Unaccustomed Earth

“No matter how they went, those trips to India were always epic, and he still recalled the anxiety they provoked in him, having to pack so much luggage and getting it all to the airport, keeping documents in order and ferrying his family safely so many thousands of miles. But his wife had lived for these journeys, and until both his parents died, a part of him lived for them, too. And so they’d gone in spite of the expense, in spite of the sadness and shame he felt each time he returned to Calcutta, in spite of the fact that the older his children grew, the less they wanted to go.” 

This quote gives us insight into Ruma’s father’s interiority. While it’s true that Lahiri is invested in plumbing the depths of the cultural, familial, and social roles of females within these stories, she also does not shy away from conferring her male characters with their own complexities. While it is women who are tasked with being the emotional centers of their families, men, too, struggle internally with the responsibilities and expectations that having a family entails. Here, we see the inner conflict that Ruma’s father contended with during his years as a father to a growing family.  

“It would have been easier telling Romi [about Mrs. Bagchi]. He would have absorbed the information casually, might even have found it a relief. Ruma was different. All his life he’d felt condemned by her, on his wife’s behalf. She and Ruma were allies. And he had endured his daughter’s resentment, never telling Ruma his side of things, never saying that his wife had been overly demanding, unwilling to appreciate the life he’d worked hard to provide.”

This quote showcases the triangulation within this family, and thereby parses the complexity of familial relationships. In it, Ruma’s father cogitates about whether or not to tell his daughter about his newfound romantic relationship. In so doing, he articulates the underlying, implicit ways that he felt ostracized within his family. Interestingly, the conflict organizes itself along gender lines, with the mother and daughter forming an alliance against the father, and the son remaining blissfully impervious to the emotional trappings of the conflict, and thereby placing himself implicitly in his father’s corner. Although Ruma’s father sees himself as a victim in this scenario, his situation can also be read as an example of the failure of the men to emotionally engage with their family.

“The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent—they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way, from the texture of their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands. Oddly, it was his grandson, who was only half-Bengali to begin with, who did not even have a Bengali surname, with whom he felt a direct biological connection, a sense of himself reconstituted in another.”

This quote articulates the sense of displacement, rupture, and remoteness created by the intergenerational and cultural divide that is unique to immigrant families raising first-generation children in America. Ruma’s father recounts how his own children felt foreign to him, even in their physical appearances. This foreignness can be interpreted as a result of both the family’s diasporic position and the particularities of Ruma’s father’s psychology. Through this depiction, Lahiri investigates how cultural, material, and psychological vectors coincide in order to form complex relationships with and emotions toward family members.

“They were cheerful songs of courtship, which transformed the quiet life in our apartment and transported my mother back to the world she’d left behind in order to marry my father. She and Pranab Kaku would try to recall which scene in which movie the songs were from, who the actors were and what they were wearing. […] She and Pranab Kaku would argue passionately about these matters, raising their voices in playful combat, confronting each other in a way she and my father never did.”

Usha recalls the magical effect that Pranab had on her mother. Her mother was trapped in a loveless marriage, for which she left her ancestral and childhood home. Neither Usha’s father nor Usha provided any emotional support or anchoring for her mother, but Pranab could animate and understand Usha’s mother in a way that no one else could. Through the connection that they share, which is grounded in shared childhood and cultural experiences, Usha’s mother finds the solace, comfort, and affirmation that her own family cannot provide for her. Through this depiction, Lahiri attends to the anguish of the older generation of Indian immigrants, parsing the loneliness and isolation that immigration can produce in the human heart.

“But, most important, in the beginning he was totally dependent on her, needing her for those months in a way my father never did in the whole history of their marriage. He brought to my mother the first and, I suspect, the only pure happiness she ever felt. I don’t think even my birth made her as happy. I was evidence of her marriage to my father, an assumed consequence of the life she had been raised to lead. But Pranab Kaku was different. He was the one totally unanticipated pleasure in her life.” 

Here, Lahiri exemplifies her nuanced investigation of the family unit. As is her characteristic style, she articulates that the family unit is, ideally, supposed to bring people, particularly mothers, the ultimate sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. However, Lahiri consistently asserts that this ideal persistently falls short of its promise, as the people who comprise the family unit are far too complex to be pacified by the oversimplifications of the family ideal as a sociological and cultural unit. The cohesion and neatly-defined emotional circuits that the family is designed to provide cannot fully account for the idiosyncratic and highly-individualized longings and mysteries of the human heart.

