OUT OF PLACE

In his marvellous poem Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins praises the glory of “dappled things”, “skies of couple-colour”, “all things counter, original, spare, strange”. That’s Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing at her best as she takes us right into the jagged worlds of those who strike their roots into unaccustomed earth — a writing born of dislocation, and powerful enough to rearrange our perceptions.

So far, I haven’t been the biggest fan of her contained little fictions about Bengali women disoriented by the American east coast, the speaking silences between generations, and the moments of incomprehension that mark migrant lives. There seemed to be a disconnect between her soggy storytelling and the general critical consensus that she was a sort of hip, updated Alice Munro with a global soul. And going by the blurb and press, Unaccustomed Earth seemed to fall back into territory she’s already strip-mined in her previous books.

In “Nobody’s Business”, grad student Paul’s fascination with his vivacious Indian housemate Sang (for Sangeeta) is less about laying claim to her as about participating vicariously in her life. “Every so often a man called for Sang, wanting to marry her” is how the story begins, and it tracks her romantic travails with her bad-news Egyptian boyfriend through Paul’s half-bemused, half-besotted perspective. And the thread that runs through the narrative is the persistent phone calls from one diligent Bengali suitor or the other — “sometimes Sang would take notes during these conversations, on the message pad next to the phone. She’d write down the man’s name, or ‘Carnegie Mellon’, or ‘likes mystery novels’ before her pen drifted into scribbles and stars and tick-tack-toe games.”

... contd.