Wonder Bread and Curry: Mingling Cultures, Conflicted Hearts
Jhumpa Lahiri's characters tend to be immigrants from India and their American-reared children, exiles who straddle two countries, two cultures, and belong to neither: too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully.
These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither; they always experience themselves as standing slightly apart, given more to melancholy observation than wholehearted participation.
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Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy love affair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is conscious of the “deadness” of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself that the relationship will endow her life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then, against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome — on the eve of Hema’s departure for her wedding — and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.
In the hands of a less talented writer it’s an ending that might have seemed melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Ms. Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and haunting power of tragedy — a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate artistry as a writer.
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