REVIEW: The Lowland
Writing about the diaspora is a Lahiri specialty. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize and The New Yorker Debut of the Year award. Her novel, The Namesake (2003), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in addition to being selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today. Her second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was No. 1 on The New York Times Review’s list of 100 Books of 2008. Her most recent published work, The Lowland, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.
Much of Lahiri’s writing is derived from personal experience. The daughter of Indian parents from West Bengal, she grew up in Rhode Island where her father worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island while her mother made efforts to ensure that their children remained connected with their Bengali heritage.
To the reader it does not matter if her novels are set in Kolkata and Rhode Island or in Karachi and Toronto. It doesn’t even matter if the protagonist is male or female. Because the experiences and emotions she describes are easily recognisable to many of us in the diaspora. We grin understandingly when Ashima mixes Planters peanuts and Rice Krispies with spices, lemon, chopped chillies and onion in the opening chapter of The Namesake. And nod in agreement when Subhash muses in The Lowland that “though he looked like any other Bengali he felt an allegiance with the foreigners [in Kolkata] now. He shared with them a knowledge of elsewhere. Another life to go back to. An ability to leave.”
Lahiri also captures the essence of second-generation South Asians in the West, specifically their detachment from the parents’ native language. That disconnect is often mitigated in adulthood by a lingering nostalgia for conversations that they had once heard at home in that language.
This explains why Bela, Subhash’s daughter, is drawn to the group of Bangladeshi construction workers at the end of her street in Brooklyn. She slows down when she walks past them so that she can hear them talk. “She can’t understand what these men are saying. Just some words here and there. The accent is a little different. Still, she always slows down when she passes them. She’s not nostalgic for her childhood, but this aspect of it, at once familiar and foreign, gives her pause.”
Born only 15 months apart, brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra are very close as young boys but as adults they choose very different paths. Subhash leaves for America’s East Coast where he leads the life of an academic, while Udayan becomes increasingly involved with the radical Naxalbari movement at home. Despite the growing distance between the brothers, they manage to keep in touch through letters — until the day Udayan is murdered by police in full view of their entire neighbourhood of Tollygunge.
On receiving the tragic news, Subhash returns to console his parents, but before heading back to America he shocks them further, marrying his brother’s widow. The reader wonders if Subhash gave any serious thought to the consequences of his announcement. Or did loneliness and genuine emotion lead him to make a decision that ensured that his future relationships with his mother, wife, and daughter would forever be haunted by his brother’s ghost.
One could argue that in contrast to this well-meaning and big-hearted male protagonist, Lahiri has created three self-centred and emotionally distant female characters. His wife in particular inspires strong negative emotions. Gauri relents to a physical relationship with him but refuses to allow their bond to develop beyond that. She even admits that the real focus of her maternal instinct is her thesis, but by that time Subhash’s anger has turned into resignation.
Subhash probably comes to realise that it is futile to remain angry with someone who does not seem to care how hurtful their lack of emotional connection is to those around them. It is as if in order to survive that fateful day in Kolkata, Gauri’s heart had to become forever numb; neither time nor distance nor a sincere partner could to revive it. “What she’d seen from the terrace, the evening the police came for Udayan, now formed a hole in her vision. Space shielded her more effectively than time: the great distance between Rhode Island and Tollygunge. As if her gaze had to span an ocean and continents to see. It had caused those moments to recede, to turn less and less visible, then invisible.”
The Naxalbari movement that dominated her life in India does not receive even a brief mention in American news reports. The violent protests and subsequent police repression that were everyday occurrences have vanished. She is safe now and free to do as she pleases, yet she yearns for something more.
“So it began in the afternoons. Not every afternoon but often enough, too often. Disoriented by the sense of freedom, devouring the sensation as a beggar devours food. Sometimes she simply walked to the store and back, without buying anything. Sometimes she really did get the mail, and sat on a bench on campus and sorted through it. Or she went over to the student union to get a copy of the campus paper.” The immense joy that she feels in these brief moments of escape makes it clear that the thing she desires most is complete freedom.
In the end neither Rhode Island nor Kolkata are able to save “certain creatures of the lowland that only survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain.”
The Lowland
(Novel)
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Knopf, US
ISBN 0307265749
352pp.