Unaccustomed

I woke up to reading bliss, eating through the beautiful lyrical prose of Jhumpa Lahiri's newest collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Ground.


Five years ago, I came upon her first book of short stories at a bookstore in Yokohama. Interpreter of Maladies. It was love at first reading. Her writing was the kind that I have never thought possible-- honest and sensitive, the kind that spoke to me because she spoke about people who are uprooted, chronicled their inner voices as they wrestled with living new lives, taking in the tension of being different and wanting to find a connection with the ground they have landed on.


When I finally stumbled upon her second book, a novel, I was in London and I felt it was a fitting time, reading The Namesake just as I was letting go of stuffs, learning about recklessness. I was smack in the middle of the one thing in my youth that was bold and stupid and totally irresponsible. What was, back then, I thought to be inevitable, something I had no power to escape from. I hated the novel, to be honest about it. It lacked something, the story dragged on and there was nothing fulfilling about finishing it. But I remember to this day, a beautiful line from that book: Remember it always. Remember that you and I made this journey and went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go. I thought it was romantic then, a beautiful line which could mean anything,depending on the circumstances which could run from a tragic death to a fairy tale ending.

If her third book had been a novel, I would have shunned it completely. I think Ms. Lahiri's strength is making these snapshots of life worthy, how she fashions stories from small moments, and the novel was too rigid, too fastidious to carry these small bites of life.

I was glad of her return to short stories, to the trained and open words, the burst of beauty and sadness and relief painted by her words, things we do feel each day, things I wish I had the mastery to write about instead of reading them from her. But that is just a trickle of pride, a pipe dream which goes away once I am alone in her world.

And so no matter how critics of Ms. Lahiri are yelping how she's limited her arc by writing about the same people and their dilemmas over and over again. I stand by her words, the silent conversations that her characters have in their minds, the restraint by which they live in the face of new people, places, new emotions slapping through their lives.

Because it's what she knows best. Isn't that the first rule in writing? Write about the things you know.

My life sometimes does feel like a series of unaccustomed grounds, having never lived long enough in a place for the past five years to be rid of that zeal, that mixture of apprehension and surprise in a place. And being always a little bit sad and regretful when it was time to move away again. I'd like to believe each of us feels this way at one point.

I think it's a gift, though there have been times that it seemed like a curse, a burden to have this chance to go through places, how sometimes I've felt I've lived too many different lives, having had to leave each place, each unaccustomed ground just when I'm just about ready to accept the routines of that life, but sometimes I think, my being forever in flight is perhaps just a flashier metaphor to what each of us undergoes - that life throws us curveballs at perfectly set times, how we have to be reminded that hey, this is, your life and place, is a gift you have to constantly be unaccustomed of. So you can treat them preciously. Because I think that one way or the other, at some point we leave places and pieces of our lives somewhere in search of new lives, evolving into someone familiar enough, but totally different inside.