DIPARTIMENTO DI
FILOLOGIA, LETTERATURA E LINGUISTICA
CORSO DI LAUREA IN LETTERATURE E FILOLOGIE
EUROAMERICANE
TESI DI LAUREA
Cross-cultural Foodways in Contemporary English Literature:
Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s the Interpreter of Maladies and The
Namesake
CANDIDATO RELATORE
Beatrice Conti
Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Biancamaria Rizzardi CONTRORELATORE
Chiar.mo Prof. Fausto Ciompi
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«What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance». E. V. Lucas
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INDEX
INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER ONE General Background 10 1.1 A Multitude of Voices 10 1.2 Jhumpa Lahiri 141.3 A Glance on her Masterworks 20
CHAPTER TWO
Interpreter of Maladies 25
2.1 A Temporary Matter 26
2.2 When Mr. Pirzada came to Dine 34
2.3 Interpreter of Maladies 46
2.4 Mrs. Sen’s 58
CHAPTER THREE
The Namesake 71
3.1 Who is Gogol? 72
3.2 A Cultural Melting Pot 77
3.3 Sweet Memories 87
3.4 Taste the Love 98
CONCLUSION 113
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INTRODUCTION
«Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are».1 Although this famous
philosophical sentence belongs to a former age, it synthesizes the existing role of food in the culture of every society and reveals the way in which it can be connected with identity. Nowadays, any source of information, such as tv-programs, magazines, internet, and books are increasingly absorbed by traditional cuisines and eating habits. Additionally, globalization has allowed people to find any kind of nourishment at their fingertips.
Food can tell us a lot about the history and traditions of innumerable regions and nations. Every continent’s cuisine echoes its lifestyle, history, and beliefs: Asia is a territory of spices, Africa is a land of sauces, Europe reveals esthetical beauty of food and introduces new opportunities for those who crave to sample different varieties of food. As an indispensable element of everyday life, the subject of food has gained more and more visibility in public debates, universal exhibitions and multimedia communications over the years; this has encouraged the development of a mainstream of studies which has placed the critical analysis of the dimensions related to eating phenomena (Stano 2005: 1). Food studies embrace methodological and theoretical approaches, by investigating
1 Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/philosophical-quotes-on-food-2670536 [Accessed: 1 October
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various aspects of the relationship between food and human experience.2 Therefore, food serves as a vehicle of cultural identity and becomes an intermediate for diversified significant social interactions. The concept of food is never reducible to what is shown on a plate; it is a pervasive expression of society that can be conceptualized in different ways, strongly linked to our memories and existence (Almerico 2014: 2).
The emerging interdisciplinary field of food studies examines the connection between people and the act of eating and reveals the complex relationship among food, society and culture from multifaceted perspectives (Almerico 2014: 3-4). In recent times, food studies have significantly increased, by succeeding in affecting the vast field of literature.3 Nevertheless, the entity of food and the act of eating have always been central to life as well as literature. It has been argued that many books of antiquity, such as The Odyssey or The Old and New Testament, contain several scenes of meals, which means that eating knows no boundaries of space and times (Kessler 2005: 149-53). However, last century has been a proving ground for writers with the aim of developing different means and imagery concerning food. Every author belongs to a specific time, space, culture, with a distinct background and tradition.
2 Although accounts of food and eating practices date to the earliest written records, the designation of more
scholarly investigations of food as food studies is a modern progress. In the era of economic globalization, food is recognized as a "lens" through which to explore and interpret society in the present as well as in the past. 3 Food in literature involves all the reader’s senses and offers a means of generating powerful imagery; each
culture depicts its representative cuisine, as well as peculiar tradition practices and habits in the act of eating; in so doing, food suggests a plenty of symbolic meanings to be explored.
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Consequently, their writings treat and explore this topic with different points of view.
Food has only recently occurred as a topic for serious literary study. Literary critics have begun to investigate the theme of food in novels, plays and poems in literature, by trying to enlighten the complex relationship between consumption, subjectivity and social constructions; the richness of what is contained is assuredly to do with the fact that every single work displays a specificity of references to food (Fitzpatrick 2012: 122). First and foremost, early modernists and dramatists have developed an interest in this topic, such as Chris Meads’ concern about the banquet in non-Shakespearean drama, although many writings concentrated more on the body with respect to food per se. The successive studies have considered a variety of genres belonging to different ages, in order to clarify the various facets of food and its actual meanings and symbolism; in fact, food could embed extra-nutritional aspects, such as class difference, sexual dimension, religious adherence and nationalism. By the reading of authors ranging from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens to those more contemporary, essays and volumes have been written in an effort to illuminate the realities of this basic human necessity. Furthermore, food studies have explored the works of female writers, in particular Jane Austen’s characters and their moral status; children’s fiction has also been inquired. What emerges from this analysis is a shift in attitudes towards food across time and space. While the early modern period has focused on the prosperity and
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profusion of eating, eighteenth-century literature is marked by cannibalism and horror visions: a new change has occurred in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, which reveals food with an ontological pessimism, a discomfort caused by the historical circumstances (Fitzpatrick 2012: 123-24).
Certainly, the contemporary era has been marked by many significant historical events which have enriched food with additional meanings (Mannur 2007: 12-13); an important example can be given by European colonialism, characterized by conflicts and environmental exploitation, during which native people were deprived of their major sources of livelihood while many of them suffered hunger. Many allegorical implications are connected with the event: colonizers symbolize a mouth devouring everything, environment and population. Furthermore, the global phenomenon of migration has contributed as well to giving additional connotations to food: it may be considered as a connector between nations, a metaphor for memories of the past, a symbol of cultural identity.
Food, history and literature are destined to mingle and merge in the exemplary model of the writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who offers a completely new view of food: as a woman of Indian descent, she presents her motherland’s peculiar gastronomic tradition; as a daughter of migrants, she witnesses the diasporic world of otherness through culinary practices, discovering their restorative power in a new reality; as a postcolonial writer, she makes her own
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contribution by providing a fresh perspective of food, highlighting the relevance of Bengali cuisine in her characters’ diasporic experiences.
This thesis has the objective to analyse food imagery in Lahiri’s masterworks Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, a book collection of short stories and a novel which offer readers an original viewpoint and a new significance of the topic under discussion; in so doing, the dissertation aims to demonstrate how food constitutes a constant feature of the author’s writing style, serves as a mediator between the characters and their heritage, and represents a positive evolution in the development of hybrid identities.
