Jhumpa Lahiri’s New Novel Is A Journey Across Time And Countries

Jhumpa Lahiri’s parents had migrated from India first to Britain, and then to America, and she grew up in Rhode Island in the 1970s. The initial struggle of a migrant’s life may have bruised her parents’ experiences, but only inspired Lahiri’s stories. Her literary fame began with the runaway success of her debut short story collection Interpre­ter of Maladies that won the Pulitzer Prize, and grew with her subsequent books. In a surprise move, she left with her family for Italy in 2012 to write in Italian, to explore a new culture, and more importantly, to reinvent herself, migration being her inheritance. Once on the road, journeys become a way of life. Her father, a university librarian, was a constant reminder of life left behind. And her mother, usually dressed in a sari, gave the daughter an idea of home thousands of miles away in India. Between the two generations, this was the third stretch of migration, but very different from the earlier two.

The woman protagonist of Whereabouts, a university teacher in an unnamed city in Italy, despite sharing many traits of the characters in Lahiri’s previous books, is a very different person. Full of self-assurance, the city her home, this single woman, with married men among her lovers, does not have any memory of migration. She goes to the swimming pool her mother first took her to, and observes the swimmers in the other lanes with an amused curiosity. The elderly woman who walks with a limp and leans on a cane swims in the next lane, “her face above water”. In the locker room where the women of different ages “take their showers, take off their swimsuits, shave their legs and armpits and groins in awkward, contorted poses”, she listens to “terrible stories, brutal information”. A woman in her eighties, while leaving, asks her if she would take some of the dresses from her younger days, for she had lost her waist decades ago.    

Though the author calls Whereabouts a novel, it is not so in the conventional sense. It is rather like entries in the woman’s journal recording the vignettes of her life—her outings and encounters, solitude and sojourns. Structurally, the narrative, woven around the woman’s wanderings, follows a straight line without the complex interplay of events and characters, twists and turns one expects in a novel. In her friend’s picture-postcard country house amidst the hills, she is swathed in the splendour of nature until she spots a decapitated rat at the entrance. The truncated rodent is a reminder that the careful construct of human happiness is too fragile.

Originally written in Italian as Dove Mi Trovo, Lahiri herself translated the book. She tells Time magazine that for her this process “becomes an interior dialogue between you and another part of you”. For those familiar with her writing, it is another Lahiri book casting a spell, with the Italian language and the city in the background. The elegance of unsaid words is often beguiling. Wondering if the newspaper story with a fellow academic’s mug is about his latest book, she goes on reading and muses: “After a long illness, it says. I’d had no idea.”   

Typically, migrant concerns seep in. The father is reluctant to drive the family somewhere for the long holidays. He would rather buy the day’s paper and lie on the sofa reading it, indifferent to his family’s disappointment. A man of refined taste, he is passionate about theatre.   

In the short story Year’s End, Lahiri wrote about a girl, a student in the US, her days in Mumbai, her mother’s death and the arrival of a stepmother with two daughters from her previous marriage, sensitively capturing the migrant trajectory: “Like them, I’d made the journey from India to Massachusetts, too old not to experience the shock of it, too young to have a say in the matter”. That more or less sums up her situation when she relocated to Rome in 2012. Her stories, she knows, are scattered along the road.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Avanti, Culture Colliders")