“Over her sari she was wearing a knee-length lilac trench coat, and to any neighbor she must have looked as though she’d simply stepped out for some fresh air. She opened up the coat and removed the tip from the can of lighter fluid and doused herself, then buttoned and belted the coat. She walked over to the garbage barrel behind our house and disposed of the fluid, then returned to the middle of the yard with the box of matches in her coat pocket. For nearly an hour she stood there, looking at our house, trying to work up the courage to strike a match. It was not I who saved her, or my father, but our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Holcomb, with whom my mother had never been particularly friendly.”

This scene describes Ruma’s mother’s almost-realized suicide. Following the marriage of Pranab, Ruma’s mother found herself in such inconsolable and wholly secret grief that she wanted to kill herself, and nearly did. It is a mark of the woman’s utter loneliness and isolation that it was not one of her family members who ultimately pulled her from her anguished daze, but a neighbor with whom she did not enjoy a particularly fond or close relationship. Lahiri therefore paints a piercingly vivid portrait of Ruma’s mother’s suffering, and of her almost-total isolation. 

“He sensed Megan’s relief at not having Maya and Monika around, at being free. Amit wanted to share that relief, that sense of escape he’d been looking forward to all summer, after the invitation to Pam’s wedding had come and they’d made their plan. But now that they were alone he was nagged by the thought of Monika’s runny nose, and wondered if his mother-in-law would remember that strawberries gave Maya a rash.”

In this quote, we see both the long-lasting effects of Amit’s parents’ abandonment of him, as well as the subtle ways that he does not fall in line with gender norms. Throughout this story, Lahiri parses the ripple effects of Amit’s formative childhood trauma: the abandonment of his parents. His overly anxious attitude about his children, and his underlying yet powerful fear that his family life could be ripped away from him at any moment, are clearly the product of the unresolved trauma that he endured when his parents deposited him at Langford Academy and summarily left the country. This trauma also prevents him from doing the more prototypically masculine thing of taking a vacation, both emotionally and materially, from his duties as a father. Tellingly, too, this struggle is entirely internal, thereby exemplifying the manner in which Lahiri articulates both the norms that her characters are expected to meet as well as their roiling and rarely-voiced conflicts with those roles.

“Do you really think you can survive a whole evening without leaving my side?’ he asked her. ‘I can if you can.’ There was a note of challenge in her voice, and Amit smiled, amused by the idea, motivated to go to the wedding now that he would have a specific task to perform. At the same time he thought that in the early days of their love this would not have been an issue, their bodies continuously touching through the course of an evening, something that would have been taken for granted.” 

Lahiri continues to investigate the institution of marriage through this quote. She articulates both the intimacies and the heartbreak that result from human participation in cultural institutions, with marriage, specifically, being addressed here. In one way, marriage is the perfect vessel for Amit and Megan to realize and express the love that they feel for one another. But in another, marriage, combined with the passage of time, can have the effect of dulling the passion that exists between the two people. For Lahiri, the conflicting energies of passion and allegiance to norms are a key part of the territory of the human psyche, as no institution can adequately hold or address the nuances and wildness of the human heart.

“He was looking at the clothes they needed to put on again. Megan’s eyes were on his face, an arm stretched in front of her and a hand pressed to his chest, as if to prevent him, now that they were finished, from collapsing on top of her again. But he hoped that he was forgiven, and for a few moments they remained together on the narrow bed in the little room, his heart beating rapidly, vigorously, plainly striking the skin of her palm.”

Here, Amit and Megan have just had sex in a dorm room on campus, after arriving to the post-wedding brunch late. As opposed to staying in one of the dorm rooms, the couple chose to say off-campus, in the hopes of having a romantic weekend together. The act of closeness between here may be read as Amit coming to terms with unresolved trauma from the time in his life when he attended the school; just as Megan and Amit heal their relationship through physical intimacy, Amit implicitly heals old wounds related to the trauma of adolescent abandonment. 