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CHAPTER ONE
General Background
1.1 A Multitude of Voices
Food and eating have always been two of the most fundamental interests of human beings. Increasingly, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, ecologists and other fields of research have become fascinated by the socio-cultural phenomena of eating (Polišenská 2011: 6).
The last century has been a proving ground for writers with the aim of developing different means and imagery concerning food. Authors such as Forster, Flaubert, and Hemingway display scenes in which lunch, dinner or breakfast are meticulously described. Many novels employ culinary details in the first few pages or chapters: instances can be seen in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and Moby Dick, which stimulate reader’s senses from the beginning. Furthermore, meals assume the role of connector between people: an example can be seen in Joyce’s The Dead, during Christmas dinner (Kessler 2005: 149-53).4
4 It is remarkable to see how food plays a prominent role for western writers; it provides emotional outlets
and satisfies the most divergent tastes and curious minds. These instances suggest an increasing interest in food phenomena as a language of its own. Brad Kessler’s article, “One Reader’s Digest: Toward a Gastronomic Theory of Literature” (2005) studies the imagery of food in a variety of works of classic literature. He discusses the significance of the stories being told around a table, considering it a major device for storytelling. Kessler also gives importance to the link between food and memories and finally points out the link between food in real life as well as literature.
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Undoubtedly, the issue of food has been widely considered in western literature, in such a manner that it has affected the filming industry, by reproducing many literary works characterized by this phenomenon. Following this recent point of interest in food in cultural field, it is useful to broaden the perspective by focusing the attention on how the acts of cooking and eating become the expression of social force, identity, memory and, in so doing, provide a better identification within culture (Pathak 2016: 1).
The twentieth century has witnessed a surprising growth of fiction, poetry, and drama from nations previously colonized by Britain, a production which has changed the map of English literature and has provided the nourishment for a variety of postcolonial theories concerning the meanings of such works.5 Every single author’s diversity of texts is not considered in isolation but represents varied thoughts, identities, attitudes, and experiences combined by the shared history of cultural colonialism, as well as the use of the English language, which contains idiomatic and syntactic variants, local languages vocabulary and the necessity of communicating a different reality.6 As a result of the dismantling of the British Empire, the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ was established, a structure
5 In this regard, Lyn Innes wrote The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007),
an introduction which examines a wide range of Anglophone postcolonial writing from India, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean and Ireland, in order to provide an excellent support to approach postcolonial studies. For further information concerning postcolonial literature, cfr. Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and John Thieme’s Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary (London: Arnold, 2003).
6 In Postcolonial literature, a relevant position is gained by Indian literature, which has a secular tradition
and owes a general blossoming as a result of many significant novels that attempt to testify and interpret reality’s changes, such as the achievement of Indian independence, as a consequence of decades of political struggles and movements. Even after independence and ‘partition’, a second generation of Indian writers did choose English as language of literary expression. As a consequence of the World War II, Britain had employed thousands of people from the Indian subcontinent, in order to sustain the country’s economy: therefore, the study of Indian studies was encouraged, by focusing on peculiar features of these writings.
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which brings together most of the former British colonies. The study of Commonwealth literature in Britain and in the United States was supported by many writers from those areas, such as V. S. Naipaul. Commonwealth literary studies, along with Black Studies and Third World Studies, have produced contemporary postcolonial literary studies (Innes 2007: 1-6).
Within the context of postcolonial writing, an increasing number of scholars have recognized the impact of food accounts in Asian American studies, contributing to the growing scholarship on food criticism.7 They have begun to
feel the urge to investigate food writing and other types of cultural consumptions, in order to enrich the meanings of critical considerations. According to Mannur (2007: 11-12), many Asian American writers have had a very important role to play, by offering a new vision of foodways, in connection with identity and social formation.
Undoubtedly, the literature of the Indian diaspora constitutes the most relevant segment which has promoted many cultural texts based on travel, trauma and displacement.8 Authors of Indian diaspora are those who come, or
7 It is important to mention some of the Asian American scholars who have contributed to the successful
growing productions of food criticism, by publishing articles and relevant essays about food and Asian Pacific American studies: Merry White, Sauling Cynthia Wong, Wenying Xu, Anita Mannur, and Jennifer Ann Ho.
8 Diaspora is a term of Greek origin and means the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away
from an established or ancestral homeland . Indians have a long history of migration, started in mid-sixteenth century and continued after the British rule in India, throughout the world. A study has shown that there are more than 2 million Indian immigrants and their offspring in the United States . They are an instance of a highly educated population which is integrated well and involved in the development of the new country, although the affective bond with the Mother Country is still significant. Available at:
https://www.intechopen.com/books/indigenous-aboriginal-fugitive-and-ethnic-groups-around-the-globe/journey-to-america-south-asian-diaspora-migration-to-the-united-states-1965-2015- [Accessed: 25 January 2020].
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have their parents coming, from the Indian subcontinent.9 In their literary production, the cultural world of India and its absence are fundamental elements of storytelling, which involves the listener in a continuous tension: the complex experience of migration implies the danger of losing one’s identity; thus, writers adopt original strategies to combat cultural alienation and nostalgia . As Mannur claimed (2007: 13), «food therefore becomes a potent symbol for signifying the ethnic integrity of Asian Americans, serving both as a placeholder for marking cultural distinctiveness and as a palliative for dislocation».
Indeed, recipes and culinary practices represent emotional anchors and genuine manifestations of national essences. Food is strategically used and transformed by writers and artists into personal and sensual histories, in order to convey the multiplicity, complexity, and history of Asian American identities. Ketu Katrak, Madhur Jaffrey, and Sara Suleri are only some of the authors who have contributed to the creation of texts which consider food as a symbol of nostalgic desire, a connector with their motherland: food transported Ketu Katrak to childhood in Bombay, by connecting the writer with her birthplace memories after moving to the United States; Madhur Jaffrey’s text, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, is certainly important for postcolonial studies, and within it Indian cuisine suggests a continual national unity; the symbolic level
9 The literature of the Indian diaspora constitutes an important part of the burgeoning field of anglophone
postcolonial literature. Some of the better-known authors in this archive include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, M.G. Vassanji, Shyam Selvadurai, and Kiran Desai. The growing international visibility of these authors has gone hand in hand with the popularity of postcolonial criticism.
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of traditional dishes and their consumption is strongly linked to Sara Suleri’s portrayals of immigrants and culinary memories (Mannur 2007: 12-18).10
Multiculturalism, the condition of Indian diaspora in the United States, the question of identity, and the prominence of food are some of the vital and fundamental aspects of Jhumpa Lahiri’s existence and literary fiction: the next section will investigate the life of this postcolonial writer and her significant connection with food.
