Making Room: Place and Placelessness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik” in Unaccustomed Earth

Abstract

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:

Nine yard sarees : a family portrait

“…In "City in C Minor", the reader meets a young Emma who grows up from age eleven dreaming of becoming a cellist just like the "world-famous" Spaniard cellist of Chinese descent that she idolises (18). However, despite her utmost efforts, she eventually decides to give up her dream after receiving a government scholarship to study not music but "economics and statistics" at a prestigious university in New York (24); it is established early on that she is not financially well-off, with her father often "not having the money" (22), which understandably influences her decision. When she watches her favourite cellist again in her junior year of college, she realises that he, after years of abiding by Western classical canon, has grown "sentimental about his Chinese heritage" (25) and has begun performing fusion East-West music.…”

“…He is constantly aware of the gaze, of being perceived as "Oriental, Other" or an "exotic curiosity" (9) because of his "generic Asian features" (10). As a writer himself, he hopes for "an alternate world" with "an alternate history" (22). At one point, he dreams of a library filled with "different versions of [himself], scattered infinity through time and space" (25).…”

“…While Bridges details the societal shifts over time and their paradigmatic translates from Sanskrit to "Great Shiva's Night" (22). Parvathi's parents, as strict followers of Brahmin as well as Shaivite tradition, extol the practice of "notasking" and "doing-without-mind" (72); her father participates in "lengthy recitations of the rudrajabam" ( 16) during Mahashivarathri, goes so far as to make his own "panchambritam", a concoction of "mashed banana, rock sugar, cardamom, raisins and saffron" (21) and performs the "esoteric ritual" (18) regularly on their "small brass Shiva-Lingam" at home (20).…”

“…The source of tension emerges early, when Parvathi is sixteen. She learns from her parents that the Shiva-lingam, an oblong idol which is the only form in which Lord Shiva can be worshipped in temples, is a sacred phallus (11) that is "actually a representation of Shiva and Shakti" in cosmic union (22), which in other words means in the midst of sexual intercourse. As someone who herself was named after Goddess Parvathi, a form of Shakti, the protagonist Parvathi is struck by the glaring omission of Shakti from the nomenclature as well as rituals performed and mantras recited on Mahashivaratri.…”