Their high achieving children move effortlessly to Cornell, MIT and Bryn Mawr or lead peripatetic lives as citizens of the world. In her Bengali-speaking community, all similarly disposed, the men seek academic and professional degrees in American universities or corporate jobs, the women are home makers, and together they make their homes in the suburbs of America, familiarizing themselves with the material clutter of American lives. Wilfully, it appears, Lahiri circumscribes her world. … She told her parents to set up sprinklers on the lawn for him to run through in the summer, and she convinced her father to put a swing set in the yard.” It is she who makes sure that her younger brother Rahul has the ‘right’ toys – “ the Fisher Price barn, Tonka trucks, the Speak and Say … and other things she’d discovered in the playrooms of friends. It is Sudha “who had to explain to her father that he had to gather up the leaves in bags, not just drag them with his rake to the woods opposite the house”. Suddenly faced with “a life sentence of being foreign”, they need their children to show them the way. For most of the first generation immigrants, as with Sudha’s parents (‘Only Goodness’), “immigration was … an adventure, living with paraffin heaters, seeing snow for the first time”. As with her first collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies, and her novel, The Namesake, she is chiefly concerned here with the lives of Bengali immigrants from India to the US in the 1960s and 70s, who struggle to set down their roots in soil that they find inhospitable, but which nourishes their children these children then negotiate between the new fecund earth and the foreign soil that their parents call ‘home’. In Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of eight short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri is on accustomed ground, playing to her strengths, painting on her square of ivory, extending her ambit by a few brush strokes.

Monkey-man - Interview with Sandhya Iyer of Sakaal Times, Pune.

Interview with Suneetha Balakrishnan, Media Voice.

Conversation with Shashi Deshpande - Beantown, Journal of the Bangalore Lit Fest.

Invisible Cities: Ruminations along the Silk Route.

Multicultural Fiction: Degrees of Disaffection.

Review of Perumal Murugan’s “Poonachi or the Story of a Black Goat”.

Review of “Gun Island”, by Amitav Ghosh.

The Story that Must Not be Told - Kavery Nambisan.

Review of Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfar.

My Family & Other Saints – Kirin Narayan.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy.

Unaccustomed earth review