1.2 Jhumpa Lahiri
«I am the daughter of former pirates, of a kind. Our loot included gold, silver, even a few precious gems. Mainly though, it was food, so much that throughout my childhood I was convinced my parents were running the modern equivalent of the ancient spice trade».11
Jhumpa Lahiri, born Nilanjana Sudeshna, is one among many postcolonial writers who has made and is making a great contribution to the portrayal of
10 For South Asians, food regularly plays a crucial role in how issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and national
identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted. For this reason, many writers and scholars have considered its centrality in the cultural imagination of diasporic populations. Anita Mannur’s article “Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora” (2007) demonstrates how culinary discourse can enable an extended discussion about the imbricated layers of food, national identity, and nostalgia.
11 Lahiri, Jhumpa, “Indian Takeout: How a Family of Pirates from Rhode Island Brought Home all the
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first, second and third generation Indian-Americans’ cultural dislocation and self-transformation, by tackling heterogeneous themes in her writings (Ştefanovici 2015: 103-4).
She was born in London of Bengali emigrants from the Indian state of West Bengal,12 in 1967. When she was three, her family moved to the United State: the destination was Rhode Island where, as recalled the writer remembering her childhood, it was difficult to find Indian groceries (Lahiri 2015: 1). The fluctuation of Lahiri’s identity is also visible since she was a child: she was called with two proper names, Nilanjana Sudeshna, until one day her teacher opted for a simpler pronunciation, “Jhumpa”: it served as an inspiration for the ambivalence of her main character in The Namesake (Minzesheimer 2003: 1). What most reminds of her childhood was her family’s vintage trunk transformed into a pantry overflowing of food; it was filled during her parents’ journey to Calcutta, where they bought nourishments and utensils unobtainable in their new home away from India: «trips to Calcutta let my parents eat again, eat the food of their childhood, the food they had been deprived of as adults» (Lahiri 2015: 1). Food were always accompanied by the purchase of specific Indian utensils such as ‘karhais’13 and ‘boti’14, bowl and blade respectively;
12 West Bengal is a state in the eastern region of India along the Bay of Bengal; it is India's fourth-most
populous state and the thirteenth-largest Indian state. Together with the state of Bangladesh, West Bengal constitutes the ethno-linguistic region of Bengal. Jhumpa Lahiri utilises these spaces as the setting for various works.
13 A karahi is a type of thick, circular, and deep cooking bowl that originated in the Indian subcontinent. It is
used in Indian, Afghan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese cuisines.
14 A Boti, is a cutting instrument,most prevalent in the Bengal region. It is a long curved blade that cuts on a
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thus, the suitcase was full during their return to America. The departure from the motherland was experienced as a great lament:
«the first meal we ate after returning from India […] was never an occasion to celebrate but rather to mourn, for the people and the city we had, once again, left behind. And so my mother made food to mirror our mood, food for the weary and melancholy» (Lahiri 2015: 3).
Cooking was a practice that Lahiri’s mother learned as a ritual transmitted from generation to generation, by observing and helping other women in Calcutta, where there was no shortage of ingredients such as lamb, fish, spices, and rice. Once her mother moved to the United States, culinary practices became her exclusive responsibility but also her secret that no cookbooks knew. Nevertheless, unlike her mother, Jhumpa started cooking not before the graduation: at the age of eighteen, she had to leave her family’s home to move to New York City; shortly after, it was the turn of Boston in order to complete her studies at Harvard. Finally, during that time, she began to approach the world of cooking; her first dinner parties helped her to extend her abilities and her gastronomic knowledge (Lahiri 2004: 2).
Together with Lahiri’s culinary experiences, the dichotomy ‘Indian-American’ has been a persistent enigma in her life. From infancy to maturity, she has experienced the immigrant perception of being separated in two things:
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«loyal to the old world and fluent in the new» (Lahiri 2006: 1). The old world, India and its various traditions, were passed on from her parents in the daily domestic life; the new world, the United States, was her place of growth, made of American friends and American schools in the multifaceted American environment: both of them were two opposing but complementary realities of her life. This is why, as soon as she started writing, Lahiri realized that the privileged subject matter of her writings was the Indian-American experience.
Lahiri’s first approach to writing was not a great success: in fact, as stated in an interview,15 her early short stories faced refusal from publishers for a long time. Notwithstanding the difficulties, she finally made her entrance into the world of writing in 1999, by publishing Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories which deals with the issues of Indians or Indian-American identity crisis.16 The year before the turn of the new century the fusion ‘Indian-American’ was a cutting-age term for her host country’s vocabulary:
«I've heard it so often that these days, if asked about my background, I use the term myself, pleasantly surprised that I do not have to explain further. What a difference from my early life, when there was no such way to describe me, when the most I could do was to clumsily and ineffectually explain» (Lahiri 2006: 2).
15 “Interview With Jhumpa Lahiri”, by Arun Aguiar (1999).
16 Interpreter of Maladies is an autobiographical collection of short stories, including generation gaps in
understanding and values; in fact, the protagonist of the last story, The Third and Final Continent, is based on Lahiri’s father, the librarian Amar Lahiri.
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The collection of short stories led the writer being rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction17 and it marked the beginning of a fortunate rewarded writing. Indeed, four years later she published her first novel, The Namesake, originally a novella in The New Yorker, which tells the story of the Ganguli family: the parents lived at first in Calcutta, then immigrated to the United States; the sons, Gogol and Sonia, grew up in a new and baffling culture that clashes with their parents’ teachings. The book follows the family over the course of thirty years in Calcutta, Boston, and New York (Minzesheimer 2003: 1).
During those years, Lahiri moved to Brooklyn and married Alberto Vourvoulias, a journalist with whom she had two children, Octavio in 2002, and Noor, three years later.
In 2008, Jhumpa Lahiri resumed the form of the short story for her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, by describing the lives of second and third generations of Indian immigrants and their assimilation into the mixed cultural world of the United States, thereby receiving critical acclaim.18 She touched once again the themes dear to her in the second novel The Lowland,19 positioning itself on the Man Booker Prize list.20 She continued publishing short stories in The New Yorker, and moved successively to Italy with her husband and kids, where she began to write in Italian and experienced a sense of exile
17 That was only the seventh time a collection of stories had won the prestigious award.
18 Available at: https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com//2008/04/10/jhumpa-lahiri-with-a-bullet/ [Accessed: 15
January 2020].
19 Interview available at:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/jhumpa-lahiri-aserious-voice-that-comes-from-nowhere-1.1554066 [Accessed: 15 January 2020].
