OUT OF PLACE

So far, I haven’t been the biggest fan of her contained little fictions about Bengali women disoriented by the American east coast, the speaking silences between generations, and the moments of incomprehension that mark migrant lives. There seemed to be a disconnect between her soggy storytelling and the general critical consensus that she was a sort of hip, updated Alice Munro with a global soul. And going by the blurb and press, Unaccustomed Earth seemed to fall back into territory she’s already strip-mined in her previous books.

But despite a recognisable cast of characters, all the eight stories in this collection (with the possible exception of “Hell-Heaven”) are small wonders that enfold a range of complicated accommodations that people make as they pick their singular ways through life. In these narratives set firmly in the US, India is only a state of mind, like the unspoken understanding that a dutiful daughter is obliged to ask her bereaved father to move in with her. Lahiri has a way of telling that’s all her own, muted and moving. As Zadie Smith has written, “You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non-sequitur, a dog dances in the street.” This collection has that ineffable effect.

In “Nobody’s Business”, grad student Paul’s fascination with his vivacious Indian housemate Sang (for Sangeeta) is less about laying claim to her as about participating vicariously in her life. “Every so often a man called for Sang, wanting to marry her” is how the story begins, and it tracks her romantic travails with her bad-news Egyptian boyfriend through Paul’s half-bemused, half-besotted perspective. And the thread that runs through the narrative is the persistent phone calls from one diligent Bengali suitor or the other — “sometimes Sang would take notes during these conversations, on the message pad next to the phone. She’d write down the man’s name, or ‘Carnegie Mellon’, or ‘likes mystery novels’ before her pen drifted into scribbles and stars and tick-tack-toe games.”

In the title story, “Unaccustomed Earth”, Ruma is a lawyer who prefers being a stay-at-home mom, whose life is thrown out of gear by her father’s visit, and even more so by the realisation that he has a “girlfriend”. There’s this bit where Ruma watches, unseen, as her father and her half-American son Akash garden companionably, the old man teaching the child Bengali — “What color is it?” her father asked. “Red.” “And in Bengali?” “Lal.” “Good.” “And neel!” Akash cried out, pointing to the sky. There’s a joy in the writing, through the murk and opacity of her characters’ inner lives there are these wonderful clearings in her stories that can stop you dead in your tracks.

The last three stories centre on the intertwined lives of Hema and Kaushik, whose families, far apart in every sense, are thrown together because they are both out of place in Cambridge. They address each other in their confessionals, and inevitably come together in the last story that could have tipped over into melodrama, but instead, closes the collection with a sombre finality. Beneath the veneer of undergraduate jadedness, Kaushik is still emotionally raw from the death of his mother, and he lets loose his hurt in a way that will haunt him forever. Lahiri has an acute sense for the afterlife of heedless, it-made-sense-at-the-time actions. In “A Choice of Accommodations”, an Indian-American man, Amit, goes back to his old prep school with his wife, for the wedding of a former flame — and at the wedding finds himself drunkenly face-to-face with his resentments that he blurts out to a prim, scandalised stranger.

Adelle Waldman, in the New Republic, calls Lahiri the ultimate assimilation artist, who speaks about the coastal elite experience better than any other, and even compares her to that other American obsessive, Philip Roth, who compulsively tells and retells his Jewish-American heritage. But even as it is formed by these particulars, the book is not really about America’s melting pot or Indian-Americans torn between filial bonds and their own self-fashioning projects, as it is about the buried life, the betrayals and disappointments of growing up, and the occasional glimpse of the truly numinous. ©