“They don’t want me to change,” wrote Jhumpa Lahiri in her first Italian book, translated into English as In Other Words. What has Lahiri meant to “them”, her readers? Almost one percent of the people in the United States are of Indian origin. Starting from her first book, the Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, Lahiri has written compellingly about the Indian American experience. Who can forget Lahiri’s stories of people caught in a world where their skin tethers them to their homes and their skin also sets them apart from their white neighbours?
She has written of Indian families who picnicked together in the US – packing boxes of Indian food and hoping their respective children would get along. She has written of white women having affairs with married Indian men. One of these women is told by the eight-year-old son of one of these men that she is sexy. When she demands to know the meaning of the word, he replies, “It means loving someone you don’t know.”
I have only read that story once, but I never forgot those words. Can you really blame me or “them”, her countless readers, for not wanting Lahiri to change?
Born on July 11, 1967, Nilanjana Lahiri discovered a few years later that her name brought her endless grief in the form of classmates and teachers who couldn’t pronounce it. Her nickname, Jhumpa, was an alternative that served her well. One can’t help but wonder if the two-syllabled name has set her apart in the international literary world in a way Nilanjana wouldn’t have.
Lahiri has referred to her mother in many, many interviews as someone who wouldn’t leave Calcutta behind. Her mother was devastated by the social norms of the US. She couldn’t bear that neighbours wouldn’t come over without calling. Lahiri’s fiction shows the vast difference between first and second generation Indian immigrants. She says, “I am the daughter of a mother who would never change.”
But Lahiri has chosen change. She is not the writer she was at thirty-two years of age when her first book came out. She has stepped away from the model her mother presented and she has walked away from the expectations of readers.
After four wildly successful works of fiction (two novels, The Namesake and The Lowland, and two short story collections, The Interpreter Of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth) over fourteen years, Lahiri seems to have tired of her own literary formula. She spoke of recurring dreams where she felt she was being pursued. When she asked herself what it could be, she came up with this puzzling answer – the English language.
The language had symbolised for her a struggle to acclimatise, to balance her American identity with her familial one. When asked how she would respond to being described as someone from Rhode Island (the place where she grew up), she replied “uncomfortably.” In 2015, Lahiri surprised readers and critics by publishing a memoir in Italian about learning Italian. The English translation by Ann Goldstein, of the Elena Ferrante fame, was published almost immediately afterwards. Did it receive the acclaim her previous books had? No, but it unnerved people.
Breaking free
In Other Words was Lahiri’s story of losing her old, burdensome self in a new language. In her twenties, before she had published a single book, Lahiri visited Italy with her sister. Instead of a guidebook, she bought a dictionary with a green plastic cover which “had more or less the dimensions of a bar of soap”. Who could have guessed this would be the tool with which Lahiri rinsed her legacy and dared to start afresh?
Her husband, a senior editor at TIME Latin America, and her two children accompanied her as she relocated to Rome to find her feet in Italian. Having studied Latin for years, the rudimentary words and phrases in Italian came easily to her. But the rest required discipline, patience and sacrifice of ease and convenience. In this new language, Lahiri couldn’t be complacent. She couldn’t count on years of familiarity to craft the elegant, clean sentences that propelled her to fame. In more way than one, learning Italian was Lahiri’s way of being free.
As an immigrant, English had exacted perfection from Lahiri. But after a while, perfection became an uninteresting plateau for her. What Lahiri sought from Italian was the literary freedom to fumble, to experiment and to fail. She says revealingly that her inevitable failures in Italian don’t wound her the way they would have in English. How fitting that one of the most famous writers in the world with an Indian connection should share that colonial fear of many Indians who are ashamed in different degrees of not knowing, knowing too little or making blunders in the tyrannical English language.
Has fame allowed Lahiri this luxury? No doubt. Take for example her latest book, The Clothing of Books, a slim personal treatise on book covers. Lahiri wrote the book in Italian, and her husband Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush translated it into English. It was a book that baffled reviewers. But it was on the front shelves of every bookshop in India.
Lahiri says, “In the animal world metamorphosis is expected, natural.” How easy it would have been for Lahiri to continue writing about the unhappy men and women in the diaspora. Even by book four, she hadn’t run out of ways to make them new. Instead, she has found a different way of endearing herself to readers (and perhaps to herself). I have heard from readers who have moved across continents that Lahiri’s explorations in Italian mirrored their own forays into a new language. This year, her translation of the Italian novel, Ties, by Domenico Starnone was published. She started off as a writer who understood physical alienation. She is turning into a writer who understands reinvention.