But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.”Īshima soon gives birth to a baby boy, and she has to learn quickly a new role and its responsibilities. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made it more miraculous still. It’s the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land… She’d been astonished by her body’s ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. It’s not so much the pain, which she knows, somehow, she will survive. For the past eighteen months, ever since she’s arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at all. In simple language, Lahiri paints a vivid picture of Ashima’s apprehension: Motherhood is a much more daunting challenge. But she finds out a year later that her duty as a wife does not pose as much anxiety as giving birth in a land unknown. The adjustments for Ashima is overwhelming as a new wife in a new country. Shortly after the wedding they leave India for Boston where Ashoke continues his graduate studies in engineering at MIT. In The Namesake, Ashima weds Ashoke Ganguli in an arranged marriage, not even knowing his name when she first met him in the betrothal. But as we zoom in on a more personal level, like the single fallen leaf, we see its unique shades of color, its tarnishes, its withered edges, and we soon find that no two leaves are exactly the same. This much is true for all immigrants, academics or otherwise. The conflicts are not only generational by often internal. Her characters, often first generation immigrants striving to plant a career and a life on new soil, raising their children with the promise of a brighter future.
Her setting is usually Northeast United States.
Jumpha Lahiri’s stories belong to the academics from India. But if you pick them up and look more closely, every single one is uniquely different. From afar, we may look like a collective mass, like the autumn leaves that have fallen on the ground. I know it first hand, and this I’ve found: categorizing could be futile. CLICK HERE to read my movie review of The Namesake (2006).
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