Writing From The Body

    In the two short stories, A Real Durwan and This Blessed House Lahiri manages multiple characters through character interactions. For instance, A Real Durwan follows the life of Boori Ma (and the other tenants/characters in the background,) and at every point where she speaks we learn both about her and the characters that surround her. One of the many times this happens is when the Dalal’s buy two basins and Boori Ma uses it the one in the hallways for the first time: “Our bathwater was scented with petals and attars. Believe me, don’t believe me, it was a luxury you cannot dream.” (Lahiri, 78-79.)     At this instance we could infer that maybe Boori Ma came from a more luxurious time and place or that she boasts about things she’s never had for whatever reasons. For certain, as readers we are forced to engage in the story through the dialogue and a personal moral compass. The moral compass appears because as readers we...

Courtney Cannon "Managing Multiple Characters in Short Pieces" Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies In this collection of short stories, Lahiri explores relationship dynamics of Indian and Indian Americans, from multiple backgrounds, and whom inhabit various settings. Lahiri shows her craftsmanship of prose in her precise word choice and editing information to the most essential. Despite the stories being short and the dialogue sparse, the worlds and people she creates are detailed and made real to the reader. One of the ways in which Lahiri creates a rich and textured story is through her management of multiple characters, their dialogue and interactions, within a short amount of pages. "A Real Durwan" and "This Blessed House" are two of the stories that display Lahiri's effective management of her characters. In "A Real Durwan," Lahiri manages the complex relationships, socioeconomic status, housing, and climate, by centering...

I have read many of the short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies before in undergrad, including "This Blessed House."  In my undergraduate advanced fiction workshop, we might've talked about several different themes, but upon rereading "This Blessed House" in conjunction with "A Real Durwan," I'm finding many interesting connections throughout Lahiri's writing that I haven't noticed before. The most prominent recurring theme in these two stories is that the narrators are, so to speak, on the outside looking in.  In "A Real Durwan," Boori Ma is an observer of the apartment building, contributing only her sweeping and her stories, and cut off for the entirety of the story from the rest of the apartment's inhabitants; in a way, she is even cut off from the reader, since we never quite get enough into her head to know the reality of her past. In "This Blessed House," Sanjeev can only watch as Twi...

A Real Durwan             This is a story of wishing for a grander life and how far you’ll go to get it. Boori Ma constantly tells stories of her old life, which may or may not be true, because she longs for the luxury of that life. Mr. Dalal buys two sinks as an indulgence after being promoted at work. The tenants of the building are incited by this to improve the building in other ways, and therefore, improve their standard of living. But all this comes at a price, which is the moral of the story it seems. The tenants’ rush to improve their building caused Boori Ma’s usually vigilance to be rendered impossible and the improvements made the building a target for thieves. Then, Boori Ma’s perpetually retold tales of past lavishness caused the tenants not to believe her when she pleaded innocent to their accusations of conspiring with the sink thief.             Jhumpa Lahir...

From the beginning, Lahiri fixes the camera eye on Boori Ma: “Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell, had not slept in two nights.” We watch her perform intimate gestures: she shakes the mites from her bedding; she places her hand on her swollen knee; she struggles her way up the stairs. Lahiri establishes Boori Ma as the central figure and we follow. We follow Boori Ma from her “bed” in the basement as she moves through the building, stopping to sweep, lingering to tell stories to her neighbors, until finally she is on the roof. This is a very effective strategy that links place and setting: we know from the get-go that Boori Ma’s limited geography is critical to her character. However, on page 71-72, the narrative shifts to omniscient, focusing on how her neighbors perceive her: “Whether there was any truth to Boori Ma’s litanies, no one could be sure” (72). We are then given a series of clues: she has a distinct accent, she changes her story often, particularly the perimeters of he...

In the Real Durwan Lahiri's character Boori Ma gifts the tenants with entertaining stories, security and the comforts afforded by a real durwan. In exchange the allow her to exist amongst them for as long as it serves them. Boori Ma's nearly constant monologue of better days, and worse days feels like her best effort to prevent her from disappearing entirely into the pile of rags or soggy news print. No one who lives in this old building has much luxury, so Boori Ma creates that for them by managing the property while they manage their own lives.  I felt that it was an interesting choice that in the Real Duwan, Lahiri used very little reflective thought but that she used primarily Boori Ma's and the other characters dialogue to set the scenes. You never truly learn what the objective history of Boori Ma is but you do learn what others think of her, or more importantly what they don't even consider about her and the value of her role in their lives. In contrast, in T...

In each story I could hear the author’s voice, even though the stories were about two very different subjects.   I felt the stories progressed in similar ways and were paced the same.   The author was able to keep the same type of style in both of the stories.   She was consistent without being boring.   She could keep her chosen tone and storytelling technique without getting repetitive.   In the two stories she approached different characters and situations but there were hints of something familiar about them.   Keeping a third person perspective in these stories helps the author keep control over how she tells the story.   She looked at different people and lifestyles, but in a way she stayed the same.   No matter who the character is, she can keep her voice, as a storyteller, the same in this way of writing.             In A Real Durwan an apartment building comes apart over greed. ...