20 Available at:
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once again: «As for Italian, the exile has a different aspect. Almost as soon as we met, Italian and I were separated. My yearning seems foolish. And yet I feel it» (Lahiri 2015: 3). Despite the obstacles faced in learning a new language and embraced a new culture, her metamorphosis is complete:
«From now on, I pledge to read only in Italian. It seems right, to detach myself from my principal language. I consider it an official renunciation. I’m about to become a linguistic pilgrim to Rome. I believe I have to leave behind something familiar, essential» (Lahiri 2015: 8).21
In so doing, she deflects attention from her first language, English, by focusing exclusively on Italian language: In Altre Parole represents the first of a series of Italian books which narrate her infatuation for Italian, the language that has given her another life.22
Undoubtedly, Jhumpa Lahiri is a writer who has lived in different realities in constant transformation: in her masterworks, Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, all this is perceptible; she gave life to those works by combining her personal experience, history, and the human condition of Indian diaspora through the use of a connector, food.
21 Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, 2015.
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1.3 A Glance on her Masterworks
«They were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear».23
It has been argued (Rao Garg 2012: 74) that Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories which investigates the identity of Bengali American characters, but not solely. The topic is more complex.
Initially, the stories inside the collection seem to be independent and separate, all connected by limited features; they include a variety of settings, characters of various ages and nationalities, different perspectives, points of view, and ideas. The obscuring part of this specific genre is surpassed from the author’s effort spent on harmonizing the representations she offers through the cycle as a whole, thereby making it popular in both India and the United States (Brada-Williams 2004: 453-54).
What understandably deserves attention is the title of the collection, expression which is derived from one of the titles of the short stories: it denotes the main character’s job, which is a translator in a medical clinic in India and thus, he connects people across languages and worlds. Doubtless, Lahiri «speaks about the dialogue that happens between places, between India and America, between diasporic subjects, and the seemingly irreconcilable space
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between being one thing or two things» (Wood 2019: 1). What the writer wishes to emphasises is the multitude of meaning connected to the title, in both literal and symbolic sense; in an interview,24 Lahiri elucidated that she first had the idea for it when she was a graduate student: an acquaintance of hers was an interpreter for a doctor who had Russian patients that not understood English; therefore, Lahiri was certain that she would use ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ for a title of a story, because it expresses the key aspect of the collection: the dilemma and the impracticality of communicating emotional discomfort and affliction as effectively as possible.
According to Rao Garg (2012: 75), she attaches a great deal of importance in the subtitle as well: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond; indeed, the adverb ‘beyond’ shall ensure that the text transcends geographical boundaries, being set in both the United States and India, and turns it into a mental space of the characters.
What is really important is that the collection, as well as the novel, exemplifies the dual identity of the author, her Indian-American cultural inheritance that is poured on her characters, who display an effort to give voice to their displacement (Monaco 2015: 77-78). One noticeable issue that is reflected upon the nature of Lahiri’s two works is history; many postcolonial writers focus their writing on themes such as migration and diaspora. The
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phenomenon of migration25 has a long past for Indian subcontinent: in the nineteenth century, the British Empire abolished slavery, causing significant Indian plantation labour migrants. After the act of 1965,26 the employment of trained Indian professionals was allowed. However, having said that, it is also important to separate a previous generation of Indian migrants who have resided in the United States (first generation) from those who are American born with at least one India-born parent (second generation). Most of Lahiri’s characters are American citizens from Bengali origin: unlike the first generation immigrants, they do not consider India as a motherland but view it in the same way that Americans do instead (Munos 2013: 1).
Consequently, migration and the successive assimilation in a new reality is a process that has changed the mentality of characters of Indian descent who were born and raised in America;27 however, as well as for Lahiri, this total assimilation is not entirely occurred for them:
«while I am American by virtue of the fact that I was raised in this country, I am Indian thanks to the efforts of two individuals. I feel Indian not because of the
25 A study has shown that there are more than two million Indian immigrants and their offspring in the
United States. They are an instance of a highly educated population which is integrated well and involved in the development of the new country, although the affective bond with the Mother Country is still significant. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/indian-migration-to-the-us.pdf [Accessed: 3 March 2020].
26 The Immigration and Naturalization Act collected many provisions and reorganized the structure of
immigration law; it has been amended many times over the years and contains many of the most important provisions of immigration law.
27 As well as migration, partition as an historical event is employed by Lahiri; in Interpreter of Maladies, the
writer attributes to the fact a metaphorical meaning: characters are divided against others and also divided within themselves.
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time I've spent in India or because of my genetic composition but rather because of my parents' steadfast presence in my life» (Lahiri 2006: 2).
Maintaining old customs and traditions while learning new ones is part of the assimilation process for the first generation Indian characters; adopting new customs is the mark of a successful transition into a new country. As regards the second generation Indian immigrants, the sense of native roots and culture are provided by their parents, continuously conditioned by the melting-pot ideology. As a consequence, alienation and homesickness are recurring themes which can be found in the works. Jhumpa Lahiri’s works present melancholy as an unbearable sorrow: it generates ambivalence in the second generation characters, raised in accordance with Bengali cultural principles but exposed to the influences of American culture; the resulting confusion causes identity crisis in these people (Harehdasht, Ataee, Hajjari 2018: 113-14). Similarly, the attachment to a different symbolic homeland generates confusion and bewilderment, an incapability to objectify their loss (Munos 2013: 3).
The theme of the relationship between parents and children is one of the most important issues in Lahiri’s works. As children grow older, their relationship changes, becoming contradictory or enriched with understanding. Moreover, the meaning of love and marriage cannot be overstated; a marriage is the beginning of a new joint life for two people, but joy is flanked by secrets, mysteries, and
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silences. Miscommunication or unexpressed feelings weigh on many characters, destroying their well-being. Lastly, the environment often reflects the inner turmoil of its characters.
Postcolonial themes, such as nostalgia, alienation, identity crisis, and cultural conflicts are recurrent in Lahiri’s volumes; a way of amalgamating ethnic identities is provided through gastronomic factors. Food is a relevant subject in the circumstance of the diaspora, on the ground that it is associated with memory and materialised feelings (Chatterjee 2016: 197-98). Taste and consumption have been studied most extensively over the last decade, as a result of dominant food-related occupations from European, Asian, and Latin American migrants;28 the connection between Bengali-Americans and food is intertwined with globalization, modernity and the construction of identity (Ray 2016: 41-43).