“In Wayland they became passive, wary, the rituals of small-town New England more confounding than negotiating two of the world’s largest cities. They relied on their children, on Sudha especially. It was she who had to explain to her father that he had to gather up the leaves in bags, not just drag them with his rake to the woods opposite the house. She, with her perfect English, who called the repair department at Lechmere to have their appliances serviced. Rahul never considered it his duty to help their parents in this way.”

This quote articulates an experience common to many first-generation children of immigrant parents. Sudha must act as both a cultural and linguistic translator to her parents—as a child, her ways are more malleable than her adult parents, whose manner within an understanding of the world has already been fully formed. Sudha, therefore, is tasked with grappling with both her own sense of displacement and forced adjustment, as well as serving as a cultural liaison between her parents and America. This is a difficult and complicated position to occupy, one that is compounded by her gender position: women and girls are normatively expected to emotionally nurture and care for those around them, and so Sudha feels more of a sense of duty in regard to caring for her parents than her brother does.

“She heard Neel upstairs, sitting in his crib. In another minute he would cry out, wanting her, expecting breakfast; he was young enough so that Sudha was still only goodness to him, nothing else.”

Sudha has just revealed to her husband that she played a key role in her brother’s alcoholism. She has kept this information secret for her entire marriage, and her brother, Rahul, has just relapsed and endangered the son that she shares with her husband. Following her revelation, Sudha fears that her entire young family life is going to be snatched away from her. She also understands that her son is still in the phase of his life wherein he sees her, his mother, as omnipotent and perfect. Through this convergence of elements, Lahiri deepens her investigation of that which lies beneath the surface of the ideal of the family. Lahiri asserts that deception, shame, and the fear of annihilation can never be fully quelled by our participation in the cultural norms and institutions that we erect as a manner of escaping the darker parts of the human psyche in favor of connection, fulfillment, and cohesion.

“[The balloon] had sagged to the floor, a shrunken thing incapable of bursting. She clipped the ribbon with scissors and stuffed the whole thing into the garbage, surprised at how easily it fit, thinking of the husband who no longer trusted her, of the son whose cry now interrupted her, the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other.”

This quote highlights the fragility and vulnerability of the bonds that humans form to one another. The balloon, now sad and deflated garbage, symbolizes Rahul’s connection to both Sudha and Neel, now permanently soiled by the consequences of his alcohol addiction. It also symbolizes the way that Sudha has inflated her family as a raft to buoy her away from the pain and destruction that her brother’s addiction has wrought within her family of origin. The final line of this excerpt articulates Lahiri’s assertion that every family plays host to the deep internal conflicts and hypocrisies that lie within the people that comprise it, and that this inner turmoil cannot ever be fully contained nor accounted for by participation in the idealized family unit. The institution of the family can never fully achieve what it purports to be able to do.  

“Paul felt sorry for Heather, with her red, chapped nose and her thick-waisted body, but more than that he felt protective of Sang.” 

Lahiri articulates the parameters of a sexual economy that remain consistent throughout this story collection. Women are judged by their appearance, with thin, conventionally attractive women consistently being upheld as the ideal, both by Lahiri’s own choice of depictions and her character’s stated ideals and motivations. Heather, who is overweight and unattractive by society’s standards, is here held up as an object worthy of pity by both Lahiri and her character, Paul. The quote can be seen as both an articulation of Paul’s inner thoughts and motivations and Lahiri’s own investment in normative feminine beauty standards. 

“For her sake, he’d told her about the crying. That night in the kitchen, watching her make the salad, he’d felt the walls collapsing around her. He’d wanted to warn her somehow. Now he wanted to push her from the door frame where she stood.”

In this quote, we see Paul’s conflicted selfishness on full display. As this story progresses, we see that Paul slyly maintained control over the situation so that he was never discovered as the voyeur and meddler that he is. Through Paul’s deft and manipulative handling of the situation, Sang never learned of the long, detailed conversation that Paul and Deirdre shared. In this quote, he assures himself of the righteousness of his actions while persisting in handling the situation in a manner that prevents his full role within it from being revealed. He wants to alert Sang to the deception that is occurring within her relationship, but not at the price of revealing himself. Through this, we see that he does not value Sang as a full person, and that investment in his own ego and reputation is a competing force with giving Sang needed and important information.

