The Interpreter of Human Beings

Dear Dreamers,

I must admit, I’m a little bit of a binge reader. Once I find a theme or writer I like, I obsessively read anything similar that will come my way. It happened when I read ‘ I left Microsoft to Change the World’ and ended up finding Paul Farmer which led me to Tracy Kidder and I found Deogratias.

Recently I came across Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘ Lowland’ leading all bestsellers list. Full disclosure, I thought I hated her writing since I disliked Inheritance of Loss ( turns out wrong author). So imagine my surprise when I find ‘the Interpreter of Maladies’ on a Saturday afternoon while browsing at a local bookstore café. Two coffees and three stories later I was a follower….

Unfortunately it would be a little while before I would get my hands on it, but I by then I found Unaccustomed earth and the Lowland. But more about these later.

Jhumpa Lahiri is a league of her own. I have always thought that short stories are the hardest to write. You got to have a point , you gotta get to it and you gotta go to go out with a bang. All in 10 pages….  That can’t be easy.

And then you meet JLa. She swoops in, takes you on a journey into a dozen Bengali households all over the world and makes you feel content like you just ate dessert.

Her stories talk about expatriate Indians, navigating the traditions they inherit and the new world they now live it. The stories are understated, the details subtle, with the voice so powerful and sure, its almost as if she has led the life of each of her protagonists.

What makes the stories special ( to me atleast) is that no two relationships are the same, no two situations similar, and yet they have a common premise. Bengalis living middle class lives in New England, parents and kids who go to school or teach  at well-known prestigious institutes in the area, who have had arranged marriages and reconciled themselves to brides chosen by their parents, who need to specifically spiced fish every day and whose houses smell of steamed rice and lentils when you enter it. Then she takes you back home, visiting a place once your home, a stranger in familiar surroundings.

She captures every sensation, every thought, every feeling of every character, thoughts impossible for anybody except the character to have, and yet once you have read them, you didn’t know life before them.