This is a collection of stories about the lives of Indian and Indian-Americans who are nostalgic for their home on the other side of the world but are also trying very hard to adjust to their life in their adopted country. The book was first published in 1999 and it won the Pulitzer and the Hemingway /PEN award.

The nine stories in the book are:

1. A Temporary Matter : A happy couple, Shukumar and Shoba who are hard-working Indian-Americans, lose their baby, and through their grief, they are alienated from each other. Environment in the background, such as the electrical power, the candles, and Indian food, provides the mood of this story.

2. When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine: This story reflects the feelings of innocent people from a personal level on both sides of a complicated political struggle. Told from the ten-year old Lilia’s point of view, this story tells of the concerns of immigrants for their old countries. Mr. Pirzada, from Pakistan, is friends with Lilia’s parents and visits them often, bringing sweets to the girl. He is concerned of the safety of his daughters back home, as things can go awry during a war. Since Lilia is a second-generation American, she views all this with deep emotion, yet childish understanding, and she misses Mr. Pirzada when he leaves for Pakistan.

3. Interpreter of Maladies: An Indian-American couple visit their old country and hire a tour-guide as their driver. The driver talks about his other job as an interpreter in a doctor’s office. Something resembling a romance starts to develop between the wife and the driver. In the story each character is flawed in some way and sees the others from a mistaken angle, and each character ends up feeling disappointed.

4. A Real Durwan: The Durwan, a stair-sweeper of an old apartment building who is an old woman, attracts the pity and the kindness of the residents, since she does this work without expecting anything. The old woman feels just as strongly about the residents and the building, as well. When a sink in the stairway is stolen, however, the residents turn their backs on the old woman, kick her out of the building and start looking for a “real Durwan.”

5. Sexy: Miranda and Laxmi work for a public radio station in Boston. Miranda is having an affair with Dev, an older, married Indian man. At work she hears Lami’s phone calls through her cubicles. Laxmi’s cousin’s husband is having an affair, and the grief of it has made the cousin unable to care for her son. When The cousin comes to visit Laxmi, Miranda babysits for her son, Rohin. Laxmi’s cousin is the victim of infidelity. It is through her stories that Miranda starts to feel and then face her own guilt and aimlessness.

6. Mrs. Sen's: An eleven year-old boy is babysat by Mrs. Sen in her own home. Mrs. Sen is a university professor’s wife who is homesick for her native land and is obsessed with objects like her special vegetable cutting blade and fish from the market. She also resists to attempt to the new country and learning to drive. One day, on a whim, she drives to the market on her own and has an accident with the boy in the car. Afterwards, the boy stops staying with her.

7. This Blessed House: An Indian-American couple, newly married, try to adjust to each other and their new house, which was owned by a fanatically religious Christian people who left artifacts hidden inside the house. The clash of cultures and the young couple’s ineptitude to accept each other’s different qualities are highlighted in this story.

8. The Treatment of Bibi Haldar: Bibi Haldar is a twenty-nine year-old spinster who has a strange ailment. From the descriptions of her symptoms in the story, she suffers from seizures. The cure is marriage, the doctors have said, and that’s what Bibi Haldar wants, but despite all the efforts, she lacks the qualities of being marriage-able. Bibi keeps the inventory of her brother's cosmetics stall, but when the brother’s wife becomes pregnant, she is afraid Bibi will infect her unborn child. When a daughter is born to her and the child becomes ill, a seriously prejudiced treatment of Bibi begins. Women of the community sympathizing with Bibi stop their purchases from the brother, causing the brother to go bankrupt, leave his store, and move out. Bibi is left to live in the storage room, which she fixes to make it livable. Then it is discovered that Bibi is pregnant, but the father of the baby is a mystery for she might have been attacked during a seizure. The women help her with the care of her son and Bibi starts her own business with the old wares of his brother’s store and manages to raise her son on her own, with her ailment now cured.

9. The Third and Final Continent: An Indian-descent young man, a newcomer to the United States from London, rents a room from a quirky old woman in Cambridge, Mass. After living with her for six weeks, he feels attached to her. When the young man’s new wife arrives from India, he moves out to an apartment in the campus of MIT. As he is trying to adjust to his wife, whom he doesn’t know well, the old woman dies. After a while, the young man starts feeling love for his wife, but he also remembers the old woman, as she was the first person he liked in the new country, which started his adaptation process to USA.

how well-described and shown the characters were with all their eccentricities and pluses and minuses.

empathy for the immigrants and their offspring.

Jhumpa Lahiri is an award-winning, highly accomplished and acclaimed novelist who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her other books are: Lowland, An Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesake.

Not only it gives a glimpse into another culture, but also, it is a learning experience if the reader-writer can analyze and interpret it with a discerning eye.

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