“In Calcutta they would probably have had little occasion to meet. Your mother went 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.” 

In this quote, Hema addresses Kaushik as “you.” The quote parses the way that class and social differences that are entrenched in India can become inconsequential when fellow Indians find themselves in America as immigrants. Their common experience of leaving their homeland for a foreign country renders class differences moot, as they find themselves similarly isolated and alienated by their adopted land. Through this depiction, Lahiri attends to the singular intimacies and pains that the immigrant experience can engender within human relationships.

“[My mother] told me that she had slept in the same bed as her parents until the day she was married and that this was perfectly normal. But I knew that it was not normal, not what my friends at school did, and that they would ridicule me if they knew. The summer before I started middle school, I insisted on sleeping alone. In the beginning my mother kept checking on me during the night, as if I were still an infant who might suddenly stop breathing, asking if I was scared and reminding me that she was just on the other side of the wall.”

This story exemplifies the cultural and intergenerational conflicts that Lahiri depicts her characters contending with. To Hema’s mother, American conventions regarding family sleeping arrangements feel cruel and cold, while Hema struggles with the knowledge that this aspect of the inner working of her family could expose her to bullying and social ostracism—something that her mother cannot fully understand. Lahiri therefore highlights a struggle unique to the first generation of Indian-American immigrants, and the emotional complexity that is foisted upon the children of this generation.

“Long hours were devoted, lying on the cot in my parents’ room, to imagining you kissing me. I was too young, too inexperienced, to contemplate anything beyond that. I accepted the picture and pasted it into my report, but not before cutting the part with you away. That bit I kept, hidden among the blank pages of my diary, locked up for years.”

In this passage, Hema outlines the contours of her nascent sexuality as it relates to her childhood crush on Kaushik. We see that shame was a powerful presence in this phase of her emotional and sexual development, which is perhaps brought on by the layered ways in which Hema felt unseen, unheard, and disempowered as a young girl. These feelings were, unquestionably, due in part to her unique positioning within the first generation of Indian-American immigrants. The passage also lays the groundwork for the stirring and passionate connection that Hema and Kaushik will share as adults: the aspect of shame, and the way that Hema feels she must hide her feelings about Kaushik to protect her own vulnerability, will make romantic and sexual realization of her feelings for Kaushik all the more powerful once they have both become adults.

“It didn’t matter to me that her things were gone. After Bombay she had little occasion to wear jewels and saris, saying no to most of the parties she and my father were invited to. Coming home from school toward the end, I would find her sitting wrapped in a blanket, looking out at the pool she no longer had strength to swim in. Sometimes I would take her outside for fresh air, walking carefully through the birches and pines behind the house and sitting with her on a low stone wall.”

Kaushik recalls his mother with his signature mix of both emotional resonance and aloofness. Tellingly, we do not know if any of these feelings were ever openly articulated to another person. In fact, it would be perfectly in keeping with Kaushik’s character to never speak these things to another person. Therefore, his first-person narration offers private insight into his emotional life, and the deep impact of both his mother’s presence in his life and her death.

“My parents had never been quiet about their fondness for Johnnie Walker, around me, around anyone. After my mother’s death, just after I turned eighteen, it was I who filled her shoes, nursing one watered-down glass and then another in the evenings in order to keep my father company before we could both justify going to bed. I almost never drank the stuff at college, preferring beer, but whenever I came home I craved the taste, unable to avoid the thought of my mother when I happened to see an ad for it on a billboard or in a magazine.”

Kaushik continues to articulate the loss of his mother. His parents’ fondness for Johnnie Walker is one of the aspects that marked them as unorthodox and Americanized in the eyes of Hema’s parents. But for Kaushik, the liquor is one of the ways in which he feels connected to his mother. By depicting these details, Lahiri parses the imminently relatable and minute ways that humans forge emotional connections to each other. She also emphasizes the importance of ritual and pattern within the familial bond.

“I sat up and watched, imagining the rest of Chitra’s hair turning gray one day, imagining her growing into an old woman alongside my father the way my mother was meant to. That thought made me conscious, formally, of my hatred of her. As if aware of what I was thinking, Chitra opened her eyes and looked at me, embarrassed, quickly gathering her hair around her hand.”

