Sexy & Third and Final Continent

            In Sexy a woman, Miranda, is having an affair with a married man.  It starts out sweet and fun, she feels special around Dev, but it starts to crumble.  Their relationship isn’t going to develop any more than it already has.  He sees her less and less.  They never go out anymore.  From the start she knows he’s married, and they only spent so much time together at first because his wife was out of town.  But she still feels the loss, she still misses him.  Her guilt about the situation increases as she listens to her co-worker’s cousin’s situation.  She looks after the woman’s son, Rohin, and this drives her reality home.  Sexy is how she felt around Dev, but “sexy,” as defined by Rohin, “’… means loving someone you don’t know’” (Lahiri 107).  Dev doesn’t know Miranda.  Miranda doesn’t know Dev.  In this moment what she has done and how unfulfilling it is becomes perfectly clear.  The imagined screaming of Rohin’s mother, “’Is she sexy’” (Lahiri 108) and, “’How could you love a woman you don’t even know?’” (Lahiri 108) haunts her.  Not only for what Rohin has been through, but how false her affair has been.  It feels hollow and empty in a way it never had before.  She imagines the conversation, breaking up with someone she was never really with.  All the usual reasons, “… it wasn’t fair to her, or to his wife…” (Lahiri 110) don’t have to be said, they live in her mind, what she imagines she says to Dev.  Once she comes to terms with this, once Rohin makes her see all this, the break up is over.  She is already moving on.  It surprises even her that the end of the relationship is so sudden, but she means so little to Dev, that he would never go out of his way to keep her around.  The story refrains from strong judgments about the characters.  Neither Dev, nor Miranda are portrayed as evil.  Rohin and his mother are victims, but the story carefully keeps them and Miranda from tangling together.  You never see Dev’s wife cry or his children get upset.  It could have been easy to make Dev Laxmi or her cousin’s husband and delve into the hurt that Miranda causes her friend.  But the story keeps them separate and gives Miranda a fairly guilt free chance to start over. After Dev and Miranda stop seeing each other, the story ends with Miranda in front of a clear blue sky, her life full of new and better opportunities.      

            The Third and Final Continent is a slowly paced story, a patient one.  A good chunk of a man’s life is covered, but it never feels rushed or that too many details are being piled on.  This is the first story we’ve read from this book that is in the first person.  I found this to be an interesting choice, it can be easier to jump around when you’re in third person, and this story covers a lot of time, but she has written it in such a fashion that it’s as if he’s being interviewed.  It’s like the reader has asked him about his life, to sum it up, and he has this response for us.  He talks about the important changes in his life, and how, after all his struggle and uncertainty, he has succeeded in building a happy life. 

When the narrator’s wife, Mala, meets Mrs. Croft, I felt the significance of the time the narrator had previously spent with her.  The two characters had never talked much and Mrs. Croft would have resented it if he helped her out, so I was left with a bit of an empty feeling around their relationship.  But when he replies with “splendid” to Mrs. Croft’s comments I laughed, the two of them had really gotten used to each other in a way that I hadn’t appreciated until this part.  Mala and the narrator also bond over this, the first time he hears Mala laugh is at Mrs. Croft’s house.  Mrs. Croft approves of Mala, and this helps the narrator and Mala become closer, if Mrs. Croft had said something mean about Mala, it might have created a wedge between them, but her admiration of Mala helps the new marriage along smoothly.  The narrator and his wife go on to build a strong, loving, relationship, and this is one of the memorable first steps.      

            These two stories are very different from each other in tone and subject matter.  In Sexy there was a sense of restlessness, always questioning and looking for something.  While The Third and Final Continent felt very grounded, the narrator felt balanced and comfortable with himself.  Both had optimistic endings despite the tone of the stories being so different.  When I read Sexy I felt some anxiety for Miranda, but with The Third and Final Continent I felt relaxed and just let the story unfold.  Sexy ends with a promise of a better future, where The Third and Final Continent assures you of the narrator’s success in the U.S.  As in all the stories a great many details are conveyed to the reader in an artistic way.  You don’t realize how much you know about the characters until you start talking about them, and then you learn you know a whole lot about them.      

-Iris Keenan