India Abroad - Archives 2003-2008

‘She brings out her memories onto the page’
Amar and Tia Lahiri reminisce with Arthur J Pais about a daughter who was born to write

You may be tempted to ask Amar K Lahiri to take care when he is travelling alone, say to
Russia. Don’t be surprised by
what he tells you in response. “I
often say I have survived three
continents,” he chuckles, adding,
“I know how to survive any-
where.” The Rhode Island
University librarian told his
family precisely this when they
came to see him off as he trav-
elled from Boston to Moscow in
1998.
Lahiri, who migrated to
America with his wife Tia, a
teacher, and young child
Nilanjana Sudeshna nearly 40
years ago after working as a
librarian in London, had no idea
that his elder daughter, whose
books have drawn upon her
experiences as well as those of
her parents, friends and
acquaintances, would use the
expression as the title of a story
in her first book, Interpreter of
Maladies.
Amar and Tia Lahiri remi-
nisced recently about their daughter’s evolution and
progress as a writer. They showed us her room filled with
books including those by contemporary writers to those
who created literature in Russia and Sweden in the previ-
ous century. They pointed out a pile of magazines and
newspapers on her winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and
remembered her telling them to put it away.
“She doesn’t like being in the news,” explains her mother.
“She wants to have all her time for her family and her writ-
ing. She doesn’t even want to read the reviews of her books,
even when people tell her they are very nice.”
Amar Lahiri reveals how his experience of living as a ten-
ant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, inspired his daughter.
The elderly landlady, who was large hearted and helpful,
lived in her mind in a ‘Victorian age.’
“She was very different from people of her age I had met
in Boston,” he says. “It was not the custom to call a grown
up man a boy. But she called me just that. I did not mind
because I knew she did not mean any harm.” Jhumpa
Lahiri took some elements from her father’s experience and
turned them into a story.
The writer has often said how her stories have autobio-
graphical elements in them and how frequently she draws
upon her life as well as the lives of her parents, friends,
acquaintances, and others in the Bengali community with
which she is familiar.

;

Brought to you by:

From the Editors ;
mingle on the page.’
That fictional fusion of a real-life dichoto-
my resulted in the Interpreter of Maladies,
Segueing seamlessly onto a vaster canvas, Lahiri then pro-
duced The Namesake, a sweeping saga of a fictional family
that immigrates to the United States. The debut novel
firmed up her reputation as a master storyteller; acclaimed
film-maker Mira Nair then distilled its essence into a criti-
cally-valued film starring the likes of Kal Penn and
Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan.
Continuing to shift effortlessly between styles, Lahiri fol-
lowed up with Unaccustomed Earth – a rare instance of a
work of short fiction jumping to the top of the Times best-
seller list on debut.
Awards and accolades have rained down on her faster
than her books have vanished off bookshelves; the shy, retir-
ing Lahiri incongruously found herself the darling of fash-
ion magazines and paparazzi alike; a couple of hundred
mediapersons descended on Kolkata to cover her 2001 mar-
riage to Alberto Vourvoulias – yet somehow, Lahiri
remained unmoved, untouched, by it all.
‘I accept it graciously and try to wear it lightly,’ she said of
her Pulitzer. ‘It is no magic potion. It doesn’t help me with
what’s really important to me: to learn and grow as a writer.’
Her almost eerie detachment is symptomatic of a writer
who cocoons herself in her own words. Criticism doesn’t
unnerve her, praise doesn’t puff her up, because she writes
entirely for herself.
Writing, for Lahiri, has been a means of making sense of
the world around her and, simultaneously, an escape from
the life of a brown immigrant in a white world; a life spent
stretching her sense of identity, of self, to touch the twin
worlds of India and the United States. It has simultaneous-
ly been a means of processing the world around her.
For an acknowledged master of craft whose words flow
with the seductive smoothness of honey, Lahiri says ‘writing
is the hardest thing I do.’
Why, then, write? Because she must; because, she says, she
does not have a choice. ‘If I don’t write, I feel dreadful. So I
write.’
For being the cultured voice of the community, for her sto-
ries that help us parse the dimensions of the hyphenated
immigrant experience and make sense of it all, for teaching
us how to wear excellence with modesty, grace and charm,
we honor Jhumpa Lahiri with the India Abroad Publisher’s
Award for Excellence, 2008.
; 10

fullscreen

subscribe

article text for page

< previous story | next story >

add comment | read comments

Share this page with a friend
Save to “My Stuff”
Subscribe to this magazine
Search
Help