Unaccustomed Earth

Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri is well-known for her Pulitzer-winning book Interpreter of Maladies. An Indian by birth and descent, Lahiri migrated to the United States along with her parents when she was 2. In her third book, Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri puts forth for her reader her character’s sense of alienation, the struggles and complexities of the new life and the need to blend into a new culture. Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories. When asked to comment on her personal life as a migrant; she says ‘No country is my motherland. I always find myself in exile in whichever country I travel to, that's why I was tempted to write something about those living their lives in exile.’ Lahiri’s stories paint a vivid picture

After the sudden death of her mother, Ruma’s father takes it upon himself to travel around Europe, something that Ruma and his deceased wife had planned. When Ruma’s father tells her that he would be visiting her, she is afraid that he might move in with them, as is the custom in Bengali families. However, during his escapades to Europe, Ruma’s father has fallen in love with Mrs. Bagchi, a young Bengali widow. Ruma’s father keeps this information a secret from Ruma, but she eventually finds out about the affair after she spots a handwritten postcard in Bengali addressed to Mrs. Bagchi by her father. When her father visits them, Ruma is a mixture of nervousness and awkwardness as she was not that close to her father as she was to her mother. When describing her father teaching Bengali to her son, Ruma is filled with guilt as she reveals that ‘Bengali had never been a language in which she felt like an adult”. She seldom uses her Bengali language now. To use a foreign language is to abide by the beliefs rooted in it. By denying using her native language Ruma shows that she has turned a stranger to her own culture. When an aunt or uncle calls from Calcutta to wish her a Happy Bijoya, or Akash a Happy Birthday, Ruma trips over words and mangles tenses. Also her guilt toward not being or wanting to be the strong and traditional woman her own mother was, and the guilt for not continuing the traditions her own mother held so dearly are more important to her than the spoken language. When Ruma first shows her father her house when he comes to visit, “she felt self-conscious of her successful life with Adam, and at the same time she felt a quiet slap of rejection, gathering, from his continued silence, that none of it impressed