Analysis Of Jumpha Lahiri's 'Interpreter Of Maladies'

Jumpha Lahiri, one of the second generation immigrants in the USA, acknowledged as one of the women writers in Indian English Literature for her Indian themes, is a recent new wave literary artist. She has authored the Pultizer Prize winning collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond (1999) and the novel The Namesake (2003). Being herself an immigrant, she feels the significance of family and how it ties man to his homeland. In the words of Lahiri herself, ‘‘I went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor as an outsider and yet I also know that as different as Calcutta is from Rhode Island, I belonged there in some fundamental way, in the ways I didn’t seem to belong in the United States’’ (2001: 7).

The diasporic characters face a sense of alienation of exile. The absence of the sense of belonging, the lingering awareness of ‘‘clutching at a world that does not belong to them’’ leaves them isolated and willing to create ‘‘home’’, a ‘‘community’’ in their own way. The protagonists are not averse to the idea of acculturation accompanied by a sense of loss and heart-breaks but they also want to ‘‘adapt and adopt.’’ The nine-short stories in the anthology deals with characters that are, or feel displaced from home. If we try to classify them, we find that the characters are first-generation and second- generation Indian settlers in the US (‘Mrs. Sen,’ ‘The Third and Final Continent,’ ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’), Indians in the native country (‘Interpreter of Maladies,’ ‘A Real Darwan’) and finally an American (‘Sexy’). In almost all the stories there is a longing for the native land, the life led in India before their migration to the US. Even the second-generation settlers are not free from the connection they have with the country of the birth of their parents. Politically and nationally they are Americans but the ‘added baggage’ of their parent’s memories of their country is something that they have to contend with. The first-generation settlers fear that the children may forget the traditions and culture of their parents and become completely Americanized. Thus they have

Their marriage is a failure; the string that had tied their hearts was broken with the death of their child. Sobha and Sukumar begin the game of confessing secrets to one another in the dark. We proceed from harmless personal details to the harmful ones when Sobha says that she has decided on a separation and has already made arrangements for it. The climax is reached when in a spirit of revenge Sukumar describes their dead child to Sobha whom she had never seen, a secret which he had previously decided never to tell her. The story ends with the couple weeping together. The story reflects the alienation and loneliness that the emigrants face in a foreign land. The marriage bond, which is still considered sacrosanct in India, is gradually slithering down under the pressure of new needs under a different background. Nevertheless, one needs another’s touch in an emotional crisis. That is why Sobha and Sukumar, failing to find any foothold of security,