ENGL 50 Penn State University Concept of Nation Intro to US Minority Paper Summarize the keyword in the document in 250-300 word. Keyword: Nation, Diaspo

ENGL 50 Penn State University Concept of Nation Intro to US Minority Paper Summarize the keyword in the document in 250-300 word.

Keyword: Nation, Diaspora, Model Minority Myth, Orientalism, Stereotype

Follow the steps below to finish the work

a) Definition: The answer contains a clear and correct definition of the keyword. (the bullet points under keyword)

b) Illustration: The answer contains an illustration of the keyword by way of a specific example or set of examples from the text. It is not necessary that you quote the text, but you should demonstrate that you have read the text by referencing specific details and/or passages. Page references are not necessary. (Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies) (more important) or (Film: The Guru)

c) Analysis: The answer shows evidence of original and critical thinking. Do not regurgitate lecture but make new and unique connections. Interp
I
preter Of
O Malladies – Jhum
mpa La
ahiri
Pulitzer Prize W
Winner
Ajaytao
Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
…
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
A Temporary Matter
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine
Interpreter of Maladies
A Real Durwan
Sexy
Mrs. Sen’s
This Blessed House
The Treatment of Bibi Haldar
The Third and Final Continent
A Mariner Original • Mariner Books
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
BOSTON • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1999 by Jhumpa Lahiri
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton MifflinHarcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lahiri, Jhumpa.
Interpreter of maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri.
p. cm.
Contents: A temporary matter—When Mr. Pirzada
came to dine — Interpreter of maladies — A real durwan —
Sexy—Mrs. Sen’s — This blessed house — The treatment
of Bibi Haldar—The third and final continent.
ISBN 978-0-395-92720-5
1. East Indian Americans — Social life and customs —
Fiction. I. Title.
PS 3562. A316158 1999
813’.54—dc21 98-50895 CIP
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
DOC 40 39 38 37 36 35
Some of the stories in this collection have appeared elsewhere,
in slightly different form: “A Temporary Matter” in The New
Yorker, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” in The Louisville
Review, “Interpreter of Maladies” in the Agni Review, “A Real
Durwan” in the Harvard Review, “Sexy” in The New Yorker,
“Mrs. Sen’s” in Salamander, “This Blessed House” in Epoch, and
“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” in Story Quarterly.
For my parents and for my sister
WITH THANKS TO
the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,
Janet Silver, and Cindy Klein Roche
Contents
A TEMPORARY MATTER
[>]
WHEN MR. PIRZADA CAME TO DINE
[>]
INTERPRETER OF MALADIES
[>]
A REAL DURWAN
[>]
SEXY
[>]
MRS. SEN’S
[>]
THIS BLESSED HOUSE
[>]
THE TREATMENT OF BIBI HALDAR
[>]
THE THIRD AND FINAL CONTINENT
[>]
A Temporary Matter
THENOTICEINFORMEDTHEM that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity
would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P .M. A line had gone down in the last
snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to
set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within
walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and
Shukumar had lived for three years.
“It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for
her own benefit than Shukumar’s. She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with
files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen.
She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers,
looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never
resemble.
She’d come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches
of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She
used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a
night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his
arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Her eyes were still
fixed on the notice in her other hand. “But they should do this sort of thing during the
day.”
“When I’m here, you mean,” Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb,
adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since January he’d been
working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian
revolts in India. “When do the repairs start?”
“It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?” Shoba walked over to the framed
corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William
Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper
pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on
the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though
Shoba and Shukumar hadn’t celebrated Christmas that year.
“Today then,” Shoba announced. “You have a dentist appointment next Friday, by the
way.”
He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he’d forgotten to brush them that morning.
It wasn’t the first time. He hadn’t left the house at all that day, or the day before. The
more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking
on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or
to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop.
Six months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference in Baltimore
when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due date. He hadn’t wanted to go
to the conference, but she had insisted; it was important to make contacts, and he
would be entering the job market next year. She told him that she had his number at the
hotel, and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers, and she had arranged with her
friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the event of an emergency. When the cab
pulled away that morning for the airport, Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with
one arm resting on the mound of her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her
body.
Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba pregnant, it was
the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted red with blue lettering. It was
cavernous compared to their own car. Although Shukumar was six feet tall, with hands
too big ever to rest comfortably in the pockets of his jeans, he felt dwarfed in the back
seat. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he and Shoba
might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart their children back and forth from
music lessons and dentist appointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as
Shoba turned around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of
parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was still a student at
thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he
welcomed the image for the first time.
A member of the staff had found him somehow among the identical convention rooms
and handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was only a telephone number, but
Shukumar knew it was the hospital. When he returned to Boston it was over. The baby
had been born dead. Shoba was lying on a bed, asleep, in a private room so small there
was barely enough space to stand beside her, in a wing of the hospital they hadn’t been
to on the tour for expectant parents. Her placenta had weakened and she’d had a
cesarean, though not quickly enough. The doctor explained that these things happen.
He smiled in the kindest way it was possible to smile at people known only
professionally. Shoba would be back on her feet in a few weeks. There was nothing to
indicate that she would not be able to have children in the future.
These days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up. He would open
his eyes and see the long black hairs she shed on her pillow and think of her, dressed,
sipping her third cup of coffee already, in her office downtown, where she searched for
typographical errors in textbooks and marked them, in a code she had once explained
to him, with an assortment of colored pencils. She would do the same for his
dissertation, she promised, when it was ready. He envied her the specificity of her task,
so unlike the elusive nature of his. He was a mediocre student who had a facility for
absorbing details without curiosity. Until September he had been diligent if not
dedicated, summarizing chapters, outlining arguments on pads of yellow lined paper.
But now he would lie in their bed until he grew bored, gazing at his side of the closet
which Shoba always left partly open, at the row of tweed jackets and corduroy trousers
he would not have to choose from to teach his classes that semester. After the baby
died it was too late to withdraw from his teaching duties. But his adviser had arranged
things so that he had the spring semester to himself. Shukumar was in his sixth year of
graduate school. “That and the summer should give you a good push,” his adviser had
said. “You should be able to wrap things up by next September.”
But nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and Shoba had
become experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as
much time on separate floors as possible. He thought of how he no longer looked
forward to weekends, when she sat for hours on the sofa with her colored pencils and
her files, so that he feared that putting on a record in his own house might be rude. He
thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled, or whispered
his name on those rare occasions they still reached for each other’s bodies before
sleeping.
In the beginning he had believed that it would pass, that he and Shoba would get
through it all somehow. She was only thirty-three. She was strong, on her feet again.
But it wasn’t a consolation. It was often nearly lunchtime when Shukumar would finally
pull himself out of bed and head downstairs to the coffeepot, pouring out the extra bit
Shoba left for him, along with an empty mug, on the countertop.
Shukumar gathered onion skins in his hands and let them drop into the garbage pail, on
top of the ribbons of fat he’d trimmed from the lamb. He ran the water in the sink,
soaking the knife and the cutting board, and rubbed a lemon half along his fingertips to
get rid of the garlic smell, a trick he’d learned from Shoba. It was seven-thirty. Through
the window he saw the sky, like soft black pitch. Uneven banks of snow still lined the
sidewalks, though it was warm enough for people to walk about without hats or gloves.
Nearly three feet had fallen in the last storm, so that for a week people had to walk
single file, in narrow trenches. For a week that was Shukumar’s excuse for not leaving
the house. But now the trenches were widening, and water drained steadily into grates
in the pavement.
“The lamb won’t be done by eight,” Shukumar said. “We may have to eat in the dark.”
“We can light candles,” Shoba suggested. She unclipped her hair, coiled neatly at her
nape during the days, and pried the sneakers from her feet without untying them. “I’m
going to shower before the lights go,” she said, heading for the staircase. “I’llbe down.”
Shukumar moved her satchel and her sneakers to the side of the fridge. She wasn’t
this way before. She used to put her coat on a hanger, her sneakers in the closet, and
she paid bills as soon as they came. But now she treated the house as if it were a hotel.
The fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room clashed with the blue-andmaroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her. On the enclosed porch at the back of the
house, a crisp white bag still sat on the wicker chaise, filled with lace she had once
planned to turn into curtains.
While Shoba showered, Shukumar went into the downstairs bathroom and found a new
toothbrush in its box beneath the sink. The cheap, stiff bristles hurt his gums, and he
spit some blood into the basin. The spare brush was one of many stored in a metal
basket. Shoba had bought them once when they were on sale, in the event that a visitor
decided, at the last minute, to spend the night.
It was typical of her. She was the type to prepare for surprises, good and bad. If she
found a skirt or a purse she liked she bought two. She kept the bonuses from her job in
a separate bank account in her name. It hadn’t bothered him. His own mother had fallen
to pieces when his father died, abandoning the house he grew up in and moving back to
Calcutta, leaving Shukumar to settle it all. He liked that Shoba was different. It
astonished him, her capacity to think ahead. When she used to do the shopping, the
pantry was always stocked with extra bottles of olive and corn oil, depending on
whether they were cooking Italian or Indian. There were countless boxes of pasta in all
shapes and colors, zippered sacks of basmati rice, whole sides of lambs and goats from
the Muslim butchers at Haymarket, chopped up and frozen in countless plastic bags.
Every other Saturday they wound through the maze of stalls Shukumar eventually knew
by heart. He watched in disbelief as she bought more food, trailing behind her with
canvas bags as she pushed through the crowd, arguing under the morning sun with
boys too young to shave but already missing teeth, who twisted up brown paper bags of
artichokes, plums, gingerroot, and yams, and dropped them on their scales, and tossed
them to Shoba one by one. She didn’t mind being jostled, even when she was pregnant.
She was tall, and broad-shouldered, with hips that her obstetrician assured her were
