I remember coming to Jatinangor four years ago, and I had so much worries about the food, the language, and the lifestyle, as well as the way people communicate to each other and how I would survive from this sea of incessant handicaps. Although highly fond of travelling to various new places, I never realized that being in an alien place longer than before could be a terrifying but page-turning phase during my teenage years. In my brain lurked a list of questions: “am I going to like the sambal terasi made in here regardless of how similar it looks or smells to one my mom made back home?” or “how am I going to cope with the Sundanese with their language and politeness and all?” At first, it was a heated moment of confusion and despair; only later I realized that I was not alone.
As it turns out, my deal is not so different with some characters in two short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Bengali Pirzada, for instance, in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”, partakes nightly meal with a Boston-based Indian nuclear family and befriends the dad, leading to a sort of adjuvant bond while monitoring the bits of the 1947’s Pakistani-Indian raging conflict from the living room. What is intriguing is that the narrator is Lilia, a 10-year-old girl as well as the daughter in the family, and she is not supposed to be the one attempting to corroborate a sense of belonging with her family membership around the orbiting shadows of Pirzada; instead, it should be him, playing the role of a curious stranger. However, such choice of narrator becomes one most crucial techniques by Lahiri to fabricate a solid curiosity on the reader’s mind, simply as to go alongside Lilia’s perseverance to get to know the almost-Indian-but-not-quite outsider. Thus, her ambitious tenacity is what enables me to relate this story to mine in a more thorough and informative way, which I will elaborate presently.
On the other hand, “The Third and Final Continent” offers a much more relatable donnée to my experience than is the previous one. The focalizer, an unnamed Indian economy scholar, expounds the ubiquitous variances between America and England through various aspects as he resides in a for-lease mansion hosted by a female centenarian called Croft. Although their first meeting is uncannily awkward and their last unappealingly cold, he ends up longing for the relation(ship) they have manufactured the minute he finds her obituary. It should too be noted that in the beginning, the narrator sort of promises to show the dissimilar “pace of life” between two continents. However, the fact that he mentions “pace,” which in general indicates “a single step”[1], movement, or speed, but does not specifically refer to, say, time, which is inevitably obvious in the story, is highly revealing to me. I say inevitably obvious because when the 103-year-old at last meets her demise, he learns that his wandering years, along with unfulfilled desires to reunite with his wife and his Cantabridgian son, are now complete, and that completeness is what enables him to identify his ultimate ego.
Both characters, indeed, experience a congenial journey mainly because they subsist in a conflict-rife zeitgeist concerning territorial abuse, political affair, or perhaps rather personal conundrums. In other words, the driving force of these stories may significantly be assumed as a mere result of globalization and the “limitlessness of global condition.”[2] Although Pirzada has been heartily welcome in the family, his change of nationality from an Indian to a Bengali is discovered by the family just at the same time when Lilia, as well as the reader, finds out that very fact by the time this story is written. This indicates that the process and series of activities of paving their way to that kind of relationship between Pirzada and the parents is already established without the reader’s knowing. Such process, by which Lilia raises questions on Pirzada’s deliberate entrance to the family, allows him to retain an “artificial modification of identity.”[3]
As much as it happens to him, Lilia herself and her mother are two other living proofs. Often, for instance, does Lilia mention that many things about Pirzada do not make sense to her, as to why his nationality must be differentiated by that of his father while they share the same appetite, language, joke, and even physique. A preadolescent, she not only begins to question things that cocoon her in an unravelling manner but in fact problematizes them to a certain inestimable extent which begets cynicism to how she deals with her Indian life. In other words, she is tight-roping in a lived reality that turned out to be “hav[ing] no significance whatsoever” compared to the similar but newly discovered reality, which, as Augé would prefer it, a surmodernité—a second reality[4]. Her mother, similarly, deals with a rather intricate second reality. In one dinner scene, she refutes her husband’s expectation for Lilia to understand the issues of Partition at such young age, indicating that Lilia should stick to her adolescence and not necessarily surpass it by involving herself in an adult’s conversation. Another scene where she convinces Pirzada that Lilia should go for trick-and-treat only because it is a tradition, emphasizes the idea of an Indian woman being habituated to American customs, inculcating it as part of the family’s lifestyle. In other words, the mother figure is a manifestation of the “fluid conjunctures”[5] operating in a complex dimension of socio-cultural inbetweenness and ambivalence.
Speaking of inbetweenness, the other story envisages a different yet enticing layer in terms of lived reality, which occurs to Croft and the narrator. Her consideration of the narrator’s conversation with Helen as an “improper” act may be seen as a depiction of a reality entailing complex cultural orders. It is complex because her strong adherence to Christian belief in the midst of liberal American lifestyle is yet exempt from a number of possibilities that sexual intention, if any, between the narrator and Helen is involved in the first place. The point is, nobody would take a hint that a mundane chit-chat could ever be considered improper or inappropriate. This is possibly why Lahiri inserts religious element into Croft’s plane of consciousness as furthered by Thomassen that this libertarian American reality pertaining complex cultural orders, enmeshed with a vast body of many others, “must have empty signifiers like “God”, “nature”, or “reason.””[6]
Much of the same way of the narrator, who, as the plot entangles, is already united with his wife and finds revelation as soon as Croft forfeits to life. It must be highlighted here that the wife is described to be the one who, unlike Lilia’s mother, strictly clings to her Eastern beliefs as an Indian and put them into practice, and her commitment to that significantly affects her husband’s dismantling axiom of being both a Bostonian and an Indian at the same time. That is what creates a sort of “fuzziness” that evokes his awareness of the existence of rules. In other words, being in an alien place without beforehand having any preconceptions about it yet resides there for a certain period of time, galvanizes him to identify “the space between the opposites, the transition between inside and outside.”[7]
That space and transition, as my final point, in fact compels these multifaceted characters to overlay their “lived” reality and then project it onto the so-called “second reality” as a form of, say, mimicry. It might take a relatively long time, but it is fundamental to “sustaining social reality” in the spaces of ambivalence and hybridity. Like me, for instance, the narrator in “The Third and Final Continent” might sense the presence of that very confusion and “fuzziness” the minute he finds himself stepping on the Promised Land, or Jatinangor, in my case. Much of the same way like Lilia who starts to doubt herself in a bewildering way but eventually accepts her skeptical attitude through, in a surprise, unwavering revelation. As I was reading through these two stories, I kept recalling what happened for the last four years in Jatinangor while bimonthly went back to Tangerang. I realized that I have been given so many choices I have to take every single day: whether I want to be like the “Continent” narrator, who in the end sojourns in the alien place carrying a sort of revelation, or, like Lilia, who, although succeeded in accepting her skepticism, still nods to the truth but “unaware of the situation.”
References
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 1999. “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”; “The Third and Final Continent”. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston, New York: Mariner Books Houghton Press.
[1] Oxford English Dictionary
[2] Prof. Bjorn Thomassen. 2015. “Introduction”. Liminality and Modern: Living Through the In-Between.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Marc Augé. 1992. “Surabondance Événementielle”. Non-Lieux: Introduction à Une Anthropologie de la Surmodernité.
[5] Bernd Giesen. 2015. “Inbetweenness and Ambivalence” in Agnes Horvath, Bjorn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra’s Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid. page 62.
Un Journal D'académique 