ALIENATION AND LONELINESS OF WOMEN IN SIX STORIES FROM JHUMPA LAHIRI’S INTERPRETER OF MALADIES
By – Dr. Meltem Uzunoğlu Erten
Instructor, Dr., School of Foreign Languages, Pamukkale University, Denizli, Turkey
June 2016, Issue XVII
Introduction to the Author:
Meltem Uzunoğlu Erten graduated from English Language and Literature Department in Ege University/Turkey in 2004. She completed the MA program in English Language and Literature Department in Pamukkale University/Turkey in 2008. In 2015, she completed her dissertation on James Joyce’s Ulysses in the same department. She has also been working as an instructor in The School of Foreign Languages in Pamukkale University since 2007.
Abstract
As an Indian Bengali American author, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing is often concerned and discussed in terms of cultural clash experienced by Indian people in the United States. Her characters are usually members of the Indian diaspora who suffer from identity crisis and nostalgia, which cause their alienation and loneliness. Accordingly, studies on Lahiri’s writing mostly focus on the themes of alienation and loneliness experienced by immigrants in another culture. However, alienation and loneliness of Lahiri’s especially women characters go beyond their cross-cultural identities. Women in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, whether they are Indian or American and no matter they are in India or United States, suffer from all types of alienation and loneliness. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze six stories from the collection Interpreter of Maladies in terms of alienation and loneliness experienced by women characters of Lahiri not only as a result of their cultural identities but also as a consequence of universally shared human conditions.
Key Words: Alienation, Loneliness, Women, Jhumpa Lahiri
Introduction
As an Indian Bengali American author, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing is often concerned and discussed in terms of cultural clash experienced by Indian people in the United States. Her characters are usually members of the Indian diaspora in American society and their stories deal with issues of hybridity, identity crisis, nostalgia and mainly with rootlessness and inability to find a home on the planet. These issues are closely connected with feelings of alienation and loneliness, which are the subjects of many papers on Lahiri’s fiction.
Accordingly, studies on Lahiri’s writing mostly focus on the themes of alienation and loneliness by keeping her Bengali background and identity as well as her life experience in western society in mind. That is, her characters’ alienation and suffering from loneliness are analyzed in relation to the cultural conflicts they go through. However, alienation and loneliness of Lahiri’s especially women characters go beyond their cross-cultural identities. Women in her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, whether they are Indian or American and no matter they are in India or United States, suffer from all types of alienation and loneliness. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze six stories from the collection Interpreter of Maladies in terms of alienation and loneliness experienced by women characters not only as a result of their cultural identities but also as a consequence of universally shared human conditions.
Alienation and Loneliness as Universal Themes in Lahiri’s Short Stories
The theme of alienation and loneliness in literature is defined as “an existing tension and disintegrating human relationship” which “serves as a basic theme and recurrent motif in many Indo-English novels” (Saleem and Bani-ata 4-7). Apart from cultural conflicts, alienation and loneliness may be triggered by various reasons such as problems in marriages, social conditions or secrets in personal life. Accordingly, characters may face these in a variety of forms. Likewise, women characters in Lahiri’s stories experience alienation and loneliness in several different ways and they make their own choices at the end of each story to cope with these feelings. That is, they either make radical changes in their lives or they completely draw themselves back into their closed worlds. Karunesh summarizes these tendencies as either “negotiation and adjustment” or “a sense of loss and nostalgia” (37). Lahiri’s six stories which will be dealt in this paper are A Temporary Matter, The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, Interpreter of Maladies, Sexy, Mrs. Sen’s and A Real Durwan, all of which will be treated in relation to each other as pairs.