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, food acts as a form of support, by embedding itself among the numerous issues of the narrative; in so doing, it makes the pages irreplaceable.
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CHAPTER TWO
Interpreter of Maladies
It has been argued (Tompkins 2005: 244-46) that eating has operated as a cultural symbol for the confrontation with social and racial diversity in the literary world since the explosion in food culture which arose in the last century, by moving beyond the written text’s impotence to entirely represent the life of the body. The couple food and speech are tested in the mouth: the importation of new words connected to new dishes implies therefore the possibility of widening of national borders. Furthermore, the act of eating is a way of deriving a communion with the others instead of the narrow individuality.
Obviously, this is also true for the effective storytelling of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, which allowed her to reach a great critical acclaim: the investigation of dislocated subjects in their native or adopted land and the balance of diverse representations render the collection as a coherent whole (Brada-Williams 2004: 451-53).
This chapter intends to examine in detail four short stories taken from the above mentioned collection, by focusing on the relevance of eating in a personal and symbolic level, in order to illustrate how food negotiates among the variety of issues treated and represents a powerful symbol within the scenery of Indian diaspora.
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2.1 A temporary Matter
«He remembered their first meals there, when they were so thrilled to be married, to be living together in the same house at last, that they would just reach for each other foolishly,
more eager to make love than to eat».29
The opening story of the collection, A Temporary Matter, takes place in the United States and deals with the critical relationship between two American individuals of Indian descent, the husband Shukumar and the wife Shoba; the husband’s third-person perspective is used by the writer to describe the way in which the couple has become distant from one another. In connection with the title, a temporary electrical problem caused by a snow-storm represents the stratagem which the author employs for exposing their unhappiness and their secrets during five evenings. In fact, until then, they had been avoiding each other for some time:
«the more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop» (Lahiri 1999: 2).
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What has destroyed their happiness is the death of their new-born son, which occurred six months earlier, as a consequence of childbirth complications. Shukumar was joining a meeting out of town while Shoba went into labour earlier than due date; he was not the one who accompanied her to the hospital and when he arrived there it was too late: such a trauma was the cause of the communication gap between the couple.
Although the narrator is omniscient, the readers interpret the course of the events through his experiences: a happier time in the couple’s life is evoked by Shukumar’s memory, by just touching household items, such as a calendar, cover, carpet, candles, and food. Indeed, the imbalance among past and present is considerably evident in the remembrance of the kitchen cupboard previous abundance:
«when she used to do the shopping, the pantry was always stocked with extra bottles of olive and corn oil, depending on whether they were cooking Italian or Indian. There were endless boxes of pasta in all shapes and colors, zippered sacks of basmati rice, whole sides of lambs and goats from the Muslim butchers at Haymarket, chopped up and frozen in endless plastic bags» (Lahiri 1999: 6).
Shoba’s passion was cooking for her family and guests, and the fullness of their kitchen store was the most visible result; what suggests the marital emotional surplus and stability of that time was the richness presence of food that «never
28
went to waste» (Lahiri 1999: 7). Traditional Indian cuisine and studied preparations were part of daily life, particularly when friends used to visit them:
«when friends dropped by, Shoba would throw together meals that appeared to have taken half a day to prepare, from things she had frozen and bottled, not cheap things in tins but peppers she had marinated herself with rosemary, and chutneys that she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes. Her labeled mason jars lined the shelves of the kitchen, in endless sealed pyramids, enough, they’d agreed, to last for their grandchildren to taste» (Lahiri 1999: 7).
Eating was also connected to their strong past emotional bond: recipes were dated to recall important occasions and memories (Garg 2012: 75).
After the tragic event, the roles have been reversed and the couple’s marriage has been cracked until the breaking point: «Shukumar enjoyed cooking now. It was the one thing that made him feel productive. If it weren’t for him, he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of cereal for her dinner» (Lahiri 1999: 7-8). Hence, the growing distancing and silence between the characters enable a culinary interest and a greater attention to food in Shukumar (Chatterjee 2016: 201).
Lahiri changes the perception of the male character of the story:30 relegating him to fulfil traditionally feminine household chores, the writer overcomes common stereotypes about cooking (Monaco 2018: 161). The readers are led to
30 Lahiri’s male characters play a critical role to influence the action and the point of view; this mostly
29
grasp the involution of their marriage through the changing of food imagery:31 the wife shifts her interest from domestic environment to her working field; unlike her husband, the home and everything that is related to it represents a trap instead of a relief. Shoba’s sense of alienation after the miscarriage is also visible in the liability of her profession, which consists of reading and correcting texts passively (Garg 2012: 75-76). On the other hand, cooking gives Shukumar the comfort and protection he needed; nevertheless, his culinary learning is totally dependent on hers, from Shoba’s cookbooks to her written instructions: he deeply depends on her different capabilities, but does not give nothing back (Williams 2007: 71-72).
A postcolonial perspective may be taken into account. It has been studied (Kuortti 2007: 205-199) the issue of translation of identities in Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies from a postcolonial perspective, demonstrating that each story features analogous situations. In this particular instance, Shukumar can be considered as a colonialist on the ground that he has usurped Shoba’s cooking approach; thus, his wife is a colony which claims to be impoverished of its essence and culture: food and knowing how to cook.
After the loss of their child, she is not the same person he married, and this fact is reflected in his wife’s changing habits and lack of willingness to cook. The tragedy has undermined their lives and their marriage: Shoba’s makeup
31 The second generation American male characters in A Temporary Matter, in This Blessed House, and in
30
symbolizes a way of hiding her grief and of defining her, because she no more knows who she is. The readers are involved in her emotional metamorphosis: once Shoba was pleased the shelves were overflowing with food whereas, after the grief, she turns into a distressed person and the food store becomes empty. Her husband, on the other hand, can be defined by his consumption: «Shukumar’s exhaustion of Shoba’s well-stocked pantry, without replenishing it, therefore becomes a signifier of the way he has exhausted and emptied his wife» (Williams 2007: 72). The fact that he does not refill the cupboard after using the ingredients and does continue to consume the remaining food could be seen as a way of trying to recover their dysfunctional affiliation.
This story deals with themes as miscommunication and secrets, rise to the surface thanks to the expedient of food: «tonight, with no lights, they would have to eat together» (Lahiri 1999: 8). They no longer eat or cook together until the workers cut their power those nights. Indeed, Shukumar converted their baby’s room into his own study, where he could work without distraction, eat cold meals and avoid the possibility of crossing his wife; similarly, Shoba remained undisturbed in the living room, eating cereals for dinner and watching tv-shows. In so doing, Lahiri uses dining and food as a vehicle to display the female character’s process of assimilation in the modern American cultural habits (Godfree 2010: 1).
