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Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
“By the end of the meal I had a funny feeling that I might marry you,” he said, admitting it to himself as well as to her for the first time. “It must have distracted me.”
It made him shy, the way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror.
Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.
“I want you to see my face when I tell you this,” she said gently.
Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged.
Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.
They were all like siblings, Mr. Kapasi thought as they passed a row of date trees. Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents.
He wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Das were a bad match, just as he and his wife were. Perhaps they, too, had little in common apart from three children and a decade of their lives. The signs he recognized from his own marriage were there—the bickering, the indifference, the protracted silences.
In its own way this correspondence would fulfill his dream, of serving as an interpreter between nations.
In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice: brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut.
Whether there was any truth to Boori Ma’s litanies no one could be sure.
Believe me, don’t believe me.
Such comforts you cannot even dream them.”
You expect two basins to make up for all that?”
“You’re sexy.”
She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see.
“Face it. This house is blessed.”
FOR THE GREATER NUMBER of her twenty-nine years, Bibi Haldar suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, gem therapists, prophets, and fools.
we made yet more egg curry,
“A flag on the moon! Isn’t that splendid?”
“It is improper for a lady and gentleman who are not married to one another to hold a private conversation without a chaperone!”
Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
Maladies both accurately diagnosed and misinterpreted, matters both temporary and life changing, relationships in flux and unshakeable, unexpected blessings and sudden calamities, and the powers of survival—these are among the themes of Jhumpa Lahiri’s extraordinary, Pulitzer Prize-winning debut collection of stories.