The first pair out of these six stories is A Temporary Matter and The Treatment of Bibi Haldar. A Temporary Matter is the story of a few days of a young Indian couple in the United States who are forced to pass through a difficult period after their stillborn baby and who are also forced to face some realities during these a few days without electricity. Happily married and excited for a baby, Shoba and her husband Shukumar come across with the trauma of their baby’s death six months ago, which breaks the bond between the couple somehow. Instead of talking about this traumatic event within the six-month-period, they avoid each other hoping it to be just a temporary matter. Yet, ironically, the story proves that “the marital discord” is “a temporary matter just as the interruption in electric power supply” (Sumalatha, 353). As time passes, loneliness grows especially in Shoba’s world, which turns her into a woman she never wanted to become. Her outfit and sloppy make-up make her “look, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble” (Lahiri 1). Looking at how “she pried the sneakers from her feet without untying them” (Lahiri 5), Shukumar thinks “she wasn’t this way before. She used to put her coat on a hanger, her sneakers in the closet, and she paid bills as soon as they came” (Lahiri 6).
Shoba’s changing attitude towards both herself and her husband is the consequence of her accusing Shukumar of being absent when she lost the baby. Although she insisted on his going for the academic conference in Baltimore, and although it was three weeks before her due date when the event happened, Shoba cannot forgive him for the loneliness she felt at the hospital. It is this feeling that grows between them each and every day. This feeling makes Shukumar “to struggle to say something that interested her, something that made her look up from her plate” and to question “what was there left to say to her?” (Lahiri 12-13).
The problem with the electricity gives the couple a chance to see what is left to say each other. It starts with Shoba’s memory about the power failures in her childhood. She explains it as a game in which everybody has to share something such as a little poem or a joke or a secret. The following days turn into an excitement for both searching something to share and wondering what the other will say. Each time they share some funny or annoying detail they kept as little secrets so far while eating together in the darkness of their house. Darkness lighted by a small candle brings them together so much they even start washing the dishes together and “drying their hands on either end of a towel” (Lahiri 15) after finishing the dishes. During these days, Shukumar is surprised to see how little he knew about Shoba although he knows how “she curled her fingers tightly when she slept, that her body twitched during bad dreams” and “it was honeydew she favoured over cantaloupe” (Lahiri 16). Despite being able to talk to each other again with the help of this temporary problem with electricity, Shukumar senses that something changed between them when they had to spend time “in a wing of the hospital they hadn’t been to on the tour for expectant parents” (Lahiri 3).
When the problem with the power supply comes to an end, Shukumar perceives the whole point of their game with Shoba’s final share: that she found an apartment in which she planned a life apart from him. Sickened by what he hears, Shukumar suddenly decides to share what he promised to keep as an eternal secret: the sex of the dead baby whom indeed he came and held in his arms before it was cremated and it is the last thing that collapses any hope for their marriage.
Shoba, who cannot conduct her trauma and Shukumar, who cannot support her, are both lost in their loneliness and are alienated from each other just in six months. Actually, Shukumar mentions that Shoba “was the type to prepare for surprises, good and bad” (Lahiri 6). Yet, the baby’s death catches her unprepared for the first time in her life and she is unable to overcome such great loss. A baby’s loss draws her into an isolated and lonely world which she surrenders eventually.
In contrast to Shoba and her baby, in the story The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, it is another baby who takes Bibi out of her lonely world. The main character of the story is Bibi who suffers from an undiagnosed illness during her whole life and whose father spends all his life to find a proper cure hopelessly. After her father’s death, Bibi has no chance but to live together with her cousin and his family working for the cosmetics shop they own. Bibi’s alienation is the result of her position in society: a young woman without parents and husband, she is outcast because of the unpredictable nature of her illness. Her cousin describes her as a troublemaker “weeping and wailing and warding off customers” and “a bane for business, he told her, a liability and a loss” (Lahiri, 164).
When a doctor offers marriage as a treatment for Bibi, although she is willing for it, her cousin and his wife give no chance to such possibility. However to stop Bibi’s complaints, her cousin Haldar places an advertisement for marriage on the newspaper describing Bibi as “UNSTABLE” (Lahiri 165). While Bibi is worried about her fate and wonders “what will become of [her] (Lahiri 167), even her neighbouring friends confess that “she was not [their] responsibility, and in [their] private moments [they] were thankful for it” (Lahiri 167). Bibi lives in such loneliness that the women living around feel pity for her and try to include her in their conversations and social activities. But, Bibi becomes more and more alone as her cousin and his family leave her completely for fear that she is a potential danger for the family’s baby. In a depressive mood, Bibi struggles to organize her life on her own. She is outside the acceptable borders of the society so much that “none of [the neighbouring friends of her] were capable of understanding such desolation” (Lahiri 166). After setting a lonely life following her cousin’s departure, Bibi and her friends recognize that she is pregnant. The father of the child remains a mystery forever, but Bibi has a healthy baby boy at the end of nine months, which becomes the turning point of her life. That is, the baby cures both her illness as suggested one of her doctors before and her alienation which “is not merely physical and circumstantial but also an isolation born in the mind of [her]” (Biswas 4).