made for childbearing. During the drive back home, as the car curved along the
Charles, they invariably marveled at how much food they’d bought.
It never went to waste. When friends dropped by, Shoba would throw together meals
that appeared to have taken half a day to prepare, from things she had frozen and
bottled, not cheap things in tins but peppers she had marinated herself with rosemary,
and chutneys that she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes.
Her labeled mason jars lined the shelves of the kitchen, in sealed pyramids, enough,
they’d agreed, to last for their grandchildren to taste. They’d eaten it all by now.
Shukumar had been going through their supplies steadily, preparing meals for the two
of them, measuring out cupfuls of rice, defrosting bags of meat day after day. He
combed through her cookbooks every afternoon, following her penciled instructions to
use two teaspoons of ground coriander seeds instead of one, or red lentils instead of
yellow. Each of the recipes was dated, telling the first time they had eaten the dish
together. April 2, cauliflower with fennel. January 14, chicken with almonds and
sultanas. He had no memory of eating those meals, and yet there they were, recorded
in her neat proofreader’s hand. Shukumar enjoyed cooking now. It was the one thing
that made him feel productive. If it weren’t for him, he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of
cereal for her dinner.
Tonight, with no lights, they would have to eat together. For months now they’d served
themselves from the stove, and he’d taken his plate into his study, letting the meal grow
cold on his desk before shoving it into his mouth without pause, while Shoba took her
plate to the living room and watched game shows, or proofread files with her arsenal of
colored pencils at hand.
At some point in the evening she visited him. When he heard her approach he would
put away his novel and begin typing sentences. She would rest her hands on his
shoulders and stare with him into the blue glow of the computer screen. “Don’t work too
hard,” she would say after a minute or two, and head off to bed. It was the one time in
the day she sought him out, and yet he’d come to dread it. He knew it was something
she forced herself to do. She would look around the walls of the room, which they had
decorated together last summer with a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing
trumpets and drums. By the end of August there was a cherry crib under the window, a
white changing table with mint-green knobs, and a rocking chair with checkered
cushions. Shukumar had disassembled it all before bringing Shoba back from the
hospital, scraping off the rabbits and ducks with a spatula. For some reason the room
did not haunt him the way it haunted Shoba. In January, when he stopped working at
his carrel in the library, he set up his desk there deliberately, partly because the room
soothed him, and partly because it was a place Shoba avoided.
Shukumar returned to the kitchen and began to open drawers. He tried to locate a
candle among the scissors, the eggbeaters and whisks, the mortar and pestle she’d
bought in a bazaar in Calcutta, and used to pound garlic cloves and cardamom pods,
back when she used to cook. He found a flashlight, but no batteries, and a half-empty
box of birthday candles. Shoba had thrown him a surprise birthday party last May. One
hundred and twenty people had crammed into the house—all the friends and the friends
of friends they now systematically avoided. Bottles of vinho verde had nested in a bed
of ice in the bathtub. Shoba was in her fifth month, drinking ginger ale from a martini
glass. She had made a vanilla cream cake with custard and spun sugar. All night she
kept Shukumar’s long fingers linked with hers as they walked among the guests at the
party.
Since September their only guest had been Shoba’s mother. She came from Arizona
and stayed with them for two months after Shoba returned from the hospital. She
cooked dinner every night, drove herself to the supermarket, washed their clothes, put
them away. She was a religious woman. She set up a small shrine, a framed picture of
a lavender-faced goddess and a plate of marigold petals, on the bedside table in the
guest room, and prayed twice a day for healthy grandchildren in the future. She was
polite to Shukumar without being friendly. She folded his sweaters with an expertise she
had learned from her job in a department store. She replaced a missing button on his
winter coat and knit him a beige and brown scarf, presenting it to him without the least
bit of ceremony, as if he had only dropped it and hadn’t noticed. She never talked to him
about Shoba; once, when he mentioned the baby’s death, she looked up from her
knitting, and said, “But you weren’t even there.”
It struck him as odd that there were no real candles in the house. That Shoba hadn’t
prepared for such an ordinary emergency. He looked now for something to put the
birthday candles in and settled on the soil of a potted ivy that normally sat on the
windowsill over the sink. Even though the plant was inches from the tap, the soil was so
dry that he had to water it first before the candles would stand straight. He pushed aside
the things on the kitchen table, the piles of mail, the unread library books. He
remembered their first meals there, when they were so thrilled to be married, to be living
together in the same house at last, that they would just reach for each other foolishly,
more eager to make love than to eat. He put down two embroidered place mats, a
wedding gift from an uncle in Lucknow, and set out the plates and wineglasses they
usually saved for guests. He put the ivy in the middle, the white-edged, star-shaped
leaves girded by ten little candles. He switched on the digital clock radio and tuned it to
a jazz station.
“What’s all this?” Shoba said when she came downstairs. Her hair was wrapped in a
thick white towel. She undid the towel and draped it over a chair, allowing her hair,
damp and dark, to fall across her back. As she walked absently toward the stove she
took out a few tangles with her fingers. She wore a clean pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt,
an old flannel robe. Her stomach was flat again, her waist narrow before the flare of her
hips, the belt of the robe tied in a floppy knot.
It was nearly eight. Shukumar put the rice on the table and the lentils from the night
before into the microwave oven, punching the numbers on the timer.
“You made rogan josh, ” Shoba observed, looking through the glass lid at the bright
paprika stew.
Shukumar took out a piece of lamb, pinching it quickly between his fingers so as not to
sc…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment