Introduction
One of the most critically acclaimed and also commercially successful collections of short stories in recent times are Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Published in 1999, the book went on to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN award in the year 2000. Other reorganizations for the book include “the Best Debut of the Year” (Argiropoulos and Rajagopal 612-614) from The New Yorker. There are a total of 12 short stories in the book. The stories, The Third and Final Continent and Mrs. Sen’s, are different in context but very similar in theme. The issue of separation plays as a common theme between the two stories.
Discussion
Both stories have one lingering theme, and that is separation. Separation comes in different forms and shapes in The Third and Final Continent. The narrator in this case has seen different types of separations, separation from his parents, separation from his motherland, temporary separation from his newly married wife, and other aspects. All these separations have a profound effect on the mind of the narrator. The presence of Mrs. Croft had reminded him of his family in Kolkata and his parents who are dead:
I was mortified. I had assumed Mrs. Croft was in her eighties, perhaps as old as ninety. I had never known a person who had lived for over a century. That this person was a widow who lived alone mortified me further still. Widowhood had driven my mother insane. My father, who worked as a clerk at the General Post Office of Calcutta, died of encephalitis when I was sixteen. My mother refused to adjust to life without him; instead, she sank deeper into a world of darkness from which neither I, nor my brother, nor concerned relatives, nor psychiatric clinics on Rash Behari Avenue could save her (Lahiri 187).
These were the small effects of separation that eventually lead his life to harmony. Finally, he was able to take his wife to the USA and lead a life of peace. But the profound effect of Mrs. Croft was the ultimate dose that helped him to overcome his separations. He also understood the degree of separation that his wife will face, and so he also become responsible to his wife when he understood the real aspects of separation:
I realized that morning would soon be my concern. It was my duty to take care of Mala, to welcome her and protect her. I would have to buy her her first pair of snow boots, her first winter coat. I would have to tell her which streets to avoid, which way the traffic came, tell her to wear her sari so that the free end did not drag on the footpath. A five-mile separation from her parents, I recalled with some irritation, had caused her to weep (Lahiri 190).
Mrs. Sen’s is also another study in separation. Here the lead two characters are one woman, who is married into a foreign land and trying to earn some money by babysitting, and the other character is one 11-year-old boy, whose mother is probably a working woman and can not give time to her son. Here in this case both of them suffer from two different kinds of separation. While we can identify Mrs. Sen’s longings and feelings with the lead character of the previous story, the boy Elliot is vastly different from all these characters. He, on the outside incomplete and satisfied, but his developing bond with Mrs. Sen is significant in many ways as it suggests that he longs for motherly love. His comparison between his mother and Mrs. Sen clearly says that to his eye Mrs. Sen is more motherly than his mother, “Yet it was his mother, Eliot had thought, in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd” (Lahiri 112).
It is obvious in life that people are separated but the stories, The Third and Final Continent and Mrs. Sen’s, evoke the different degrees of separations and the multitude of pains involved with them. This aspect makes the theme extremely vibrant in emotion and this is the main driving force of both stories. It is the theme of profound humanity that makes us feel for the characters and brings us nearer to them as if we are partners in pain along their path of different degrees of separation. This common theme makes both stories extraordinary and humane.
Conclusion
There are different degrees of separation in the two stories. But the recurring things of separation are like the separation from parents by different means, some one’s parents are dead, some has to leave them for marital bonds, and some has to stay in other peoples care as his mother works in a faraway place. There are themes of separation from family and motherland, and ultimately separation from own identities. These recurring themes make the stories more beautiful than ever.
Works Cited
Argiropoulos, Catherine, and Indhu Rajagopal. “Women in Poverty: Canada and India.” Economic and Political Weekly 38.7 (2003): 612-14.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of maladies: stories. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999.