31
Environment plays a significant role in the short story;32 it changes its appearance depending on characters’ emotional states. Lahiri offers a variety of details that suggest both the huge change for the couple after the misfortune of their child and the vast carelessness in their shared environment: an instance is displayed in their failure of caring for watering the domestic plants (Brada-Williams 2004: 456-57). Before the grief, their home was a hospitable and loving place, and the kitchen was characterized by the overwhelming presence of food, symbolizing a functioning relationship. Then, the darkness depicts their current crisis and a harmless place for the partners, forced to an intimacy nearly lost. Therefore, obscurity permits an intimacy considered lost.
The first night without current, the husband lighted birthday candles accidentally found, and prepared dinner with meticulous precision, using typical Indian products such as rice, lamb and paprika stew: «it’s like India» (Lahiri 1999: 11). The suffused atmosphere represents a reminiscent of their motherland; in particular, she remembered her attendance at a ‘rice ceremony’33
when she used to live in India during her childhood, as opposed to Shukumar, whose parents lived in the United States and made sure not to take their own child with them every time they returned to their homeland, as a consequence of dysentery that he had in India. Meanwhile, the candles reminded him of a past
32 The environment often reflects the inner turmoil of its characters: it is visible through the snow in A
Temporary Matter, the rubble-filled Sun Temple and the dry river in Interpreter of Maladies, the grey waves in Mrs. Sen’s, and the changing seasons in The Treatment of Bibi Haldar.
33 It is also known as Annaprashan. In Hindu culture, the rice ceremony occurs in the sixth or seventh month
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birthday party, when his wife invited more than a hundred friends and cooked for everybody. Shukumar’s memory is associated with abundance of food and sentiment of love for each other; although their current solitude, the central scene suggests a deceptive vitality for the marriage thanks to food and confessions (Williams 2007: 72). This forced dinner brings them closer together after a long time, and the subsequent conversation provides a therapeutic interaction between them (Godfree 2010: 1). In fact, the second evening without power line Shoba came home before the light stopped functioning, with the purpose of eating together Indian food he had made; at the end of the meal she helped clean up than usual, and this detail is very important on the ground that proves a transition which culminates in the fifth night. As the days go on, they both are willing to eat these meals together.
Food is involved even during their conversations. It evokes Shukumar’s desire to marry her: «by the end of the meal I had a funny feeling that I might marry you» (Lahiri 1999: 14); it connects past and present: «each night his mother cooked something his father had liked, but she was too upset to eat the dishes herself» (Lahiri 1999: 17); it makes significant events present: «for their first anniversary, Shoba had cooked a ten-course dinner just for him» (Lahiri 1999: 18).
In the dimness, subsequent dinners allow for intimacy between the husband and the wife not reached since their mourning: «something happened when the
33
house was dark» (Lahiri 1999: 19); the resulting need for communication let their secrets emerge in chronological order (Godfree 2010: 1). Firstly, they confessed irrelevant and hilarious revelations, such as taking a peak at the address book, forgetting to tip the waiter in a Portuguese restaurant, going out with a friend instead of eating with his mother, cheating on an exam in college, keeping a picture of another woman torn out of a magazine, exchanging a gift for a drink; gradually, the confessions become more important and painful (Monaco 2015: 87).
The day of the final revelations, the electric company announced that the repair process required no more time; once again, his emotional condition is shown through the use of food, after releasing that their game had ended:
«He was disappointed. He was planned on making shrimp malai for Shoba, but when he arrived at the store he didn’t feel like cooking anymore. It wasn’t the same, he thought, knowing that the lights wouldn’t go out. In the store the shrimp looked gray and thin. The coconut milk tin was dusty and overpriced» (Lahiri 1999: 20).
Indeed, Shoba’s intention to move to another residence and Shukumar’s revelation of the gender of their child are their final secrets. Although those unexpected awareness overwhelm them, Shukumar’s third-person perspective displays his conflicting emotions: the communicative game was intended to
34
expose the hard truth and he was both relieved and sickened by the fact that his wife had signed the lease for a new life without him. At the end of the story, the snow outside starts to melt, and it offers the image of the couple’s liberty, now free from their sorrow and marriage simultaneously.
According to Williams (2007: 72), their attempt to repair their marriage is an illusion; Shoba’s refusal to cook for Shukumar like in the past and her rejection to refill the cupboard are consistent with her coming shift: build a new future that does not include «Shukumar’s nutritionally and psychically consumptive and exhaustive presence and practices». Using food as a tool in this first story of the collection, Lahiri demonstrates a prolonged instability and incertitude in a family relationship, in order to consider isolation as a consequence not only historical, but also personal.
Undoubtedly, food plays a major role in this short story: it unites the couple no longer united, becomes the only means of communication in the relationship, and serves as a metaphor to reflect emotional states and their final dwindling affections.
2.2 When Mr. Pirzada came to Dine
«At first I knew nothing of the reason for his visits. I was ten years old, and was not surprised that my parents, who were from India,
35
acquaintances at the university, should ask Mr. Pirzada
to share our meals».34
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine constitutes the second short story of the collection, in which history merges with personal lives. The course of events are narrated by a ten-year-old Indian American girl, whose name is Lilia;35 she tells the story from the remoteness of her infancy, only understanding after years have passed: «all of these facts I know only now […] but then it remained, for the most part, a remote mystery with haphazard clues» (Lahiri 1999: 40). Through the first person perspective of a child, the purpose of the writer is to mitigate the Indo-Pakistan war and its problematic concern, witnessed from an emotional and geographical distance.
Everything began in the autumn of 1971, when a man called Mr. Pirzada went to Lilia’s house to dine every day: «I have no memory of his first visit, or of his second or his third, but by the end of September I had grown so accustomed to Mr. Pirzada’s presence in our living room» (Lahiri 1999: 25). He moved to the United States for the yearlong opportunity of studying the foliage of New England. After various wanderings, he settled in Boston, living near a university north where Lilia and her parents lived. He came from a part of
34 Lahiri, Jhumpa, Interpreter of Maladies, London, Flamingo, 1999, p. 24.
35 In three stories -When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, Sexy, and Mrs. Sen’s- Jhumpa Lahiri employs innocent
voices to problematic situations in order to make the historical and subjective results of diasporic discourse comprehensible. Therefore, children act as cultural translators.