The opposition between Shoba, whose world tumbles with her baby’s death, the birth of her baby unites Bibi’s lonely and unhappy life. Giving birth to her son, she manages to put her house and job to rights, starts earning a living on her own and raises the child with the help and support of her neighbourhood women friends without having another attack from then on.
The second pair is composed of the stories; Interpreter of Maladies and Sexy. The common characteristic of this pair is the secrets, discomfort caused by them and people’s need to ease their conscience. Lahiri’s ironical emphasize is on loneliness that push people towards keeping secrets and it is those secrets that adds to their loneliness in return.
Mrs. Das is the one who keeps a dark secret from both her husband and her children in Interpreter of Maladies. Coming both from Indian families but born and raised in The United States, Das couple makes a visit to India during which they arrange a sightseeing tour guided by Mr. Kapasi. From the very start of their tour Mr. Kapasi senses something weird about the family and observes them in curiosity. The couple “[bickers] about who should take Tina to the toilet” (Lahiri 43), Mrs. Das dose not “[offer] her puffed rice to anyone” (Lahiri 47) and she puts her little girl off because “[she is] making [her] mess up” (Lahiri 48) while painting her nails. “Lost behind her sunglasses” Mrs. Das “[walks] past her children as if they were strangers” (Lahiri 58). Mr. Kapasi decides that “they were all like siblings…Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents” to the degree that “it seemed that they were in charge of the children only for the day” (Lahiri 49). Besides these, Mr. Kapasi realizes that one of the sons of the family, Bobby, “was slightly paler than the other children” (Lahiri 48).
Mr. Kapasi’s special interest in Mrs. Das is returned by her when she finds out that Mr. Kapasi has a second job as an interpreter for the illnesses of people in a doctor’s office. Surprised by the authenticity of his job, Mrs. Das asks several questions and she is all ears to his sample stories about some of the patients. They come closer in a mutual interest as their journey continues, which reaches its peak when they are left alone by Mr. Das and the children who want to see the monastic dwellings located at some hills, caves and the monkeys around. Mrs. Das offers her husband to “pretend [she’s] there” (Lahiri 61) and refuses to join them. It is within this short time period when she shares her secret, which became a burden on her shoulders for many years, hoping that Mr. Kapasi can interpret her malady and help for a cure as he does for other people. Thus, she confesses for the first time to a stranger that Bobby is not Mr. Das’ son for he “was conceived in the afternoon, on a sofa littered with rubber teething toys” (Lahiri 64) belonging to her other son Ronny, after having sex with her husband’s Punjabi friend, who was then a guest in their house, “swiftly, in silence, with an expertise she had never known” (Lahiri 64).
Mrs. Das attempts to express how she feels after all those years of friendship and marriage with her husband without any break and leaving no private space in her life. She tells how their families almost arranged their marriage ignoring many things they would normally think improper in their relationship. She now feels that it was all set up for her, her whole life, getting married and having a baby at a very early age without any social life and friends. She does not try to justify herself but puts forward her loneliness which her husband never shares in real means clearly and in a cold manner. Stunned by her confession, Mr. Kapasi only wonders if it is really pain or guilt that she feels, a question which Mrs. Das leaves unanswered and continues the journey as if no such conversation happened.
The story Sexy constitutes a pair with Interpreter of Maladies because it also involves a secret about unfaithfulness in marriage. Yet, this time the perspective is given through the ‘other woman’ with whom the husband, Dev, cheats his wife. An American girl from Michigan, Miranda lives and works in Boston where she met Dev, who is originally from Bengal and whose wife is about to leave for a holiday in India for a few weeks at the time they met.
