5/23/2023 0 Comments Author of interpreter of maladiesIn ""A Real Durwan,"" the middle-class occupants of a tenement in post-partition Calcutta tolerate the rantings of the stair-sweeper Boori Ma. The arranged marriage of ""This Blessed House"" mismatches the conservative, self-conscious Sanjeev with ebullient, dramatic Twinkle-a smoker and drinker who wears leopard-print high heels and takes joy in the plastic Christian paraphernalia she discovers in their new house. The two things that sustain her, as the little boy she looks after every afternoon notices, are aerograms from home-written by family members who so deeply misunderstand the nature of her life that they envy her-and the fresh fish she buys to remind her of Calcutta. Sen (in the same-named story) leaves her expensive and extensive collection of saris folded neatly in the drawer. Displaced to the States by her husband's appointment as a professor of mathematics, Mrs. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history. The rituals of traditional Indian domesticity-curry-making, hair-vermilioning-both buttress the characters of Lahiri's elegant first collection and mark the measure of these fragile people's dissolution.
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