Eloquence of Jhumpa Lahiri

When I read a book, I like to know how the author looks like. Yes, looks can be deceptive. But sometimes, if the photo is good, it captures a part of the person. As you start reading the book, that part of the person comes alive. In my mind, I build my own person, I build the writer.

Writing is extremely personal. It is a reflection, both loudly and subtly of the deep thoughts within an individual. Writings bring them out so even if I have only read fictions from one author, I feel that I know this person. I know some part of the person through a friend, through a cousin, through a face I noticed on the street.

I love Jhumpa Lahiri as a writer, and possibly as the person in my mind. I love her originality. If writing is food, hers is the organic one. There are no fertilizers in it. There are no embellishments. Its simple. Its powerful. Combining her writing to her face, oh my, it creates a most seducing image. Lahiri's eyes are deep. She seems like the kind of person I would want to spend time with. Someone who has thoughts unique and beautiful.

Her books gives me companionship. She gives words to my deepest thoughts, some of which I feel with pain. When I see her writing about the experience I have undergone myself, I feel close to her. This loneliness she describes, so exquisitely, this feeling of not belonging, of being in a new country, of being a foreigner, Lahiri shares my pain.

Her prose is so dignified yet intimate. It impresses deep within me. So to those who have not read her yet, she has three books to her name:
A. Interpreter of Maladies

B. The Namesake
C. Unaccustomed Earth

Let me end with the final line from her story, " The Third and Final Continent":

" Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination". 


Now, thats what I call WRITING.