36
Pakistan at that time, Dacca, the current capital of Bangladesh, where his wife and seven daughters lived. That specific year was significant for his birthplace since it was involved in civil war. As a result, thousands of locals were tortured and killed.
Lilia’s initial portrayal of Mr. Pirzada displays how vital food is in Indian culture (Godfree 2010: 1). In fact, one of the first times she saw him, he showed her a black and white photograph of his daughters «at a picnic, their braids tied with ribbons, sitting cross-legged in a row, eating chicken curry off of banana leaves» (Lahiri 1999: 23-24). Through Lilia’s parents, the Pakistani man broke into their lives: in search of fellow citizens, they used to check the university records until they could find someone from their same part of the world; thus, they ran into Mr. Pirzada. Since then, he became a regular guest during the dinner hours, as it had limited space to stay. Consequently, dinner becomes an essential source of interaction in their regular encounters. It has been claimed (Brada-Williams 2004: 455) that this short story is the only one which interrupts the theme of marriage or marital problems: it includes married people, such as Mr. Pirzada and Lilia’s parents, but the focus of attention is represented by both the relationship between Lilia and their visitor, and the connection created by Pirzada and Lilia’s parents «sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear» (Lahiri 1999: 41).
37
During one of these dinners, Lilia called him «the Indian man» (Lahiri 1999: 25), contrary to the opinion of her father; indeed, since partition,36 he no longer considered their guest Indian: «one moment we were free and then we were sliced up […] like a pie. Hindus here, Muslims there. Dacca no longer belongs to us» (Lahiri 1999: 25). By stating this, food is used as a metaphor for easily describing historical facts which characterized the motherland: it indirectly suggests how brutally the bloody massacres isolate and damage many lives and families (Deb 2014: 123). After winning the independence from England, the country was sliced in two, by placing Hindus in India and Muslims in Pakistan: Mr. Pirzada is Bengali, but also a Muslim. The partition caused conflicts and disputes which were still present in their mental attitudes after years, and again the matter is highlighted through nourishment: «for many, the idea of eating in the other’s company was still unthinkable» (Lahiri 1999: 25). These statements confuses and disorientates Lilia’s naivety; indeed, their guest is not any different than her parents: he speaks their same language, he tells the same jokes and, most importantly, he eats the same food. Their geographical closeness and shared culinary culture overcome the differences exposed by her father (Garg 2012: 77).
36 By the term Partition is meant the division of India into two independent dominion state: the Union of
India (the current Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan (the current Islamic Republic of Pakistan). It caused the displacement of millions of people along religious lines, and provoked refugee crises and antagonism between the two countries. Partition as a historical event and as a metaphor is employed by Lahiri. Characters are divided against others and within themselves. The main characters of When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine and The Treatment of Bibi Haldar are victims of Partition. The eighth story of the collection represents the disastrous effects of the events of 1947.
38
Accordingly, Lilia’s father disapproved of his daughter’s unawareness concerning the current events of Pakistan and India. Assimilation of Indians to the United States is one of the predominant themes of the collection, and in this specific story the issue is noticeable since the beginning. It is obvious that she is a first-generation American born to immigrant parents who remember their own involvements in India intensely; the absence of their native land can be seen largely from a gastronomic point of view: «the supermarket did not carry mustard oil, doctors did not make house calls, neighbors never dropped by without invitation, and of these things, every so often, my parents complained» (Lahiri 1999: 24). Lilia is an American, and thus she totally incorporates the American culture. She does have an interest in her parents’ world and appreciates her father’s attempt to illustrate a different reality: food metaphor is featured when Lilia focused on the geographic map; her father ironically explains the considerable hostility between Hindus and Muslims, calling into questions the political turmoil during Partition of India (Deb 2014: 124). Using the map, she is immersed in so many different countries in Asia, but her reasoning is opposed to her parent: «Pakistan was yellow, not orange. I noticed that there were two distinct parts to it, one much larger than the other, separated by an expanse of Indian territory; it was as if California and Connecticut constituted a nation apart from the U.S.» (Lahiri 1999: 26).
39
Unlike her father, Lilia’s mother is proud that her daughter is an American: this fact assures her a safe life, a guaranteed education and many other opportunities: «I would never have to eat rationed food» (Lahiri 1999: 26); hence, Lilia is unable to study the history of her parents’ place of origin on school time, but only American interrelationships.37 The study of its history and geography into which Lilia is being initiated is not inclusive of references to similar contemporary insurrections and independence fights in other parts of the world; she realises the intricacies of the India–Pakistan situation through her family’s sharing meals with Mr Pirzada (Deb 2014: 123).
Every evening at six o’clock Mr. Pirzada arrived in their home; he always carried with himself something to eat, such as «plums, olives, and chocolate browns» (Lahiri 1999: 27) and she took his coat. Like her parents, Mr. Pirzada removed his shoes before walking in the room, chewed seeds after meals as a digestive, did not drink alcohol, dunked biscuits into consecutive cups of tea for dessert (Chobey 2001: 3). The most important reason for his constant presence in the house was connected to the possibility of using television; in fact, every night Lilia’s family and their guest ate in the living room in order to watch the local news.
The topics covered by Lilia’s father and Mr. Pirzada were generally the same every time, which were updates on the Indo-Pakistan fights, while Lilia’s
37 The relative confidence with which Lilia participated in an American childhood is contrasted with the
40
mother «appeared from the kitchen with a plate of mincemeat kebabs with coriander chutney» (Lahiri 1999: 28). Kitchen is considered the heart of the home, a place where they share private customs, practices, and food becomes thus a form of expression of their identity (Wulandari 2013: 3). With meticulous observation, it is defined the typical Bengali dishes prepared by her mum, always characteristically accompanied with Bengali condiments. The sequence in which food appears resembles the order in which they are eaten in Bengali households. Indeed, the Bengali cuisine normally includes vegetables and lentils served with rice. Like Mr. Pirzada, Bengalis enjoyed each dish separately. Furthermore, as Lilia’s mother regularly did, the food was typically served course-wise rather than all at once (Deb 2014: 126).
For Lilia, during these conversation something awkward occurred: while they were talking about refugees and starvation «he reached into his suit pocket and gave me a small plastic egg filled with cinnamon hearts» (Lahiri 1999: 29). It became their ritual, and at first it was the only moment of the evening he spoke to her directly; the treats were stored in a keepsake box that belonged to a grandmother she never met: «long ago in India, my father’s mother used to store the ground areca nuts she ate after her morning bath» (Lahiri 1999: 29-30). Despite the different utility, in both India and America the purpose of the container is to contain two different types of food.
