Jan 16, 2004 05:12 AM
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(Updated Jan 16, 2004 05:12 AM)
Pulitzer Prizes, Commonwealth Awards, Man Booker Trophies don’t guarantee a fantastic book and this belief only became reconfirmed as I eyeballed through my rough notes and the scribbly stars that I had awarded to the different fables in the book. A collection of nine stories captioned, “of bengal, boston and beyond” this one fetched the author the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but after reading them, one’s left with an indissoluble bitter taste and there are reasons galore.
Giving the compliments where they are due, there are two exquisite stories in the book but for some vague reason, Lahiri’s intelligence at being powerful and sensitive in tandem is limited to these first and last stories and the nosedive which the emotions and the characters takes for the seven other stories is so immoderately abrupt and steep that one’s left wondering if it’s the same book one’s reading.
In all probability, one of the most moving short stories I have ever come across, is “A Temporary Matter” which focusses around a couple (Shukumar and Shoba) whose relationship, with the passage of time and circumstances has choked while the gradually elaborating communication and emotional gap has beaten the path for a strange bond which is a confusing mixture of ambivalence and avoidance. But a temporary matter of hourly electricity cut for five days acts a pacifier as they exchange confessions each night under a candle-light. Lahiri has, with such chiselled precision visited Shukumar’s self-piteous feelings (being an unemployed, idling student of 35), his gradual blunted odium towards Shoba’s presence (Shoba being a productive proof-reader), his yearn for the once-booming relationship and his silent embitterment towards Shoba for her little candlelight confessions which furthers him to make a revelation that was never meant to be—the description of their stillborn child, that the whole story becomes haunting and being the first, raises one’s expectations to levels never attained by the others.
Seldom have I come across stories which have visited the mindset of the immigrants, and “The Third and the Final Continent” is one such rare case. A Bengali bachelor who migrates to North London for his degree and then to a library’s processing department at MIT in US, his various experiences of accommodation (at YMCA and then at a rented room in a centenarian Mrs Croft’s house) and adaptations to the environment till he finally localises with his wife and family are delicately laced with subtle humour and incised domestic detail but what takes the cake is the final sentence which so brilliantly sums up this strange mix of attachment and achievement for the forever recurring, resonating experiences of one’s first moments in the alien land:
“I have lived in this new world for 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary…still there are times when I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.”
Starting from the dim-sighted amongst the blind comes the erotically titled “Sexy” which centres itself around a young Midwestern girl, Miranda (and her steamy affair with a married Bengali man) who has failed to notice the sheer insignificance in the relationship till a kid, Rohin, victim of another failed marriage causes her to visualise the other side. The story has its entertaining moments in Miranda-Rohin’s conversation and Miranda’s quest to rate Dev’s wife’s beauty which takes her to a video-library as she hears him comparing the latter to a certain Madhuri Dixit who she doesn’t have a clue of. But an open-ending dampens both the well-constructed milieu and characters.
Another mediocre story focuses on an 11-year old boy Eliot and his experiences during brief everyday sojourns at his new, Indian baby-sitter--Mrs Sen’s. His queer interpretations of her ways of fashion and meal-preparation and his reflections on Mrs Sen’s reactions as she alternates between motherland nostalgia and driving fear are rational, and through a predictable, but well-conceived climax one does feel the frigidity in the natives of America as Eliot’s mother decides against baby-sitting, but never for the actual protagonist—Mrs Sen.
As the Indian landscape sashays across Lahiri’s book, one’s bewildered at the overweening eccentricity and preposterousness with which the characters are handled. Then be it the fuss around the treatment of a brainsick woman (Bibi Haldar) whose ailment’s only cure is being sowed with some male seeds, or the sweeper besotted with her pre-Partition past, Boori Maa whose years of sweeping and gatekeeping still doesn’t deter from the superiors living in the building in pointing their fingers at her when a robbery materialises, Lahiri’s neither able to convey the sheer futility of years of servility in India in latter nor the psyche of an insane female all thanks to her rushed climaxes and forced metaphors.
Another otiose shot from Lahiri is a long-winded “When Mr. Pirzaada comes to Dine” where through a young narrator’s eyes one observes a Pakistani oldster (Mr.Pirzaada) whose family’s trapped in Bangladesh during the violent epoch of 1971. Though a poignant metaphor does persist throughout (that of the girl praying for Mr.Pirzaada’s family every night with a sweet being swallowed), I wonder if it’s the sheer immaturity of the chosen young storyteller or Lahiri’s fatigue midway to blame, for neither does Mr.Pirzaada’s tragedy exhibits the required potency nor is his stoic mien any more efficacious. A terribly clichéd climax only crushes whatever depth the story possesses.
The amusing factor of a Hindu couple finding scattered Christian regalia in their new house again bleaches abruptly in the climax in “This Blessed House” as one of the obstinate partners gives in to another’s zeal to demonstrate their “blessed” catches. Lahiri’s continuous enthusiasm is the only redeeming factor in this commonplace story.
Shockingly, Lahiri’s worst shot is the story possessing the book’s title “Interpreter of Maladies” where Lahiri has little else to convey besides a tour operator cum interpreter’s crush on one of his female customers travelling with her husband and kids en-route Konark. A poorly-conceived and untimely revelation of the wife to the interpreter about her worn-out relationship and illegitimate child without any rhyme or reason, her bizarre reactions after the interpretor’s question about her feelings and the unfastened climax leaves you feeling zonked and zapped (first at the story and then at yourself). Absolutely pointless!!
One of the selected reasons that drew me towards this book was the expectation to witness some issues surrounding the Asian community in the alien-land exile, and save for one Lahiri’s dry, clinical approach towards characters and relationships means the impact is both soggy and dull.
One can’t deny that Lahiri possesses incisive background detailing, theme indulgence and deftness in lacing simplistic humour with tragedy, which makes these tales readable to an extent, but she lacks that consistent compassion and cohesion in expression which leaves her short-stories both emotionally flaccid and wanting in content.
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