BOOKS

Chronicle of the cultural interface

SUSAN RAM

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; Flamingo, 1999; pages 198; Rs.469.95 (paperback).

THE movement of peoples across borders and cultures that has, in the era of globalisation, broadened and accelerated beyond all previous experience, poses a special literary challenge. At one level, the cultural collisions, dislocation, loneliness and lo ss of identity thrown up by the process offer writers rich possibilities: locations, themes and characters abound, and the act of cultural juxtaposing promises interesting literary results. The scale of the canvas can, as Salman Rushdie has shown, elicit extraordinary results. But writers also face being swamped by such plenitude. The task becomes one of negotiating the material in such a way that intimacies emerge out of the vastness, the exotic is rendered familiar and the reader, irrespective of geog raphical location or cultural background, is jerked into new perceptions and understandings.

In her debut collection of short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri impressively unfolds the possibilities of the diaspora fiction genre, while also indicating some of the problems. Of Bengali origin, born in London and raised in the United States, she writes in the main within the bounds of her own experience; most of her stories explore uprooted Bengali experience in or around Boston, a beacon city for India's upwardly mobile by dint of its universities and career opportunities. Her instinct to explore her themes and characters within this well-defined, bipolar geography underlines the necessity, within this genre, for delimitation and control; it is when she strays beyond its parameters that problems surface.

LAHIRI'S Boston is a city of parks and tree-lined streets and quiet orderliness, a foil for Calcutta's clamour and vivacity. Here, her characters, Indian and American, lead unremarkable lives, grappling with everyday challenges, coping with inadequacy or failure, seeking to survive the visitation of tragedy. Their take on life is that of the educated middle class professional for whom income is assured; existential challenge lies in the essential unpredictability of human relationships and the whole bus iness of living.

For Mrs. Sen, the wife of a visiting Indian academic, homesickness for family, friends and the sheer exuberance of Calcutta is compounded by immobility in her new surroundings, her fear of driving through the fast, impassive Boston traffic locking her in to loneliness and accentuating the fragility of her links with life back home. Mr. Pirzada, a Bengali from the other side of the border, is initiated into the mysteries of Halloween by a small Bostonian girl of Indian Bengali origin. Through the prism of his presence, she in turn seeks to make sense of events taking place far from Boston and her history lessons in the American Revolution; the year is 1971, India is at war with Pakistan, and Mr. Pirzada must fear for his family caught in the maelstrom of a nation in the making. Sanjeev, an MIT-trained engineer making it very good indeed in corporate America, finds his life turned upside down and his basic assumptions challenged by Twinkle (Tanima), his lively and precocious new wife.

Working within the confines of this canvas, Lahiri exhibits the deftness of the gifted miniaturist, unlocking mysteries to throw light on sensitive areas of human experience. In the best of the stories, she pursues an identifiable literary strategy: some thing offbeat or unexpected or quirky is introduced, and this becomes the means by which problems are brought out into the open, confronted and resolved.

In the fine opening story, "A Temporary Matter," a nightly electricity cut - a rare event in Boston or indeed any Western society - creates interludes of intimacy, shadowed by folk memories of India, in which Shoba and Shukumar can at last begin to deal with the grief bequeathed by their stillborn child. For Sanjeev and Twinkle, the newly married couple whose first weeks together are explored in the story "This Blessed House", a trail of Christian iconography and bric-a-brac secreted in their new home b y its previous occupants proves deeply unsettling, destabilising the husband's instinctive male assertiveness and setting the marriage on quite a different course.

In other stories, the perceptive abilities of a child cut to the heart of things. In the story "Sexy", Miranda, a young American woman, is shaken out of her obsession with Dev, a married Bengali investment banker, by seven-year-old Rohin, every bit as pr ecocious and forthright as the boy in the story of the emperor's new clothes. Elsewhere, Eliot, an American boy on the threshold of adolescence, is edged into India across the evenings spent at the home of Mrs. Sen, his Bengali babysitter. In this beauti fully observed story, one of the best in the collection, East meets West in the shared experience of loneliness and the poignancy of Mrs. Sen's situation is handled with utmost delicacy and control, unsullied by any hint of mawkishness.

In the best of her storytelling, Lahiri eschews showiness in favour of simplicity, delicacy and sustained understatement. This results in moments of acuity and insight. The immaculately attired Mr. Pirzada, escapee from subcontinental chaos and mayhem, m akes a small girl feel a stranger in her own home through the superb ease of his gestures. Eliot, observing his mother in the new universe of Mrs. Sen's flat, suddenly finds his own perceptions turned upside down: it was his mother, Eliot had thought, in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd. Her cropped hair, a shade similar to her shorts, seemed too lank and sensible, and in that room where all things were so carefully covered, her shaved knees and thighs too exposed. She r efused a biscuit each time Mrs. Sen extended the plate in her direction and asked a long series of questions, the answers to which she recorded on a steno pad.

IT is when Lahiri moves outside her Boston setting to assay India as the backdrop for stories that her grip on her material falters. In the story that lends its title to the collection, the Bengali diaspora feeds back into India in the shape of Mr. and M rs. Das and family, visiting from the United States. Their interaction with the homeland is observed by Mr. Kapasi, a part-time guide who chauffeurs them on a day trip to the Sun Temple at Konarak. Through the story runs the theme of misinterpreted signa ls: Kapasi believes the (by Indian standards) scantily dressed Mina Das to be interested in him and the interpreting work he does at a doctor's clinic, while she assumes that Kapasi, by his very Indianness, will be able to interpret her failing marriage and falling out of love with life.

But the authenticity of their doomed encounter is undermined by stilted dialogue, elements of cliche and loaded symbolism exemplified by a gang of menacing monkeys.

Set loose from her Boston moorings, Lahiri allows herself to wander rather too freely. In the story "A Real Durwan", she attempts an Indian morality tale with surreal undertones. Magical realism surfaces unconvincingly in "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar", accompanied by overwriting and awkward sentences: "thus, her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores" (p. 161). Detached observation, a hallmark of Lahiri's writing elsewhere in this collection, becomes ed ged out in this story by elements of judgment and caricature.

Lahiri as a chronicler of cultural interface, rooted firmly in the Boston she knows and with her antennae tuned to the muted anguish of her middle class protagonists, emerges from this first collection as a writer of deftness, control and understatement. In the best of her stories, she binds reader to character so artfully that the reader longs for the narrative to continue beyond its typically low-key ending.

Lahiri, it seems, is a writer well-positioned to move from short story writing to a more sustained fiction. What is not yet clear is whether she is interested in making such a journey.