Jhumpa Lahiri; Discovery and the Other

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 This Blessed House,  Lahiri uses much internal reflection and consequently you learn much more about Sanjeev even as you discover that he is still only beginning to learn about Twinkle, love and relationships. The use of the Christian iconography was a powerful metaphor and it was clever device choice. It perfectly encapsulates the otherness in a way that was very understandably uncomfortable for Sanjeev. I also wondered if one of the reasons that Twinkle was more drawn to the Christian artifacts had to do with the fact that she was working on completing her master's thesis on an Irish poet, I do not think that it would be too great of a stretch to imagine that Christian imagery may have been contain within various sonnets or more specifically the life of that unnamed Irish poet.

 Yet in This Blessed House, Sanjeev grows to appreciate the other (Twinkle) and to see the value which her oddness imparts to his life. The tenants of the building can neither appreciate Boori Ma nor recognize that it is their own vanity which created the vulnerability to the act of vandalism which occurs. The ability to look within ones self ultimately creates opportunity to see others as the are and forms the basis of acceptance. From an evolutionary or developmental perspective this is referred to accommodation, change within the homeostasis leads to cognitive dissonance, which either results in disassociation or accommodation. Lahiri explores both scenarios in her craft within these two pieces and does so beautifully and with very different outcomes for the characters within her stories.

lora



Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 30, 2017 at 12:15 AM

    I thought it was very observant of you to point out the similarities between Boori Ma and Twinkle. Both are judged by the characters around them, in the end Boori Ma is homeless, thrown out by the people in her life. Twinkle has a home, but is at odds with her husband, budding up against Sanjeev's wishes constantly.
    I also found your connection between the Irish poet and her fascination with the Christian objects very interesting, it didn't even occur to me. Her collecting the objects has a kind of scientific feel that is a lot like research, something she is in the middle of doing anyways.

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  2. AryaOctober 30, 2017 at 11:28 PM

    I'm really interested in your analysis of the similarities between Twinkle and Boori Ma -- how we only learn about them via how they are viewed by others. It's true that no one displays much introspection or self-reflectiveness in A Real Durwan -- Boori Ma does not seem to have the luxury of that kind of reflection and certainly no one in the building seems to recognize "that it is their own vanity which created the vulnerability to the act of vandalism which occurs." Whereas This Blessed House is deeply self-reflective, but through a very distorted lens of someone who doesn't know how to be vulnerable. Your post made me think about how much we might long for self-reflection as a reader, but how deceptive self-reflection can really be.

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  3. AnonymousNovember 1, 2017 at 12:19 PM

    I agree that there was definitely a difference in the ways that the reader understood Boori Ma versus how we get to know who Sanjeev and Twinkle are in This Blessed House. I think that's one of the awesome things about a collection of short stories, that this came from the same author who gives us different ways of achieving character description.

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