41
From that night forward, they did eat at the coffee table, as a result of the impossibility to watch in a complete way the television from the dining table. They did not converse but solely ate. On the ground that Mr. Pirzada was described not as an Indian, Lilia began to observe him carefully.38 Before eating, Mr. Pirzada carefully positioned a silver pocket watch he kept on the local time of his homeland, Dacca, eleven hours ahead. She imagined his daughters already awakening the following morning, having breakfast, and going to school: «our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there» (Lahiri 1999: 31); therefore, food becomes a connector of two realities, the United States and the place where their guest really belonged, in which a war took place. Local news was observed very attentively in the hope of not seeing members of his family among the refugees, and Lilia was dramatically concerned about Mr. Pirzada’s daughters that she could no longer eat the abundance of food which was served by her mother; her consciousness of the divergence between her situation and their visitor’s daughters opens her eyes to the intricate political struggle on a personal level. That night, she decided to hold the candy Mr. Pirzada gave her, considering it as a contribution in her prayers for their guest’s family (Brada-Williams 2004: 455):
38 All nine stories are woven together with the recurrent representations of care and neglect. Repetitions of
this opposition include neighbourhoods, marital and extramarital relationships, and relationships between adults and children.
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«I took a square of white chocolate out of the box, and unwrapped it, and then as I chewed it slowly, I prayed that Mr. Pirzada’s family was safe and sound. I had never prayed for anything before, had never been taught or told to, but I decided, given the circumstances, that it was something I should do» (Lahiri 1999: 32).
It is clear that food plays a central role in the act of beg on behalf of others, representing the medium to satisfy her wishes; thus, she decided not to brush her teeth after eating the candy, so as to prevent the invalidity of the whole action, and slept with sugar in her mouth. Since Lilia, who declared she did not pray, did a ritual to keep Pirzada’s daughters safe, it can be said that she did not practice the religion of her parents. There is no indication of religion in Lilia’s family, though it can be assumed that her family was Hindu, considering that Mr. Pirzada was a Muslim. In the present case, Lilia performs a different form of prayer, with the candy given to her by the visitor; and hence, she represents a secular American, again detached from her parents’ culture. This ritualistic consumption seems to be a farfetched derivation of the wine and bread circulated into Christianity, which is a symbol of Jesus’s flesh and blood. Such rituals allow people to feel part of a community; Lilia eats without relish or for any nutritive benefits; her consumption is compelled by a non-personal cause (Garg 2012: 78).
Observing Mr. Pirzada’s fears during the dinners, Lilia began to gain a new awareness of a world larger than her own; no one mentioned the Indo-Pakistan
43
issue during lessons in the classroom, and her attempt to understand something more about it in the library was rejected by the teacher. The days passed without positive news about the situation; nevertheless, Mr. Pirzada and Lilia’s parents «joked and told stories, and dipped biscuits in their tea» (Lahiri 1999: 34). Food was a constant element during their conversations, which varied in a regular manner over each evening; these food items which are characteristically Pakistani as well as Indian help to preserve the harmony between Lilia’s family and Mr. Pirzada, but for the latter more importantly function as a refuge in his nostalgia and homesickness (Choubey 2001: 3). In dinner occasions, they discussed political and social troubles complemented by the South Asian dishes cooked with care by her mother; the food that never missed was rice, which represents the essential nourishment in Indian cooking (Wulandari 2013: 4). The only thing Lilia could do was to continue to practice in secret the candy ritual for the benefit of Mr. Pirzada’s daughters and pray for their safety. Meanwhile, halfway around the world a nation was being created.
Lahiri also uses food to transmit the issue of ethnic identity and the need to assimilate into a different culture: this is shown through the American tradition which involves food like pumpkins, seeds, and candy. In October, Mr. Pirzada asked about the pumpkins he saw around the neighbourhood and Lilia explained that they were for Halloween; the American custom mystified him. However, that night the Pakistani man and Lilia’s family worked together to create a
Jack-44
o’-lantern. Even though they came from South Asia, they carved the pumpkin together, socializing with Americans (Wulandari 2013: 5).
In so doing, food displays the unity of different cultures, customs, and generations; multicultural America helps them to overcome the differences, dine together, worry and laugh together (Khilnani 2015: 78). When they were carving the jack-o’-lantern, the TV reporter mentioned Dacca and news about the war against Pakistan. Upon hearing what was happening, Mr. Pirzada’s knife slipped, leaving a profound incision in the pumpkin, which appeared frozen in astonishment; thus, due to the sad news, food embodies their states of mind, which are terror and fear. The shattered pumpkin at the end of the evening represents the peace already vanished between the nations.
Quite significantly, Lilia qualifies the Indo-Pakistan War39 through imageries of eating. During twelve days of war, what Lilia remembered was a change of habits from her parents and Mr. Pirzada: «my father no longer asked me to watch the news with them, and that Mr. Pirzada stopped bringing me candy, and that my mother refused to serve anything other than boiled eggs with rice for dinner» (Lahiri 1999: 40). What begins and ends the short story is the candy item; through the vital food metaphor, Lilia first comprehends the seriousness of the socio-political crisis. The liberation struggle of Bangladesh unites Lilia’s
39 During the conflict, the U.S.A. sided with West Pakistan, the Soviet Union with India and what will
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parents with Mr. Pirzada thanks to their Bengali nationalist identity which includes the most obvious cultural element of food (Deb 2014: 124).
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Pirzada returned safely to his home, to what was left of Dacca, where the new government had to face serious issues, such as famine and the relocation of refugees; therefore, the candy ritual became redundant, and Lilia continued to eat a candy in prayer for his family: «just as I have no memory of his first visit, I have no memory of his last. […] Our evenings went on as usual, with dinners in front of the news. The only difference was that Mr. Pirzada and his extra-watch were not there to accompany us» (Lahiri 1999: 41). At the end of the story, a card from Mr. Pirzada thanked deeply Lilia’s family for their hospitality, and informed them that he had reunited with his family and daughters; for the great news, Lilia’s family commemorated the occasion with food. Lilia did not consider it as a celebration: the end of the fight corresponds with the definitive end of Mr. Pirzada’s presence at the dinners. Finally, the ritual performed to keep his daughters safe was no longer necessary, so throwing the rest of the candies away was Lilia’s final act.
It’s definitely demonstrated how the vital role of food facilitates the intimacy between characters, by dissolving political and religious differences in the shared environment of America; it becomes a valuable support in the gradual development of diasporic identities of all the four characters. In so doing, food allows Lilia to learn a great life lesson, as suggested by the title of this short
