Jhumpa Lahiri

On Reading The Namesake in the Netherlands

Yes, I almost had to close the book that Jhumpa Lahiri is best known for. I genuinely could not stomach it. Here was the problem; I started reading the novel, suspended mid-air, somewhere between America’s East Coast and Iceland. My family was on its way to visit our extended family in the Netherlands. My worlds were already shifting at an alarming rate. All of a sudden I went from summer camp-life to Dutch farm life in a matter of 48 hours. I was back in the house where we used to come all those years ago, as children. We’d travel from India for my parents to do fundraising in Holland and stay in my aunt’s farmhouse. This time around the house was smaller. Actually, no, we had all grown to our full adult sizes. The angst in my brain was potent. I was in the height of gloomy highschooler-dom, reflecting on summer vacations of my youth, realizing that time had moved so far forward. And then Jhumpa inserted herself into the picture. Her mournful reflections on foreignness, on loneliness, on migration and assimilation were heightened by the realization that the last time we were in Holland was on our way from India to America. In the eight years since, we had developed a life for ourselves in Massachusetts, but always with important chunks missing. Reading about Ashima’s lonely first days would have dragged tears from me even in Boston. But in the strange, liminal space of betweenness that Holland was for me, half-way away from both India and America, Lahiri’s words were crippling. I literally locked myself up in the attic-room to finish the book, refusing to be a social, happy member of my family. I heard my mother call her best friend on the phone, asking her if we could borrow a guitar so that “Joanna had something to do, I think she is depressed”. That was the first time ever, in my conscious adolescent memory, that my mother could call a friend for a favor without any hesitation or second-guessing. She was at home in Holland. I was not. Would I be “at home” back in India? No. In Boston? Probably not without the same identity issues as Gogol had.

 

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