Here, Kaushik articulates the conflict that Chitra’s presence inaugurates in his life. The passage reveals that although it takes Kaushik some time before he fully voices his emotions, his mother’s death still deeply and wrenchingly affects him. His father’s remarriage to Chitra, as we learn at the end of the story, is the factor that moves Kaushik’s mother resolutely into the past. However, at this stage, Kaushik has not fully grappled with his mother’s death. In fact, given that the last thought that we hear articulated by Kaushik is one about his mother, it can be surmised that her death is never fully resolved within his psyche. It is therefore very relatable and very human that he should feel the hatred for Chitra that this quote articulates. It is also of note that Kaushik and his father, keeping in line with gender norms, do not ever fully discuss the emotional contours of their grief. Instead, the feminine figure of Chitra is inserted into their relationship, and it is through her existence that they each come to terms with Parul’s death.

“Tears fell down their faces but words continued to pour out of me, words that should not have been uttered, should not have been heard. ‘Well, you’ve seen it for yourselves, how beautiful my mother was. How much prettier and more sophisticated than yours. Your mother is nothing in comparison. Just a servant to wash my father’s clothes and cook his meals. That’s the only reason she’s here, the only reason both of you are here.” 

This quote articulates the emotional and narrative climax of the short story, and is also the crux of Kaushik’s relationship to his stepsisters. Prior to this moment, an uneasy affection had been growing between Kaushik and his stepsisters. However, his unrestrained fury at them in this moment creates an insurmountable rift within their relationship, and causes Rupa and Piu to retreat into a permanent and remote politeness toward Kaushik. Through this depiction, Lahiri demonstrates the fragility of human bonds—especially those that are born of obligation and circumstance. Although Kaushik will soon come to regret this manifestation of his rage and grief, there will be nothing that he can do to make amends for it, especially given that Rupa and Piu will never reveal the truth of Kaushik’s treatment of them to their mother or his father. This aspect also layers the depiction with the issue of secrecy, and the quote serves as an example of the way that Lahiri asserts that the unspoken can become just as powerful, if not more so, than the spoken within our relationships to each other.

“I had hated every day I spent under your parents’ roof, but now I thought back to that time with nostalgia. Though we didn’t belong there, it was the last place that had felt like a home. In pretending that my mother wasn’t sick and being around people who didn’t know, a small part of me had been able to believe that it was true, that she would go on living just as your mother had.”

In this quote, Kaushik speaks to Hema. He articulates the manner in which Hema and her family are bound in an important way to his memories of his mother, and to his conception of the idea of home. It will later become clear to him that the element of their relationship that he expresses here is what separates Hema from any other woman that he has been involved with or could become involved with. By rendering Kaushik’s interiority in this way, Lahiri depicts the highly individual and idiosyncratic ways that humans form bonds to one another and create emotional meaning in their lives. Kaushik and Hema share a unique tie and intimacy that only a childhood connection can engender, and that connection, for Kaushik, is also deeply impacted by his love and grief for his mother. Therefore, the quote also highlights the emotional role that women occupy in the lives of men: the love and presence that women provide are foundational to men’s’ conception of home, belonging, and security. 

“But this time, looking at the giant sarcophagus of the bride and groom enclosed in a box of glass, she found herself in tears. She couldn’t help but think of Navin. Like the young smiling couple sitting affectionately on top of a shared casket, there was something dead about the marriage she was about to enter into. And though she knew it had every chance, over the years, of coming to life, on her way home, in the yellow light of evening, she was conscious only of its deadness.”

In this quote, the narrator relays Hema’s innermost feelings as she views a sarcophagus in a Roman museum. The passage exemplifies Lahiri’s investigation of the institution of marriage. While the institution of marriage exercises an inexorable and powerful hold upon many of the characters within this collection, especially Hema, Lahiri pushes beyond the things that are socially and culturally taken for granted about marriage—that it is right, natural, and expected—and interrogates the ways that the institution can and does fail to deliver on its promise of absolute fulfillment and meaning. Hema’s inclination to view the sarcophagus couple as resolutely dead, in the face of her own impending marriage, symbolizes her own recognition that she is choosing bland allegiance to the institution of marriage, and attempting to gain the stability and cultural and social validation that marriage confers, while being simultaneously aware that her chosen path symbolizes the death of romantic passion and vitality.