Interpreter of Maladies, her first internationally acclaimed collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth is Jhumpa Lahiri's third book and her second collection of short stories. Born in London and educated in Boston, Massachusetts, Lahiri spent many months with her grandmothers in Calcutta during her childhood. Currently living in Italy, she recently started writing in Italian (Lahiri 2016). As Pankaj Sharma explains in a paper entitled "Neither Here Nor There: An Assessment of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth as Migration Literature," Jhumpa Lahiri is now known as "an American Writer of Bengali descent who writes about the diaspora and their modes of existence and identity" (2013, 33). She therefore not only writes across places, but also across languages. Like her previous work, Unaccustomed Earth deals with second-generation immigrants born on non-Indian soil in the 1960s or 1970s and their difficulties in navigating issues of belonging, nostalgia and marginality in a context of speed, modernity and globalization. Unaccustomed Earth is divided into two parts and this paper focuses on the second part, a novella entitled "Hema and Kaushik." 2 "Hema and Kaushik" is in fact a trilogy in which each story might be read as a meaningful unit. But the three stories echo one another in a complex way, and should therefore be read as a whole. The deep meaning of "Hema and Kaushik" emerges from those echoes, as well as from the missing links-mishaps, mistakes and misrepresentations. While being strongly referenced in non-fictional space and time, the three parts of "Hema and Kaushik" foreground a tension between a yearning for some form of emplacing and embodiment of place, and a resistance to traditional forms of belonging. As Barbara Bender writes in A Handbook of Material Culture:

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