Review
To read a story by Jhumpa Lahiri is to slip effortlessly
into the life of another, to immerse yourself in that life
as wholly and as seamlessly as if you've just slid into a
sun-warmed pond. Each of the stories in
Unaccustomed
Earth excels at almost imperceptibly presenting a
character in full, poised at a moment of high importance in
her life. Lahiri switches between narrating the present and
filling in the back-story, slowly accreting the heft and
solidity of a life.
Her characters are mostly women who stand at the fulcrum
between their parents' immigrant generation and their
children's untroubled generation. Their parents are,
uniformly, prosperous Bengalis who moved to the Boston
suburbs in the 1970s, the women continuing to wear saris and
cook luchis while the men...
Beyond the Book
The Origins of Sindoor
With supreme and economical skill, Jhumpa Lahiri uses only a
few cultural signifiers to situate her characters in space
and time. Almost all of the mothers in her stories, the
women from the older generation who emigrate from India to
the United States with their husbands, wear vermilion powder
in their hair. Called sindoor, this powder is applied to the
part of a Hindu bride's hair by her husband during their
wedding ceremony, and is thereafter worn to signify her
married status. Widows typically do not wear sindoor.
In this way, the meaning of sindoor is much simpler than
that of the bindi, the bright red dot that many Indian women
wear on...
