once in a lifetime
Wonderful short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, in the New Yorker. Her prose is smooth, not jarring. It’s descriptive, emotional and evocative. I liked her description of jet lag, it caught the mood of being in another state while trying to recover from jetlag.
In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere. When I returned from school in the afternoon you were still sleeping, and at dinner, breakfast for you, you all declined the curry we were eating, craving toast and tea. It was like that for the first few days: you were awake when we slept, sleeping when we were awake; we were leading antipodal lives under the same roof.
Her American Born Confused Desi (ABCD)ness comes up, when she is trying to stereotype all Indians. It’s interesting how South Asians living abroad like to create a binary other, who is less than them, usually family in India.
I did not know what to make of you. Because you’d lived in India, I associated you more with my parents than with me. And yet you were unlike my cousins in Calcutta, who seemed so innocent and obedient when I visited them, asking questions about my life in America as if it were the moon, astonished by every detail.
Her writing of the story in the second person is interesting and intimate. It felt like a love story.
Her descriptions of places are precise, and the relationships between people subtle. I liked how she captured the relationship between her parents, his parents and between the two families living in the same house. She gets the highs and lows of peoples moods just right.
My parents felt slighted by your parents’ extravagant visions, ashamed of the modest home we owned. “How uncomfortable you must be here,” they said, but your parents never complained, as mine did, nightly, before falling asleep. “I didn’t expect it to take this long,” my mother said, noting that almost a month had gone by.
Hema’s take on living with a dying person, seemed self obsessed. Not concerned about the person suffering or their family, but focusing on how “I” feel. Maybe she was too young then, I wonder how she feels now, if faced with a similar situtaion.
Perhaps you believed that I was crying for you, or for your mother, but I was not. I was too young, that day, to feel sorrow or sympathy. I felt only the enormous fear of having a dying woman in our home. I remembered standing beside your mother, both of us topless in the fitting room where I tried on my first bra, disturbed that I had been in such close proximity to her disease. I was furious that you had told me, and that you had not told me, feeling at once burdened and betrayed, hating you all over again.
Jhumpa is a wonderful writer, has a way with words, but I don’t agree with a lot of her premises and perspectives.
I read the story over three subway trips to and from work, and could not put it down. I was sad the story was over. The last section or the crescendo, situated the whole story and gave it meaning and substance.
In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere. When I returned from school in the afternoon you were still sleeping, and at dinner, breakfast for you, you all declined the curry we were eating, craving toast and tea. It was like that for the first few days: you were awake when we slept, sleeping when we were awake; we were leading antipodal lives under the same roof.
Her American Born Confused Desi (ABCD)ness comes up, when she is trying to stereotype all Indians. It’s interesting how South Asians living abroad like to create a binary other, who is less than them, usually family in India.
I did not know what to make of you. Because you’d lived in India, I associated you more with my parents than with me. And yet you were unlike my cousins in Calcutta, who seemed so innocent and obedient when I visited them, asking questions about my life in America as if it were the moon, astonished by every detail.
Her writing of the story in the second person is interesting and intimate. It felt like a love story.
Her descriptions of places are precise, and the relationships between people subtle. I liked how she captured the relationship between her parents, his parents and between the two families living in the same house. She gets the highs and lows of peoples moods just right.
My parents felt slighted by your parents’ extravagant visions, ashamed of the modest home we owned. “How uncomfortable you must be here,” they said, but your parents never complained, as mine did, nightly, before falling asleep. “I didn’t expect it to take this long,” my mother said, noting that almost a month had gone by.
Hema’s take on living with a dying person, seemed self obsessed. Not concerned about the person suffering or their family, but focusing on how “I” feel. Maybe she was too young then, I wonder how she feels now, if faced with a similar situtaion.
Perhaps you believed that I was crying for you, or for your mother, but I was not. I was too young, that day, to feel sorrow or sympathy. I felt only the enormous fear of having a dying woman in our home. I remembered standing beside your mother, both of us topless in the fitting room where I tried on my first bra, disturbed that I had been in such close proximity to her disease. I was furious that you had told me, and that you had not told me, feeling at once burdened and betrayed, hating you all over again.
Jhumpa is a wonderful writer, has a way with words, but I don’t agree with a lot of her premises and perspectives.
I read the story over three subway trips to and from work, and could not put it down. I was sad the story was over. The last section or the crescendo, situated the whole story and gave it meaning and substance.
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