tribulation settle abroad for a better life. The

bond between the landlady Mrs. Croft and the Bengali youth is beyond

explanation. It is something to be felt and understood. The old lady is well

aware of people and can read them as one would a book, despite being hundred

and three. Mrs. Croft never spoke more than a few words at a time, most of

which she repeats daily to the young tenant but the narrator knows her

loneliness and develops fondness for her. It grows after being told by her only

daughter that she made a living for herself and for her daughter by teaching the

piano for forty years which resulted in swollen knuckles. He is also reminded of

his own mother who refused to participate in life after the death of her husband.

In conclusion we can say that the collection

of stories in Interpreter of Maladies attempt to offer an interpretation of the

maladies of the contemporary society, of individual’s anxieties and torment and

of the individual inevitably caught between different cultures and yet belonging

in neither of them.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----------

References

Lahiri Jhumpa (2005). Interpreter Of Maladies, Harper Collins Publishers India.

Mishra, Vijay (2000). ‘New lamps for Old: Diasporas Migrancy Border’, in Interrogating

Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context, edited by Harish Trivedi and Meenakshi

Mukherjee. Shimla.

Shukla, Sandhya (2005). India Abroad, New Delhi: Orient Longman.

Watson, C.W. (2005). Multiculturalism, New Delhi: Viva Books.