Jhumpa Lahiri’s short-story “Once In A Lifetime” in the latest New Yorker has a paragraph that describes the accident of two Bengali women coming together in Cambridge, a meeting that is remarkable not because it is accidental but because it would have been unlikely back in India:

Our mothers had met when mine was pregnant. She didn’t know it yet; she was feeling dizzy and had sat down on a bench in a small park. Your mother was perched on a swing, gently swaying back and forth as you soared above her, when she noticed a young Bengali woman in a sari, wearing vermillion in her hair. “Are you feeling all right?” your mother asked in the polite form. She told you to get off the swing, and then she and you escorted my mother home. It was during that walk that your mother suggested that perhaps mine was expecting. They became instant friends, spending their days together while our fathers were at work. They talked about the lives they had left behind in Calcutta: your mother’s beautiful home in Jodhpur Park, with hibiscus and rosebushes blooming on the rooftop, and my mother’s modest flat in Maniktala, above a grimy Punjabi restaurant, where seven people existed in three small rooms. In Calcutta they would probably have had little occasion to meet. Your mother had gone to a convent school and was the daughter of one of Calcutta’s most prominent lawyers, a pipe-smoking Anglophile and a member of the Saturday Club. My mother’s father was a clerk in the General Post Office, and she had neither eaten at a table nor sat on a commode before coming to America. Those differences were irrelevant in Cambridge, where they were both equally alone. Here they shopped together for groceries, and complained about their husbands, and cooked at either our stove or yours, dividing up the dishes for our respective families when they were done. They knitted together, switching projects when one of them got bored. When I was born, your parents were the only friends to visit the hospital. I was fed in your old high chair, pushed along the streets in your old pram.

This is not a characteristic Lahiri passage–politics enters her prose briefly through what a character might say in a conversation; there aren’t really more than one or two Lahiri stories that dwell on political events–but these lines say something important about Indian writing in the diaspora. The passage provides a direct observation about social realities in India and comments on how those contradictions can be papered over and subsumed under the conditions in the new country. In lines like those above you get a writing that instead of simply being nostalgic provides an account of what is particular to immigrant life.

[The picture above is a painting by Paramjit Singh. I have used it here because Lahiri’s story relies for some of its drama on the woods behind the narrator’s house. Introduced early in the story as a site of mystery and a murder, we return to the woods to look at old tombstones and find fresh news of death. Short stories more easily reveal such elements: little bits of technique, crowded like flamboyant dancers in a small room. Lahiri’s technical mastery means that there are no loud moments in her prose. Although the reasons for this are more than merely technical, there is always a hush present in Lahiri’s writing. It can be contrasted with the garrulity of so much of more overtly political novels in Indian fiction; it will be very interesting to see how young desi writers, following in Lahiri’s footsteps, surround that silence with new sounds.]

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