Not so green

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri; Random House; Price: Rs.450; 333 pp The themes of cultural alienation, adjustment and the immigrant experience continue to preoccupy Brooklyn (New York)-based author Jhumpa Lahiri. These themes, which Lahiri first explored in her Pulitzer Prize winning debut collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies and persisted with in The Namesake, are again predominant in Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of eight narratives. Artful and poignant, her latest oeuvre treads familiar ground, chronicling the emotional upheavals of middle class Indian-(Bengali) immigrants, presumably driven out of their beloved Sonar Bangla by the communist regime and its stranglehold over the electoral process in West Bengal. Now far from home, they are struggling to adjust with the American dream and with their US-born and reared children. Though they embrace the opportunities and affluence which America offers, theres nostalgia for the life they have left behind in the motherland. In the title story, the disconnect between Bengali immigrant parents and their America-born children is sensitively recounted. Ruma, a lawyer who defied her parents to marry an American, frets that her widowed father would become a responsibility, an added demand, continuously present in a way that she was no longer used to. And the father, while visiting his daughters immaculately manicured suburban home in Seattle, is surprised to find that his once rebellious daughter with all her assertions of selfhood, has given up work to raise a three-year-old son and is pregnant again. He had always assumed that her life would be far from humdrum, yet it isnt too different from how it would have been in Kolkata. Growing up, her mothers example — moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household — had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Rumas life now. In an ironic turn, he advises her to find work and become self-reliant, and declines her invitation to live with her, preferring his new found independence. Strange customs and perceived betrayal is also the theme of ‘Hell-Heaven, which tells the tale of a young American-born Bengali woman who recalls her mothers unrequited love for one Pranab Chakravorty, a student at MIT, and her disgust at his marrying an all-American girl (Deborah). Subsequently after Pranab leaves Deborah for a married Bengali woman, her mother confesses her hopeless love to her daughter whose own heart has been broken by a man shed hoped to marry. ‘A Choice of Accommodations narrates the story of Amit, an editor of a medical journal who disappointed his doctor parents by dropping out of Columbia med school, and his coming to terms with his successful and ambitious American wife Megan, who persisted at Columbia and is now a very busy doctor. Such complications are rare, if not unimaginable back home in India, and are captured by Lahiri through sensitive writing, language and poetic intelligence. The last three short stories form a trilogy and are grouped under ‘Hema and Kaushik. The lives of Hema,…