Interpreter of Continents

Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri is the talented author of the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. Regularly published in magazines and journals of literature, including The Harvard Review and The New Yorker, Lahiri earned a Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter.

Jhumpa Lahiri

All of the short stories in the collection deal with matters of the sub-continent, either through their setting- several take place in West Bengal, the Indian state whose capital is Calcutta- or through plot.  The majority of the stories take place in the northeastern U.S., and this is Lahiri’s strongest area: She writes deftly about the challenge of assimilation, of Indian life led in the suburbs of Boston, of balancing an arranged marriage with a new life in a new world. In “The Third and Final Continent,” Lahiri chronicles a  young Indian man who studies in London and, before taking a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, flies home to Calcutta to marry a woman he has never met. She joins him in Boston several months later, and they must get to know each other as they also learn the ways of their adopted continent.

In “A Temporary Matter,” Lahiri’s extraordinary talent with language is demonstrated through her telling of a marriage torn apart when acouple suffers the miscarriage of their first child. A scheduled nightly power outage in the Boston neighborhood in which Shoba and Shukumar live gives them the courage to say the things that have gone unspoken since the miscarriage.

In the dimness, he knew how she sat, a bit forward in her chair, ankles crossed against the lowest rung, left elbow on the table. During his search for the candles, Shukumar had found a bottle of wine.

‘It’s like India,’ Shoba said. ‘Sometimes the current disappears for hours at a stretch.’

The couple begins to play a game from Shoba’s childhood in India; they take turns revealing something they’d never before shared with anyone. And they play the game each night when the power cuts, enjoying the darkness, and the carefully chosen cnfessions. Lahiri transforms the mundane- a power outage for electrical repairs- into a magical, and then heart-breaking, circumstance.