The story begins with a sentence of empathy with the cheated spouse in a marriage: “it was a wife’s worst nightmare” her husband to “[fall] in love with another woman” (Lahiri 83). Miranda feels an emphatic connection with her friend Laxmi’s cousin, whose husband leaves her for an English girl half his age he met at an airplane, and her empathy reaches to Dev’s wife, which triggers a feeling of guilt inside her. Although “somehow, without the wife there, it didn’t seem so wrong” (Lahiri 88) during those few weeks, Miranda’s uneasiness grows with her return.
Instead of spending each and every day together in the wife’s absence, Miranda and Dev starts to meet once a week, which gives Miranda plenty of time alone to think about it. Indeed, she is already alone in Boston “where she [knows] no one” and where she feels loneliness “after seeing a movie on her own, or going to a bookstore to read magazines, or having drinks with Laxmi, who always had to meet her husband at Alewife station in an hour or two” (Lahiri 89). Her affair with a married man seems to add more to her loneliness:
Miranda knew how to wait. In the evenings, she sat at her dining table and coated her nails with clear nail polish, and ate salad straight from the salad bowl, and watched television, and waited for Sunday. Saturdays were the worst because by Saturday it seemed that Sunday would never come. (Lahiri 97)
She pictures Dev in his suburban house full of guests with his beautiful wife who looks like a famous Indian actress. Knowing that she has little part in Dev’s life, a secret to be kept in the dark and a mistress to be visited only in good weather under the excuse of going out for jogging, Miranda cannot tell about her affair even to her closest friend Laxmi. Outside the established norms of the society and the sacredness of marriage, she is outcast as ‘the other woman’.
However, it is Laxmi’s cousin’s little son who shows Miranda that she and Dev are only strangers to each other: people from different lives, cultures and social groups who share nothing but the excitement of sexuality in Miranda’s small apartment. The boy, named Rohin, is the silent witness and observer of a breaking family because of ‘the other woman’ in England. His description of the word ‘sexy’ as “loving someone you don’t know” (Lahiri 107) makes Miranda suddenly perceive the distances between herself and Dev and the temporariness of their affair. Growing this distance she puts an end to meeting Dev just in a few Sundays time at the end of which she goes out to walk and then drink coffee under the clear blue sky on a Sunday completely alone.
The last pair of stories is Mrs. Sen’s and A Real Durwan in which women are desolated and alienated by the societies they live in no matter they are in India or The United States. The main characters of both stories are Indian, but Lahiri reveals the loneliness of a single American mother as well in Mrs. Sen’s.
Mrs. Sen is the wife of a man who teaches mathematics at an American university. As Shraddha Dubey states, her story is mainly about “the difficulties faced by an Indian wife in a foreign culture” (39). She feels homesick and living in The United States is a temporary situation for her since “everything is there” (Lahiri 113) in India. She is lonely and a stranger to everything so much so that she “cannot sometimes sleep in so much silence” where “Mr. Sen has brought [her]” (Lahiri 115):
Mrs. Sen paced the apartment, staring at the plastic-covered lampshades as if noticing them for the first time…She switched on the television but never watched or … she made herself tea but let it grow cold on the coffee table. (Lahiri128)
Her loneliness grows so big that she is not even sure if someone would come “if [she] began to scream right now at the top of [her] lungs” (Lahiri 116).
