This has been their history as long as she can remember: “Somehow, she feared that any difference of opinion would chip away at the already frail bond that existed between them.” Her marriage, Ruma realizes, is stilted too: she is increasingly aware that she and her husband, Adam, are “separate people leading separate lives,” and that part of her is actually relieved when Adam leaves on one of his many business trips.
Like many children of immigrants Lahiri’s characters are acutely aware of their parents’ expectations; that they get into an Ivy League school, go to med school or grad school, marry someone from a good Bengali family. Deftly explicating the emotional arithmetic of her characters’ families, Lahiri shows how some of these children learn to sidestep, even defy their parents’ wishes. But she also shows how haunted they remain by the burden of their families’ dreams and their awareness of their role in the generational process of Americanization.
Their parents often seem so exhausted just coping with the difficulties of surviving in a strange new world that talk about self-fulfillment or depression or happiness seems utterly irrelevant to them; they are strangely pragmatic and unsentimental — about their marriages, their work, the hardships of daily life.
These characters’ US-born children are, at once, more romantic about the possibilities of finding genuine love and rewarding careers and more cynical too about the trajectories of most people’s lives. Often cast in the role of facilitator or fixer, they are accustomed to serving as their parents’ go-betweens and to easing their younger siblings’ way into full-fledged American lives.
The last three overlapping tales in this volume tell a single story about a Bengali-American girl and a Bengali-American boy, whose crisscrossing lives make up a poignant ballad of love and loss and death. Hema and Kaushik get to know each other as teenagers, when Kaushik’s family comes to stay with Hema’s parents while they house-hunt in the Boston suburbs.
Hema secretly nurses a crush on Kaushik, but he is oblivious to her schoolgirl antics and preoccupied with his mother’s deteriorating health. His grief over her death and his rage at his father’s hasty remarriage will propel him into a career as a photojournalist, who spends most of his time traveling to war zones in distant parts of the globe.
Hema, meanwhile, becomes a professor, a Latin scholar, who after a long, unhappy love affair impulsively decides to opt for a traditional arranged marriage; though she is conscious of the “deadness” of this proposed partnership, she tries to convince herself that the relationship will endow her life with a sense of certainty and direction. Then, against all odds, Hema and Kaushik run into each other in Rome — on the eve of Hema’s departure for her wedding — and embark on an intense, passionate affair. And yet it is an affair that concludes not with a fairy-tale happy ending but with an operatic denouement that speaks of missed opportunities and avoidable grief.
In the hands of a less talented writer it’s an ending that might have seemed melodramatic or contrived, but as rendered by Lahiri it possesses the elegiac and haunting power of tragedy — a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate artistry as a writer.
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