Translating the Indian experience in nine stories. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.
Short stories are not really my thing. I’ve never really liked the context switching from one story to another, no matter how good those stories might be. Oftentimes there is a jarring disconnection between the stories, even though each one revolves under a central theme. I also feel saturated of fiction about the migrant experiences. Though these books may be well written, they feel alike to each other after some time, as they encroach into each other’s real estate of the reader’s minds, blurring lines which triggered in my mind a feeling of I’ve read this somewhere before.
But Interpreter of Maladies feel different — I was honestly floored. Lahiri is an artisan of putting the migrant experience into eloquent fiction that however mundane, echo deeply into that vulnerable shell we call the human experience. In the book, the Indian diaspora is on the spotlight. Yet, being a migrant many times over, firstly as a child who moved with my family to Australia, then the second and third time as someone trying to find my feet in countries where my passport is foreign, the stories resonate to my experiences. Call me biased, but I reckon these stories are fucking wonderful.
A preliminary to a divorce, the fear of driving, the irremediable interpreter. And the others.
The book started with one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. A Temporary Matter is about an Indian couple living in London who had alienated each other in the course of their marriage. When they have to go through a rolling power outage for a few days, they started playing a game under the candlelight to tell each other things that the other had not known about, thus sharing previously concealed secrets. The secrets are sadly benign, though they were harnessed in fear of discovery: a gift of a sweater pawned, a picture of a model ripped from a magazine. But the wife’s secret is darker as the confessions were a mere charade for her admitting to finding a new place to live as a precursor of their divorce.
In Mrs Sen’s, a young white boy comes under the care of an Indian woman while his single mother was at work. He was exposed to the Indian household: the amount of time the wife spends in the kitchen with her meticulous prep of basic ingredients, her obsession with procuring fresh fish and her irrational fear of driving in busy streets. In When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, we have another viewpoint of a young person as a fly on the wall as an expat Bangladeshi professor watches the news in agony while the Bangladesh Liberation War was taking place.
Interpreter of Maladies, the titular story of the collection is far from the best story but is still memorable. A tour guide, Kapasi, who doubles as an interpreter for the local doctor. Though his role is straightforward, he would put a twist to the doctor’s diagnosis. The family who he took under his care were Indians who had lost their roots, with the familiar brown face but the unfamiliar American voice. In a private moment, the unhappy wife admitted to Kapasi that one of the children were not the husband’s and seeks for a solution to her unhappiness.
Pressing a vein on the Indian pulse
We need to be wary of where Lahiri is coming from. Any interpretations that we extract from the novel is a tiny sample size of the Indian experience though we can say that the nine stories here are already quite expansive in their scope. Lahiri is from Kolkatta with a Bengali background, which if we follow an Indian stereotype (which we should be wary of), it’s the part of India with a bit more wealth. But I’m sure that this experience may differ slightly from the Tamil experience.
But there is something universal in the every day struggles of the characters, fighting against the current. It is through the resilience of the migrants that they are able to make life work in relation to their culture. Mrs Sen with her hours of food preparation, the narrator in The Third and Final Continent who had to find roots in an America infatuated with men landing on the moon, and his wife who would weep after being wrenched from her family to a new land, Mr. Pirzada who tried to extract any speckle of information of his family from the news. These are stories of resilience, where simple things which many take for granted become almost insurmountable obstacles: driving, not seeing one’s parents and siblings, marrying a stranger.
The examples above are only the other side of the coin. The other side are those who stayed. Lahiri wrote equally eloquently of the contemporary issues of Kolkatta in the lens of those who stayed — the women who live in the margins, living through the charity of neighbours and loose connections. It seems that being husbandless in India is a great depravity, as the woman would lack masculine protection and they’d lose face, being the butt of jokes as someone left unmarried. The position of women are ever precarious. The married ones, however, were also victims of the husband’s indifference and infidelity in some of these stories. Culture could be oppressive for the women and men alike, leading to undesired consequences.
But to mention solely the Indian-ness of these stories is also misleading and do no justice to the book. It is a book about cultural differences, sure. But it is also a book about the shortcomings which make us human; the decay of relationships, falling to the temptation of infidelities, succumbing to one’s vanity to show your peers that you’re doing pretty bloody alright. Case in point from This Blessed House:
“Each time he passed the mantel he winced, dreading the raised eyebrows of his guests as they viewed the flickering ceramic saints, the salt and pepper shakers designed to resemble Mary and Joseph. Still, they would be impressed, he hoped by the lovely bay windows, the shining parquet floors, the wooden wainscoting, as they sipped champagne and dipped samosas in chutney.”
Lahiri writes beautifully. There is a poetic clarity which is typical of subcontinental authors, but also a voice uniquely her own. Items are important, as the everyday household items are juxtaposed with Indian words you might need to Google up every so often. She uses dialogue sparingly and the voices of her characters, when she uses them, are credible. It is a book free of the clichés often found in migrant writing, which lends it an important voice.
Thus, what Lahiri wrote is more relevant now more than any time in the past, as we see an increasing Indian diaspora diffusing to all parts of the world. We watch reels these days of Melbourne and Toronto packed full of people, shoulder to shoulder, most with subcontinental faces. These scenes may be comedic for some, inducing hatred for others and some would not feel a thing. There is a not-so subtle racism in the publication of these short videos to show how the subcontinental migration has affected the global landscape, but as casual watchers we often forget the stories behind those faces.
I see this racism where I live in Malaysia, where Bangladeshi migrants would be treated as second class citizens by their sheer presence in Kuala Lumpur. But they are humble people who had gone through much and are actively contributing to the growth of the country, and the prejudice is really unjustified. But then again, racism relies on one’s automatic response. Books like Interpreter of Maladies has a key role in bringing readers more grounded, to develop empathy to anyone with a brown face in a predominantly white or yellow country if they had felt otherwise.
