Fruits of diaspora soil

Jhumpa Lahiri's new book of short stories is much more than an assortment of immigrant cliches.

To get a sense of the impression many readers "" especially non-resident Indians "" have of Jhumpa Lahiri's work, you need look no further than this bit of cheekiness from the culture blog Ultrabrown:

Attention all readers, attention all readers. You'll want to sit down for this one, it's a bit of a shock. Celebrated author Jhumpa Lahiri has just stunned the literary world by penning a New Yorker story about cultural confusion among 2nd-gen Bengalis in the US.

It's a theme she's never written about before. Not even in her last New Yorker story. Or her novel. Or her film. Or her short-story collection. Jhumpa, you sly dog.

Even a quick glance at jacket descriptions of Lahiri's previous books "" the short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies and the novel The Namesake "" will reveal that she specialises in a certain type of writing: about the immigrant experience, more specifically, the lives of first-generation Bengalis and their alienated children in the US.

This sort of thing draws mixed responses. Many readers of Indian writing in English have come to be suspicious of the sub-stratum known as "diaspora fiction", a common allegation being that such writing panders to a Western readership by creating an exoticised picture of Indians and their adjustment problems.

Besides, how often can you tell the story of, say, a conservative couple coming to terms with life in a foreign land without being accused of flogging a comatose horse?

But this argument tars all diaspora fiction with the same brush, implying that all such authors tell the same stories and deal with the clash of cultures in a simplistic or patronising manner. The related allegation that there is little variety in Lahiri's work isn't particularly useful from a critical perspective either.

Many writers (Faulkner, Twain, anyone?) have built glorious careers by writing only about the people and settings that they know about "" and they have done this thoughtfully, intelligently, and with a display of versatility and variety that transcends the limited definitions of these words. As ever, the question that should be asked while appraising their work is not "what" but "how".

Lahiri still has a way to go as a novelist (poignant though The Namesake was, its tendency to ramble suggested that she isn't fully comfortable yet with long-form writing), but when the question "how" is applied to her short stories, the answer is that the best of them are notable for their restraint, for their economical character portraits and for quiet, seemingly effortless insights into people's thoughts and actions.

Her new collection, Unaccustomed Earth, has all these qualities. At first glance, the book's title may seem to be about a shift to an unfamiliar country, but reading the stories one realises that it encompasses many other actions or experiences that bring a sense of dislocation with them: such as moving to a new house shortly after the death of a beloved parent and trying to think of the place as home despite knowing that the deceased person had never even seen it; or an elderly man taking hesitant steps into a new relationship after years of being with the same woman. In the title story, a w oman nervously awaits a visit by her widowed father with whom she has rarely been alone in the past (her mother having always served as the go-between). In "Only Goodness", a rehabilitated alcoholic, estranged from his family, attempts to return to the fold by getting in touch with his elder sister.

The tentative interactions between these sets of people show us how circumstances can lead even the most intimate relationships into unaccustomed territory.

This is also the case in the intriguing "A Choice of Accommodations", in which a man named Amit and his American wife Megan visit the mountain town where he once went to school, to attend the wedding of an old friend (and onetime crush).

This story has a dreamlike quality that contrasts Lahiri's usually straightforward narratives. Initially we don't sense much wrong between Amit and Megan beyond the ennui that can settle in after several years of marriage, but soon little details accumulate: they are disappointed by the hotel they have booked for their two-day stay; a tear in Megan's dress seems like a bad omen; the setting recalls the loneliness of Amit's youth and his failure to pursue the things he was really interested in; at the wedding, he forgets the name of an old classmate and upsets someone with a casual remark about how most marriages "disappear" after some time; he goes back to the hotel room to make a call and falls asleep, leaving his wife alone.

Here, as in Lahiri's most subtle work, nothing is spelt out but we sense how interior worlds can impinge on the routines of daily life and threaten relationships.

There are a few weak links. A couple of the stories, like "Hell-Heaven" "" about a housewife's attraction towards a younger man, supposedly a brother-figure "" are engrossing without ever demanding much of the reader.

The main point of interest in "Nobody's Business", where a student named Paul gets involved in the personal affairs of his housemate Sangeeta, is that the perspective here is that of a non-Indian. And the gardening analogies in "Unaccustomed Earth" are laboured ("he had toiled in unfriendly soil, coaxing new things from the ground"), providing just the right ammunition for critics who would dismiss Lahiri's work as, dare one suggest, coaxing new cliches from the soil of immigrant fiction.

The good news is that the book ends on a very strong note with the elegiac, three-chapter novella "Hema and Kaushik", which brings together many of Lahiri's ideas about lives that have been set adrift.

One of the central characters here is a photojournalist who travels around the world but for whom unaccustomed earth, the place where he feels most like an outsider, is his own home in Massachusetts, where his father's new family has supplanted memories of his deceased mother.

It's another reminder that sticking the diaspora tag on these stories would be to limit them "" the characters here are Indians abroad all right, but more importantly they are people struggling with universal human feelings.

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UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Random House
PAGES: 352 Price: Rs 450