The Unaccustomed Earth — A Review

With the publication of Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri, the subtle chronicler of the Bengali immigrant diaspora, has reached an important literary milestone. Dislocation of identity on account of migration is more a backdrop than a force holding centre stage in her new anthology. More universal yet grimmer human predicaments such as death, deceit and desertion play defining roles in the lives of the characters of Unaccustomed Earth. The resultant perspective gains considerably in complexity with the emergence of children of the original immigrants.

Most of her earlier stories in Interpreter of Maladies explore the psycho-social conflicts of the characters, their isolation, crises of identity, and their struggle to belong. The first-generation émigrés were like first settlers on an ‘unaccustomed earth’, braving the rough winds and weather alien to them, survival and adjustment being at the core of their predicament. The metaphor finds its fullest expression in the title of the succeeding volume.

Unaccustomed Earth picks up the threads from its predecessor. The first wave of settlers has long since arrived, and some have embraced the new culture wholeheartedly, even as others cling to the baggage from that far-off land. Then there are those who attempt to straddle both. Food, clothes and customs at odds with inherited Indian values pose major stumbling blocks to transition for some. Uncomfortable with the pace and extent of change, they cling fiercely to earlier ways of life, almost as if mourning. The quandary turns into a quagmire when they seek to perpetuate those values through their children. Regardless of their levels of assimilation, something of that alienation gets transmitted to their offspring, almost as if genetically. The children, however, have grown up as natives of the adopted land, imbibing its customs and mores. Not only do they feel at home in it, they often find the culture of their parents incongruent with their own lives. As they move into adulthood, parental resistance to their fuller assimilation into American culture causes friction that shapes their lives.

The title story of the collection tells us about Ruma, living in Seattle with her husband Adam and their toddler son Akash. She hasn’t returned to work after her mother’s sudden death and is expecting her second child. Ruma’s father is a consummate immigrant, assimilated to the extent that, with his gray hair and fair skin, he could easily be mistaken for an American in his old age. He has embraced the intense individualism manifest in American culture. He lives alone and makes his own meals, loves to hop around the world, living out of a suitcase. He has developed an interest in Mrs Bagchi, a widow who frequents packaged tours and is, like him, an Americanised immigrant. Ruma’s father is the epitome of a free spirit who sends over picture postcards to her periodically. But there is a certain disconnect between him and Ruma, partly an offshoot of the resettlement process. “Occasionally there was a sentence about the weather. But there was never a sense of her father’s presence in those places.”

Ruma continues to carry the influence of her mother, who had steadfastly retained her Indian identity. Although she has chosen to marry an American, much to the mortification of her mother, her Indian inheritance remains unmistakable. The old generational divide has begun to blur: cultural inheritance moves unpredictably between generations, and assimilation itself is neither linear nor uniform. The father embraces individual freedom while the daughter remains susceptible to inherited notions of filial duty. She feels guilty for not taking due care of her father as she believes an Indian daughter should and is constantly worried about him. She yearns to be with him, if only to evoke the old times when her mother was still alive. However, when her father pays her a visit, she fears that he may decide to stay with them, unsure how Adam will receive the arrangement in the long run or what impact it will have on the family she has so carefully nurtured.

Hell-Heaven is narrated by Usha, recalling her childhood and adolescence with a mother who resented the American way of life, enforced Bengali customs at home, and forbade her to go on dates or even to Harvard Square with a friend, to eat turkey or touch wine. Her mother, Aparna, developed a secret attachment to Pranab, an acquaintance who eventually married Deborah, an American. Yet her private attachment to Pranab complicates this cultural rigidity, revealing desires that sit uneasily with the traditional order she seeks to preserve for her daughter. Her recurrent refrain to Usha is, “Don’t think you’ll get away with marrying an American, the way Pranab Kaku did.”

A Choice of Accommodations explores the strains in the marriage of Amit and his American wife, Megan. Their relationship is tested when they travel to Langford to attend the wedding of Pam Borden, towards whom Amit once had strong feelings. Only Goodness moves still further from the conventional immigrant dilemma, confronting Sudha with her brother Rahul’s alcoholism and the burden of guilt and responsibility it brings. Nobody’s Business, similarly, places Sang in a relationship with Farouk, an Egyptian, but it is deceit rather than cultural difference that ultimately defines their relationship. Once cultural identity ceases to determine every conflict, Lahiri’s immigrant characters are free to suffer the same ordinary and terrible failures as everyone else.