Mrs. Sen’s loneliness is caused not only by her being a foreigner in American culture but also by her marriage, which is observed by Eliot, the eleven-year-old boy she babysits. When Eliot visits Mrs. Sen with his mother for the first time, he realizes that Mrs. Sen introduces her husband in a way “as if they were only distantly acquainted” (Lahiri 112). During his days at Mrs. Sen’s house, he gets used to Mr. Sen’s coming home and “patting [him] on the head but not kissing Mrs. Sen” (Lahiri 124). The day Mr. Sen takes them to the seaside as a surprise; Eliot pictures the couple holding hands or any physical contact showing love and affection. For example, he observes that “as Mr. Sen backed out of the parking lot, he put his arm across the top of the front seat, so that it looked as if he had his arm around Mrs. Sen” (Lahiri 129) and expects them at least to come closer while he takes a photo of them:
Finally the camera was given to Eliot. “Hold it steady,” said Mr. Sen. Eliot looked through the tiny window in the camera and waited for Mr. and Mrs. Sen to move closer together, but they didn’t. They didn’t hold hands or put their arms around each other’s waists. Both smiled with their mouths closed, squinting into the wind, Mrs. Sen’s red sari leaping like flames under her coat. (Lahiri 130)
Mrs. Sen is alone both in and out of her house in this new continent. Her husband insists on her learning how to drive to make it possible for her to create a connection between herself and the outside world, for which she is quite reluctant. She is afraid of driving and disappointed for she cannot meet this challenge when she finally finds the necessary courage which ends in a traffic accident. Driving becomes the symbol of her adjusting the new way of life in The United States, but after the accident she completely refuses to adapt this new life by “shutting herself up in her room and crying there. Thus, Mrs. Sen’s thoughts and attempts at self Americanization end in tears and silence” (Dubey 39).
The other lonely woman in Mrs. Sen’s story is Eliot’s single mother who does not know even where his father is. Although living in her native land in contrast to Mrs. Sen, she is alienated from the society; it seems, mostly because of her social situation as a single and working mother. She and Eliot live on a beach house mostly isolated from the rest of the city especially during winter. Eliot remembers a party at their neighbour’s house to which “Eliot and his mother weren’t invited” (Lahiri 116).
Experiencing loneliness and alienation both in their own way, the two women, one Indian and the other American, express their circumstances via some symbols in an opposite manner to each other. For instance, Eliot finds his mother looking odd with her “cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes” in which “her shaved knees and thighs too exposed” especially in Mrs. Sen’s room “where all things were so carefully covered” (Lahiri 112). Unlike Eliot’s mother’s American looking clothes and style, Mrs. Sen insists on wearing her sari, everyday a different colour, although Mr. Sen suggests to buy something warmer for “it’s getting too cold for that top coat” (Lahiri, 129). Like her clothes, which indicate a connection with her homeland, food is another symbol of home for Mrs. Sen. Every day she cooks “merely dinner for herself and Mr. Sen” in great amount, which surprises Eliot for it “was never a special occasion, nor was she ever expecting company” (Lahiri 117). Also, she is in a constant search for fresh fish which reminds her of home again. Madhuparna Mitra asserts that “if fish is the tool of nostalgia, it is also the symbol of Mrs. Sen’s alienation, her isolation” (193) for she complains for the lack of fresh fish in her surroundings. Food becomes the symbol of loneliness for Eliot’s mother as well, who does not eat lunch at work but “pour[s] herself a glass of wine and eat[s] bread and cheese” (Lahiri 118) and orders pizza as normal for dinner. However, the amount of food in these women’s lives is in both extremes and they express their loneliness in very different ways.
Unfortunately, these women never share a close connection. Their only relation is Mrs. Sen’s inviting Eliot’s mother when she comes to pick her son and insisting on tasting some Indian food or biscuits she cooked and Eliot’s mother’s refusing to eat most of the time for she confesses Eliot that she does not like them. Eliot’s mother “is unable to empathize with her son’s after-school caregiver” and she cannot offer a “female companionship of the kind shared by the women chopping vegetables” (Mitra 194) like Mrs. Sen used to have in India. Their connection is forever lost after Mrs. Sen’s accident with Eliot in the car and Mrs. Sen is completely trapped in her lonely world where she cannot find any pictures good enough to send her family in India.
The last story, which is of concern in this study as well as being the second of the last pair, is The Real Durwan. It is also a story about social alienation, yet it is about the alienation of Boori Ma, an old Indian woman, in Indian society. Boori Ma is the old sweeper of an old building in India, under whose letterboxes she sleeps at nights. Everybody in the building is used to hear her stories about her past luxurious life twice a day while she cleans the staircase, but no one takes her serious.
