Searching for Home: A reader response of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri was able to share with the world her first book, a collection of nine stories, Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999. Brought up in America as well as her Indian heritage make her a genuinely interpreter of themes such as, cultural multiplicity, memory of homeland, the search for identity and the sense of belonging. Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies. Ever since Interpreter of Maladies was published, she has been variously proclaimed to an “American writer” and “an Indian American author”. Her writings are described as “diaspora fiction” by many Indian scholars and “immigrant fiction” by American critics. Thus, it can be said that Lahiri’s fiction is a unique addition to the existing Asian American Literature. This paper focuses on the various concepts of home. It exposes the sense of home from different perspectives as it appears in several short stories. The study relates the sense of home to literature in relation to human relationships and to the sense of place. We pose several questions in our efforts to study the sense of home in Jhumpa Lahiri’s selected short stories: Does psychological home have any significance in the well-being? – How does making a physical surrounding “home-like” benefit someone? And how does an immigrant make a house a home? What is the difference between physical and spiritual sense of home? All these questions will be examined through the analysis of Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter”, “When Mr. Pirzada came to Dine”, and “Mrs. Sens”. In conclusion, the paper aims to show to what extent Jhumpa Lahiri succeeds in conceptualizing the sense of home in diverse ways and how she skillfully allows her characters and her readers to glimpse small perceptions into human nature while presenting familiar, everyday events in life.