Book: ROMAN STORIES
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Published by: Hamish Hamilton
Price: Rs 499
After bagging the Pulitzer with her debut publication, Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri has produced a series of piercing and intense diasporic novels and short stories that almost always address the pains of immigrants. Lahiri herself is an Indian-American author born to immigrant Indians in London. She moved to America early in her childhood but her Bengali roots remained strong as the family often visited their hometown, Calcutta. About a decade ago, Lahiri moved to Italy and it is from there that she acquired expertise in Italian, calling it her third language. Roman Stories is yet another sparkling collection of short stories told from the perspective of those living in Rome. Lahiri writes the stories in Italian and later translates six of them herself to English. The other three are translated by Todd Portnowitz.
Nine stories are woven around fifteen nameless characters, some immigrant and some native, who live in the city of Rome or come back to it occasionally. Lahiri begins from the suburbs of the city and gradually rolls into the very centre of urban Rome. Though Rome looms large as the central subject of the collection, the city’s role in the lives of the characters only emerges slowly.
The first four stories are clustered together because of the journey from the outskirts into the periphery of the city. The slow heat and the buzzing flies of the summer in “The Boundary” are no match for “the harsh quiet that reigns” there in winter, muses the girl who cleans for tourists visiting the house next door. Nothing of note really happens. It is simply a fluid narrative of her observances and recollections about the tourists, through which slips through the racist attack on her immigrant father that changed their lives into a continuous confinement in solitude. Silent sufferance takes the form of silent resentment in the narrator of “P’s Parties”. The story begins in a light spirit where the narrator, a novelist, talks about lively parties hosted by his wife’s friend. It gradually takes a morbid turn as the narrator’s frustration creeps into his story, ending with the sombre occasion of death. Perhaps the most poignant story in this section is “Well-Lit House”, which captures the fear and hopelessness an immigrant is shoved into after encountering the hatred of racists. The protagonist, who moves to Rome with his wife and children and manages to secure permanent housing in a small apartment that offers apparent freedom through the slice of sky visible through their bedroom window, is forced into confinement because of the hostility of the locals. His family return to their native country but he remains in Rome, quietly dwindling into obscurity.
“The Steps” houses six stories about characters in whose lives these steps — 126 of them — play some vital roles. For some, they signify a yearning for youth in the motley collection of youngsters who crowd around in various zones of these steps; for others, they are a source of insecurity and fear, and for others still a profound alienation. Like a bridge, “The Steps” connects us through to Rome central and the third section of stories in the collection.
“The Delivery” reveals a sudden and unexpected act of cruelty in a violent shooting triggered by racist hatred. “The Procession” brings back tourists, a couple in their fifties, the woman with a connection to Rome. It was where she first fell in love. The story begins with an air of festivity and offers us glimpses of a couple comfortable in their togetherness, but the veil soon falls away to reveal a deep sadness that sits in their hearts like the locked room in their rented apartment to which there is no key.
The final story is an urban masterpiece. Starting with a bittersweet tale of unfulfilled teenage love, it maps the life of a successful writer and university professor who apparently is capable of freeing herself by discarding earthly possessions. In the end though, it is again loneliness that screams voicelessly.
Lahiri’s choice of writing in Italian is conscious. Even though this is not the first time she turns to her third language, its usage is deeply relevant to the central themes of immigrant crisis, pain and suffering, and alienation. Lahiri pulls the spotlight on herself as a writer of the Indian diaspora, an act that allows her to write with a keen knowledge of these themes. The collection, though not an overtly politicised enterprise, does investigate the haunting sense of detachment that living in a city of Rome’s size can bring. Whether immigrant or native, each of the characters is gripped by unnamed fears, much like their unnamed selves. The lack of nomenclature further helps to drive the point home. Though Rome remains silent, she also swallows names and identities, making each individual just a number of the populace. We are reminded of the paralysis felt by the protagonists of Joyce’s Dubliners — the epiphanies though, remain elusive.