One reason for people to ignore her is that she is an immigrant in Calcutta from somewhere none of them was sure. The other reason is her social position in the building and the society in general without any family and a proper place to live. However, since she sleeps just behind the collapsible gate of the building during nights, the residents feel safer and she is the best sweeper they can afford. But things change when the residents find themselves in a competition and jealousy about the things they own in their houses and all of them suddenly start a number of renovations in the building.
Sleepless for many nights, Boori Ma takes her quilts to the rooftop for beating and leaves them there, which is the cause behind their “turning into yoghurt” (Lahiri 76) under the unexpected and heavy Indian rain. Consoled by Mrs. Dalal, one of the neighbours, and promised by her to be given new quilts and blankets on her return from holiday, Boori Ma starts sleeping on newspapers, which leaves “her hips…sore” (Lahiri 78). Forgotten and ignored even more than before among the crowd of workmen in the building, Boori Ma moves her stuff to the rooftop. Under the heavy rain, “her mornings [become] long, her afternoons longer. She [can] not remember her last glass of tea. Thinking neither of her hardships nor of earlier times, she wonder[s] when the Dalals [will] return with her new bedding” (Lahiri 80).
When the basin on the stairwell of the building is stolen in Boori Ma’s absence, the residents of the building are frustrated. They cruelly accuse her in the event and decide to send her from the building for they claim that she “has endangered the security of [the] building” in which “[they] have valuables” (Lahiri 82). But before that, they go and ask Mr. Chatterjee, another resident of the building who sits in her newly painted balcony, for advice. He says the final word on the argument: “Boori Ma’s mouth is full of ashes. But that is nothing new. What is new is the face of this building. What a building like this needs is a real durwan” (Lahiri 82). The residents, unable to understand the irony in his tone, toss all her belongings together with Boori Ma out of the building and none of them even listen her.
Unlike Mrs. Sen’s loneliness and alienation, Boori Ma experiences these feelings in her own culture, where neither customs nor language is a barrier. However, it seems that like Mrs. Sen, whose clothes and fish she bought from the market make people stare at her, people find Boori Ma weird because of the uncertainness of her past and her physical loneliness. This obscurity creates “fear-fear of the outside world and the social upheavals stemming from a traumatic past- that rises to the fore and dominates” (Dhingra and Cheung 111) the neighbours of Boori Ma in their final reaction. That is, despite living within the same culture, she is still a refugee full of ambiguities, which is the real source of her alienation and loneliness.
Conclusion
To sum up, Lahiri’s women characters all come across and deal with loneliness and alienation in their own ways. While Shoba cannot cope with these feelings within her marriage, Mrs. Das sees no alternative way other than keeping her children and husband together after an attempt to find a remedy for her restless soul. Miranda chooses loneliness not only spiritually but also physically by putting an end to her affair. Although Mrs. Sen’s final decision for being alone seems like an individual option, actually it reflects the reality of “especially unemployed Indian women, who are transplanted into a new culture which cuts them off from the sustenance and peace provided by their traditional, moral, and spiritual sources” (Naikar 307) and her husband does little to help her loneliness at least in terms of developing more emotional bounds within their marriage. Lahiri’s presentation of Eliot’s mother in Mrs. Sen’s and Miranda in Sexy and their alienation next to her Indian women characters is crucial in emphasizing the universal character of loneliness. Finally, although “Lahiri’s Boori Ma and Bibi Haldar are the tormented souls in their native selves” (Naikar 308), Boori Ma surrenders loneliness and alienation desperately whereas Bibi is brave enough to take the control of her life and steps out of the borders foreseen for her.
That is to say, all six stories have something to say undeniably about the reality and circumstances of being an immigrant such as the clash between cultures, identity crisis, problems of adaptation and longing for a far away home. Besides, they intersect with each other on a larger ground; that is, on the loneliness and alienation experienced especially by women no matter they live within or outside their own culture, no matter they are American or Indian or married or single. On this larger ground, Lahiri “tells about the human conditions that have universal resonance” by taking advantage of her multicultural identity and “wear[ing] the different hats of culture-the Indian, the British and the American” (Naikar 310). Beyond experiences of being an immigrant, she “expresses the dilemma, the difficulty and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affection to other, as well as expressing it to ourselves” (Biswas 3), which makes her work worth analyzing on more universal plane.
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