Unaccustomed Earth

In “Hell-Heaven,” Usha recalls a stretch of her childhood and teen years, and the impact of a family friend named Pranab, whom her mother was secretly in love with. Pranab eventually marries a white American woman named Deborah, who embodies many of the ideals that Usha associated with idealized American beauty: she is white, tall, conventionally attractive, and masters a casual yet sophisticated aesthetic that contrasts with the traditional Bengali clothing Usha’s mother foists upon her. In this story, we see Usha struggling against the “old world” expectations of her mother, who eventually becomes scorned and neglected by both Usha and her father. These conflicts are rooted in the family’s diasporic position, gender norms, and both the intergenerational and cultural conflicts that such a diasporic position engenders. For Usha, Deborah symbolizes both the warm, intimate maternal bond that is unachievable with Usha’s own mother, as well as the tantalizing yet unrealistic and unrealized promise of assimilation into the American Dream. 

Amit, the central character in “A Choice of Accommodations,” is an Indian-American man who is married to Megan, a white American woman. Together, they have two daughters. The story chronicles a vacation weekend that Amit and Megan take in order to travel to Langford Academy, the private boarding high school that Amit was forced to attend for his sophomore through senior years of high school. We learn that Amit’s parents unceremoniously enrolled him in the school before moving back to India—an abandonment that affected and still affects Amit deeply. He is a character plagued by constant anxiety that his entire life—his wife and children—could be catastrophically taken from him at any moment. The reader can surmise that this anxiety is at least partially rooted in the trauma of Amit’s own abandonment by his parents as a teen. Also of significance is the fact that he and Megan are attending the wedding of Pam, the daughter of Langford’s headmaster. Amit used to be in love with Pam, both as a student at Langford, and a student at Colombia, which both he and Pam attended for their undergraduate education. This fact remains unspoken by Amit, who instead speaks badly about his marriage to another wedding guest before accidentally abandoning Megan at the wedding when he falls asleep in the hotel room after leaving the wedding to call his children. Ultimately, the story leaves us with a conflicted image of the couple’s sexual and emotional reconciliation, forming the message that no matter how close or intimately involved one is with their spouse, there will remain depths unknown and unexplored within the human heart. 

In “Only Goodness,” Sudha’s primary struggle is the one that she shares with her younger brother, Rahul. She begins the story by stating that it was she who first introduced Rahul to alcohol. Together, they nurtured his growing addiction by hiding alcohol from their parents in the house when she would come home for visits from college. While her brother is more academically gifted than her, his alcohol addiction quickly claims his college career, and he finds himself a dropout living with his parents. This foists the unexpected role of golden child upon Sudha, who earns many academic accolades, marries, and gives birth to a son named Neel. Rahul eventually steals his mother’s gold jewelry and absconds, and then begins a new life with a woman and her daughter in New York. During this time, he also goes into rehab, which appears to help him. However, when he comes to visit Sudha and her young family, Rahul has a relapse and ends up endangering Neel’s life by leaving him unattended in the bathtub. This leads to a confrontation in which Sudha reveals to her husband the secret of her culpability for Rahul’s alcoholism, which she has been hiding for her entire marriage. At the story’s end, we see Sudha fearing that her entire life and marriage is at a point of implosion. Her story depicts the fragility of human bonds and the destructive power of secrets and denial. Through Sudha’s characterization and narrative, Lahiri forwards the notion that the most ordinary and quotidian of human relationships can be haunted by secrets and deceptions that are in and of themselves also ordinary and quotidian, yet in possession of a deep and terrible power to upend and destroy. 

Sang is a Bengali-American woman in her early 30s. Throughout “Nobody’s Business,” she is cast as a sexual object. Both the strange Bengali men who call her on the phone, wishing to marry her based on the credentials that she is rumored to hold, and her white roommate, Paul, nurse voyeuristic, fetishized visions of her that they cling to in order to satisfy their sexual and romantic appetites for her. Farouk, her boyfriend of three years, is also discovered to be having an affair with another woman and lying to her face for a year. Although the story is ostensibly about Sang, she is narratively sidelined by Paul, which substantiates her depiction as a person whose degradation and dehumanization is predicated upon her female identity.

In the trilogy that closes the collection out, we see Hema during two distinct phases in her life. The first phase, chronicled in “Once in a Lifetime,” covers a time during her thirteenth year, during which Kaushik and his family lodge with her family for a period of a few months while they arrive from Bombay to purchase a new home in America. Hema quickly falls in love with Kaushik, who is three years older than her. This story sees a young Hema directly confronting both her nascent sexuality and the specter of death, embodied by Kaushik’s breast cancer-ridden mother Parul. It also sets the stage for the passionate and deeply intimate connection that Hema and Kaushik will share when they reunite as adults. Ultimately, when faced with a choice between Kaushik, who asks Hema to abandon her life as an academic, along with her arranged marriage, and Navin, who promises a life of stability through that arranged marriage, Hema chooses herself and Navin. Kaushik travels to Thailand as a stop before settling into Hong Kong for a desk job, but is killed when a tsunami strikes. After her marriage, Hema quickly becomes pregnant. The last image of Hema we receive is one of her contending with both the new life growing inside of her and her secret grief for Kaushik. She has married for the purposes of entering her 40s in fulfillment of what both she and society expects of her through her role not only as an academic, but as a wife and mother. Through this narrative arc, Lahiri depicts the conflict between passion and practicality. Lahiri also questions the nature of the norms and institutions (such as gender, marriage, work, and family) by which we achieve fulfillment, asserting that underneath the idealism lies the mystery of the human heart, and its conflicting desires and deceptions.