The stories we tell
Of a place and a time
I was listening to The New Yorker Fiction Podcast - Rebecca Makkai Reads Jhumpa Lahiri today. In this episode they were reading The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri about an Indian immigrant who travels from Kolkata to the USA.
It is a beautiful story and you should go read it. Or, listen to the podcast and have the story read to you.
The format of the podcast is this -
- An author reads a short story written by a different author
- After that, the host and the author who read the story, discuss the story.
There is this section in the story, where the narrator talks about his marriage,
For five nights we shared a bed. Each of those nights, after applying cold cream and braiding her hair, she turned from me and wept; she missed her parents. Although I would be leaving the country in a few days, custom dictated that she was now a part of my household, and for the next six weeks she was to live with my brother and his wife, cooking, cleaning, serving tea and sweets to guests. I did nothing to console her. I lay on my own side of the bed, reading my guidebook by flashlight.
In the podcast, they were discussing this section. The said, the narrator did not put a hand around his wife. He did not love her wife. And I realised it was not that. They were strangers, and it was perfectly normal. They had not talked before they got married. And how that might have seemed bonkers to an American.
I realised they did not understand the place and time in which this story was written.
I realised how stories are a product of and belong in a certain time and place. How they are like time machines. How if you want to understand a place and a time, you should read stories written in that time.
And I realised how differently this story would feel to an American, than an India. It is of course an immigrant story, but the details are India. And if you aren't an Indian, you would not get the details.
And despite it all, it does not matter. Once we write a story and put it out into the world, it is out of our hands. The world can make of it, whatever the world will make of it.
