SOUND OF SILENCE

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, the silences are as evocative as what is articulated

- Arshia Sattar

ROMAN STORIES
By Jhumpa Lahiri
PENGUIN

Love, lust, fear, disdain, prejudice, xenophobia, anxiety, poverty, alienation—all haunt these narratives, mostly as shades and spectres

I have not, in the past, been a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing. But something shifted for me when I read the short stories in Unaccustomed Earth (2008). The melancholia that coloured the collection stayed with me for longer than I expected. Lahiri’s mastery lies in what she does not say, in the emotions she does not describe, in the cataclysms that she alludes to. I believe that she is a celebrant of silence. Like many other readers and writers, I was intrigued by her decision, about a decade ago, to write in a language that she learned as an adult, carefully and conscientiously and with no external compulsion. It seemed to me that this was the most challenging of all the existential choices that a writer could make, to forego a natural intimacy of a first language and linguistic culture and seek the capacity to express oneself creatively in a tongue hitherto both alien and distant. Then, Lahiri started “self-translating” her Italian work into English. And I wondered, again, about the silences that she might be exploring. Were they, this time, the silences between languages themselves?