Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.”

Ashima’s loneliness and intense craving for Calcutta, her beloved city, is reflected ever so poignantly in that singular plate of jhal muri that she made for herself during her pregnancy in Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. In an unknown land far away from home, finding a substitute for puffed rice was perhaps a task more tedious than their search for identity, where experiences and time mixed together into a concoction more brutal to the senses than a spicy plate of this delectable Bengali street food.

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⚫ “Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”

Emotions that can only be felt and articulated by a Bengali, the gravitas of a pet name and justification behind its increasing layers of ridiculousness in our culture has never been so adeptly penned before this. The beginning of a journey for Gogol and the elusive mystery behind his name forms the crux of the story in The Namesake, and readers felt rapturous joy in the validation of their pet names in these few lines.

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⚫ “I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. 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.”

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In The Third and Final Continent, a short story that found home in Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, the immigrant experience that the author so deftly writes about, is summed up beautifully in these lines. It is in the capturing of the uniqueness of each individual experience that makes her the author she is, bringing home the awards and adulation she does.

⚫ “Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.”

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In The Lowland Lahiri writes about the loneliness of a couple that is so starkly different from that felt by Ashima in The Namesake. These lines when read in isolation, describes the gnawing feeling of doom that sometimes comes dragging up at inopportune moments and feel worse in the presence of company. Isolation too can be a companion after a point of time and we feel it in our bones.

⚫ “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without having to move your feet”

While these lines from The Namesake resonated with readers around the world, it especially echoes well with Jhumpa Lahiri fans who get a sneak peek in the lives of people whose experiences are multiplied in effect due to the geographical distance from their roots. Displacement and the subsequent search for identity maybe an alien concept for few but it hardly remains so after glancing through a few pages by Lahiri. Stringing together a montage of the simplest of life experiences, she creates magic from thin air and we can’t wait for Whereabouts to sweep us off our feet.