Imaginary homelands

Debut collections of short stories are not usually the stuff of dramatic literary success stories. Perceived more as creative writing exer...

Debut collections of short stories are not usually the stuff of dramatic literary success stories. Perceived more as creative writing exercises, they are meant to acquaint the publishing and reading communities with a potential novelist of the future. Critically scrutinised, quietly read, politely applauded with a small prize or two, they tend to remain stepping stones in their writer8217;s path. Which is what makes Jhumpa Lahiri8217;s Pulitzer triumph so startling. Admitted, the buzz about Lahiri from the very beginning foreshadowed the greater things that lay ahead.

The publication in The New Yorker of some of the work compiled some months later in Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond was hailed for its prose and its sensitivity. So much so that the magazine labelled her one of the 20 young American writers of the 21st century, and critics in the United States and India alike welcomed her as one of the freshest, most empathetic voices in recent times.

Certainly, those acquainted with her nine stories will endorse the Pulitzer jury8217;s decision: in nine delicately nuanced tales mostly about Indian immigrants in America, she has lent a universality to seemingly ordinary travails. For the exile her protagonists have been banished to is not necessarily a geographic one; often disconnected, some temporarily and some permanently, from the normal rhythms of their little worlds, they subsist on the peripheries of emotional and imaginary homelands. It is an exile all of us are routinely banished to.

In Lahiri8217;s opening, and perhaps her most masterly, short story A Temporary Matter8217;, a thirtysomething couple of Indian origin in Boston receive a notice, that their electricity will be cut for an hour everyday at 8 pm for five days. Having been ostracised from old selves and flung into their respective glass bubbles some months ago after a pregnancy gone tragically wrong, Shoba and Shukumar establish a new meeting point in the flickering candlelight. And as they play a variant of truth and dare, and as they come to terms as much with themselves as with each other, a new intimacy is established.

It is a measure of Lahiri8217;s skill as a short story writer that we never know whether they emigrate to their new emotional home together or apart.

Lahiri8217;s triumph thus lies in expanding the nascent sub-genre, writing of the Indian diaspora. If her stories are refreshingly devoid of the cloying exotica and sentimentality that informs Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni8217;s work, they are equally free of political correctness that shackles books by writers like Shauna Singh Baldwin. As Lahiri said, quot;I don8217;t feel fully Indian8230; I don8217;t know what a distinct South Asian identity is. I just try to bring a person to life; often they happen to be Indian because that8217;s what I know.quot; Accordingly, more than the Indian experience, Lahiri chronicles the human condition. And how. The Pulitzer is thus an apt acknowledgement of her achievement as a writer and of the maturing of that nebulous entity, Indian writing in English.