0f41e05
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he wanted to relive those confused days, that life of discovery, to be bound to those round tables and lectures and exams. There were things he had always meant to understand better [...] He wanted to read what he was told each evening, to do as he was told. There were great writers he had never read, would never read. His daughters would begin that journey soon enough, the world opening up for them in its entirety.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
b7894fe
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And yet she didn't want to kill herself. She loved the world too much, and people. She loved taking long walks in the late afternoon, and observing her surroundings. She loved the green of the sea, the light of dusk, the rocks scattered on the sand. She loved the taste of a red pear in autumn, the full, heavy winter moon that shone amid the clouds. She loved the warmth of her bed, a good book to read without being interrupted. To enjoy that..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
512108c
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But no turbulent emotions passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
5f208b3
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Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days overlooking a lowland, a pair of ponds.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
530054d
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Then again, how could he expect Bela to be interested in marriage, given the example he and Gauri had given? They were a family of solitaries. They had collided and dispersed. This was her legacy. If nothing else, she had inherited that impulse from them.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
bbe9e9c
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But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost
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marriage
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
d570f10
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They were all like siblings, Mr. Kapasi thought as they passed a row of date trees. Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
923e058
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I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my student to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
af5a0e3
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The blood of too many, dissolving the very stain.
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tragedy
desensitized
political-upheaval
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
51eac0d
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He waited for chaotic games to end, for shouts to subside. His favorite moments were when he was alone, or felt alone. Lying in bed in the morning, watching sunlight flickering like a restless bird on the wall.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
0ba1eea
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She wished the days and months ahead of her would end. But the rest of her life continued to present itself, time ceaselessly proliferating.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
7f9f2d2
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And so she felt antagonized by a man who did nothing to antagonize her, and by Bela, who did not even know the meaning of the word. But her worst nemesis resided within her. She was not only ashamed of her feelings but also frightened that the final task Udayan had left her with, the long task of raising Bela, was not bringing meaning to her life. In the beginning she'd told herself that it was like a thing misplaced: a favorite pen that wo..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
737fb0b
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And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as "Are you listening to me?"
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
384c2d9
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It usually sits on the night table, so that I can easily look up an unknown word while I'm reading. This book allows me to read other books, to open the door of a new language. It accompanies me, even now, when I go on vacation, on trips. It has become a necessity. If, when I leave, I forget to take it with me, I feel slightly uneasy, as if I'd forgotten my toothbrush or a change of socks.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
a18cf19
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He was blind to self-constraints, like an animal incapable of perceiving certain colors.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
6bbed6a
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The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that a cover is a sort of translation, that is, an interpretation of my words in another language -- a visual one. It represents the text, but isn't part of it. It can't be too literal. It has to have its own take on the book. Like a translation, a cover can be faithful to at the book, or it can be misleading. In theory, like a translation, it should be in the service of the book, but this..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
fe0ffd3
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She knew that the word providence meant foresight, the future beheld before it was experienced.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
355b995
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He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor. Instead of a knife she used a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas. The blade was hinged at one end to a narrow wooden base.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
fe1f54e
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To Travel without moving an inch.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
6e78bae
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In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too. As
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
5128c55
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At the side of the house he scraped scales of fungus off the shingles. His basement smelled of mildew, his eyes stinging when he put in the laundry. The soil of his vegetable garden was too wet to till, the roots of the seedlings he'd planted washing away. The rhododendrons shed their purple petals too soon, the peonies barely opening before the stalks bent over, the blossoms smashed across the drenched ground. It was carnal, the smell of s..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
709a637
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I'm scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It's a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
6d40ab7
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It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
cca7e15
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And she refused to go to that miserable place he had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.
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unchanging
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
38e9b48
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Like certain faces among the people I see on the street every day, certain words, for some reason, stand out, and leave an impression on me. Others remain in the background, negligible. After
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
a4026ca
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A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.
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transformation
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
5c1816b
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She was unprepared for the landscape to be so altered. For there to be no trace of that evening, forty autumns ago.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
526be8a
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He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcutta. The people filling the platform, passengers and coolies, and vagrants for whom the station was merely a shelter, were bundled in woolen caps and shawls.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
73a4bc5
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I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal....It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
40590f2
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He was proud to have come alone to America. To learn it, as he once must have learned to stand and walk and speak. He'd wanted so much to leave Calcutta, not only for the sake of his education but also--he could admit this to himself now--to take a step that Udayan never would.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
7f88837
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Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
f76ad95
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Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
7df70b6
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He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems.
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literature
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
6f192ad
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Do I remind you of that night?" "Not at all," his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. "You remind me of everything that followed."
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
c849a97
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Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. "Gogol,"
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
85a5b59
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Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don't suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
0ef5c7d
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Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
24f9047
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That's what books are for, to travel without moving an inch.
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travel
reading
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
b02dfc3
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She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
c89c09e
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T]hey are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It's a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can't avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there.
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writing
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
1f2ea00
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She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned to swim, is an essential part of her, even more so than the house in Chelsea. This was where she lost her virginity, she confesses, when she was fourteen years old, in a boathouse, with a boy whose family once summered here. He thinks of himsel..
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
621adb1
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They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera. I
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
0a2c14c
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Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people. They
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Jhumpa Lahiri |
613611c
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No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family.
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Jhumpa Lahiri |