In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, Interpreter of Maladies, Mrs. Das, who lives in the United States and doesn’t go back to India on vacation, revealed to Kapasi, a native Indian, the secrets of her cheating.
The unstoppable dialogue is like a waiting-to-discover illness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, spreading, developing, and spreading to other Indian immigrants who leave their homeland for the United States. Compared to Mrs. Das’s secret, the group faces a larger and more invisible gap, from geography, society and culture, and is forced to refine into a habit that is hard to give up in a foreign country, with curry and beans on the table, cinnabar nevus on the forehead symbolizing marriage, letters and home language on the phone.
These habits follow the “American-style” home as they thought, waiting for their master: an Indian couple who have been married based on theirparent’s wish, a husband with a high degree and a job in college; a wife who stays at home, from the kitchen to the bedroom, running between her husband and her children. They acquiesce in the East-style family relationship in a more independent, more open foreign country to take root, grow up, the habit of joint asylum and identity change, loss, until the illness revealed, in panic and stubbornness, and was hastily covered up, so that this effort to maintain family life can continue.
Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, moved to Rhode Island with her parents at the age of three, studied as an adult in Places such as New York and Boston, and obtained several degrees, including a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, with a librarian father and a master’s degree in art from her mother. Analyzing this up-and-coming background and experience of Jhumpa Lahiri is no different from the immigrant characters she writes about in her novels, and the writer is first and foremost the story’s personal experience before he becomes the creator of the character, which is perhaps why Jhumpa Lahiri can document the changes in immigrant life with sophisticated, hands-on strokes, capturing the panic and persistence of a particular moment. In Interpreter of Maladies, after the conversation, Mrs. Das opens the door and walks up the hill to Mr. Das and the child, shouting, “Wait for me! I’m coming”. Calm as if nothing had happened.
References:
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_of_Maladies”
“http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2019/1210/c404092-31498076.html”