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16ba62a
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Amid the gray, an incongruous band of daytime blue asserts itself. To the west, a pink sun already begins its descent. The effect is of three isolated aspects, distinct phases of the day. All of it, strewn across the horizon, is contained in his vision.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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33f6adf
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When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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c074e2f
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Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. --NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, "The Custom-House"
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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2c5d87d
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Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it's tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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9ecde41
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Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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4d3ef10
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But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to..
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identity
immigration
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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318a58f
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Lying in his parents' house, in the middle of the night, she told him the whole story, about meeting Dimitri on a bus, finding his resume in the bin. She confessed that Dimitri had gone with her to Palm Beach. One by one he stored the pieces of information in his mind, unwelcome, unforgivable. And for the first time in his life, another man's name upset Gogol more than his own.
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names
jhumpa-lahiri
the-namesake
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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1ca8ecb
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The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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cda1dec
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By now she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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99e15c8
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For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy--a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curi..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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80a63d6
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She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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3b757c7
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While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty 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 in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appear..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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521107f
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I have only the desire. Yet ultimately a desire is nothing but a crazy need. As
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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de938bf
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He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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77a05b3
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The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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f9a8e9a
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He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.
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motherhood
children
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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7800498
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Time flowed for Bela in the opposite direction. The day after yesterday, she sometimes said. Pronounced slightly differently, Bela's name, the name of a flower, was itself the word for a span of time, a portion of the day. Shakal bela meant morning; bikel bela, afternoon. Ratrir bela was night. Bela's yesterday was a receptacle for anything her mind stored. Any experience or impression that had come before. Her memory was brief, its content..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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1139f60
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And yet it felt like an invasion of the part of his body, the physical sense that was most precious: something that betrayed him and also refused to abandon him.
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invasion
sense
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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5c24fea
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Besides, there are always pet names to tide one over: a practice of Bengali nomenclature grants, to every single person, two names. In Bengali, the word for pet name is daknam, meaning, literally, the name by which one is called, by friends, family and other intimates, at home and in other private unguarded moments. Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood; a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. The..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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9944f55
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You got cats at home?" "No cats. Only a husband." --
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humor
marriage-life
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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693a5ad
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At the end of that week, Navin arrived to marry me. I was repulsed by the sight of him, not because I had betrayed him but because he still breathed, because he was there for me and had countless more days to live. And yet without his even realizing it, firmly but without force, Navin pulled me away from you, as the final gust of autumn wind pulls the last leaves from the trees. We were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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a9179d0
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In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.
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silence
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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1fb811c
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In those six weeks I regarded her arrival as I would the arrival of a coming month, or season - something inevitable, but meaningless at the same time.
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jhumpa-lahiri
the-third-and-final-continent
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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59f6e5d
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She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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4b02adf
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It's easier to surrender to confinement.
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immigrant-experience
surrender
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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4773d99
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Unlike her parents, and her other relatives, her grandmother had not admonished Ashima not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair or forget her family the moment she landed in Boston. Her grandmother had not been fearful of such signs of betrayal; she was the only person to predict, rightly, that Ashima would never change.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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30bd8b9
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They still feel somehow in transit, still disconnected from their lives, bound up in an alternate schedule, an intimacy only the four of them would share.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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266c9be
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The givers and keepers of Gogol's name are far from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure, in order to dwell, as his father does, in a separate world. She will call him, once a week, on the phone. She will learn to send e-mail, she says. Once or twice a week, he will hear "Gogol" over the wires, see it typed on a screen. As for all the people in the house, all the mashis and meshos to whom he is ..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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b834adb
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When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her. Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She's not made to survive here.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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5759008
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I think it's a hesitant book and at the same time bold. A text both private and public. On the one hand it springs from my other books. The themes, ultimately, are unchanged: identity, alienation, belonging. But the wrapping, the contents, the body and soul are transfigured.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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99649b7
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They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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db0cf66
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What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered,
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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3fa0db6
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Each day she removes a small portion of the unwanted things in people's lives, though all of it, she thinks, was previously wanted, once useful. She feels the sun scorching the back of her neck. The heat is at its worst now, the rains still a few months away. The task satisfies her. It passes the time.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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186adfb
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He longed for sleep, but it would not immerse him; that night the waters he sought for his repose were deep enough to wade in, but not to swim.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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d7c97f1
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In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father's train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a new life on the other side of the world. There was the disappearance of the name Gogol's great-grandmother had chosen for him, lost in the mail somewhere between Calcutta and Cambridge. This..
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family
destiny
life
contingence
coincidence
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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a9b7a2a
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Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns."
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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671e020
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Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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073affb
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Odd things made him love her.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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f432055
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I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.
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regret
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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9f5ad17
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She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who'd embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of her was elated. But she was also struck by his selfishness.
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love
selfishness
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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0419db9
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In a sense, I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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412c8c9
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It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself--rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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d6dc708
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She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
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eb8616e
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For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |