The Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri rocks once again with her new short story collection-The Unaccustomed Earth. It is only an instinct for a reader, who has captivated by the life sketched in The Interpreter Of Maladies, to get a copy of this short story collection. As the reader leaf through the pages of The Unaccustomed Earth, life opens with all its colours and smells.

The collection itself can be seen as a garden in which different flowers with unique aromas and colours contribute to the panorama. Adapting the theme of the book from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom House, the stories convey the idea that expatriate life can be a rewarding one, only when women strike their roots to the ‘unaccustomed earth.’ Jhumpa Lahiri gives testimony for this idea through the sketch of two generations of Bengali immigrants in America.

Family relationships in an expatriate soil have a different significance than that in India. The stories “Hell-Heaven,” “Only Goodness,” and “Unaccustomed Earth” deal with the tensions in Indian immigrant families. “A Choice Of accommodations” and “Nobody’s Business” depict the strains of Indo-Anglo co-habitation.



The short story trio-“Hema and Kaushik” –is an introduction to a new writing style of Jhumpa Lahiri. The story moved me as deeply as it sketched through the protagonists' minds. Hema and Kaushik’s childhood, their unacknowledged teenage infatuation for each other, the expatriate Bengali lineage that they share, their middle age romance and the disaster that they encounter will etch in the memory even time after the story gets finished. The stories are aptly named as “Once In A Lifetime” to mark the time the teenage protagonists shared under one roof, “Year’s End” to mark the found and lost relationship that Kaushik shared with his step sisters and “Going Ashore” to mark the reunion of Hema and Kaushik and proceeding events.

The movements of events in these stories are spontaneous. As someone criticized, the stories have no marked beginning and finished end. The stories can begin anywhere from your imagination and can continue in your imagination. That is the ability that a good reader imparts to you-the power of imagination where you can ponder over small events and see the wonderful story in it.

Publishers: Random House
Price: Rs.595/-