The last three stories form a triptych about Hema and Kaushik, childhood acquaintances who become lovers years later. Lahiri lends the tales a poignant urgency through shifting perspectives, drawing together the conflicts and fates of the émigré, the immigrant and the vagabond. Once in a Lifetime tells of Kaushik’s parents returning to America after seven years in Bombay. As the two families stay together at Hema’s house, her mother and Mrs Chowdhary occupy opposite ends of the assimilation seesaw. Hema’s mother retains Bengali habits of dress and food; Kaushik’s mother has embraced American ones, smokes cigarettes and enjoys her drinks. For a while the two families live together in strained contrast. The next story, Year’s End, is told from Kaushik’s perspective. His mother is already dead when he learns from his father that he has remarried, giving Kaushik a new stepmother and two stepsisters. He tries to live with the newly constituted family but struggles to suppress his resentment and grief. Eventually, he breaks free, driving away aimlessly with his mother’s photographs towards the desolate shores of the North Atlantic.

Going Ashore shifts into third-person narration. By now, neither Hema nor Kaushik is easily contained within an Indian or American identity; both have become citizens of a wider world. Home and identity have become increasingly portable, fluid and transnational. Hema is now a professor of Latin and is visiting Rome, taking advantage of a colleague’s unoccupied apartment. Kaushik has become a photojournalist whose work carries him through conflict zones across the world; a map of the Gaza Strip is a permanent fixture on the wall of his apartment in Rome. When the two encounter each other again, they fall into intimacy with remarkable ease. However, Hema’s marriage to Navin has already been arranged, and Navin is scheduled to move to Hong Kong for a new job. Eventually, they break away to their respective cosmoi.

Jhumpa Lahiri is a master of narratives that captivate through accumulation rather than event. Small observations, domestic arrangements, remembered objects, gestures and withheld words gather almost imperceptibly until an emotional truth becomes unavoidable. Her language flows with purpose and grace without many swirls and ripples. Her style is minimalist and restrained. Sentences are precise and measured but suffused with nuance; a casual reader risks overlooking the undercurrent. “It was colder than Rome, a cold that emanated from stone, and instead of her leather jacket Hema now wore a peacoat of Kaushik’s, grateful for the weight over her shoulders, remembering that other coat of Kaushik’s she’d so hated wearing when she was a girl, back when they were nothing but already something to each other.”

She doesn’t rely upon florid diction, and yet her prose is not bereft of imagery and symbolism. The symbols rarely announce themselves; ordinary objects and places acquire significance through their recurrence and context. The garden Ruma’s father plants in unfamiliar soil acquires a deeper resonance in the title story, echoing the metaphor that gives the collection its name. Sarcophagi appear twice in Going Ashore, casting an unobtrusive shadow of mortality over Hema and Kaushik’s renewed intimacy.

The progression of the stories in the collection marks an evolution in the concepts of home and belonging. The further we move, the more we find the concepts of home and identity becoming fluid—portable, even transnational. Yet this fluidity offers neither a common experience nor a common refuge: some carry home with them, while others learn to distrust it. “It didn’t matter where she was in the world, or whether or not she was dying; she had always given everything to make her homes beautiful, always drawn strength from her things, her walls. But Kaushik never fully trusted the places he’d lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life.”

These stories mark an evolution in Lahiri’s fiction. The intercultural conflicts that held sway over many of the characters in her earlier stories have yielded ground to challenges arising from larger questions of life. Her protagonists may not always be surer of their moorings, but the source of their uncertainty has changed. For the ensuing generation, identity is no longer necessarily unsettled along the old axis of India and America; the earth they stand on is no more unaccustomed. Assimilation is neither linear nor uniform, but neither does it remain the organising drama of every life.

It is remarkable, however, that racial discrimination, so common a theme in immigrant fiction, rarely occupies the foreground in Lahiri’s work. Even where racial and cultural differences are readily available as sources of conflict, she often directs our attention instead towards the more intimate failures of family, love and belonging. The dilemmas and agonies haunting the characters of Unaccustomed Earth therefore extend far beyond the immigrant experience. The conflicts and alienation of Lahiri’s diaspora become representative of human suffering regardless of geography.