Unaccustomed Earth

“‘Perfect’, Adam said, when Ruma told him about her father’s visit. ‘He’ll be able to help you out while I’m gone.’ But Ruma disagreed. It was her mother who would have been the helpful one, taking over the kitchen, singing songs to Akash and teaching him Bengali nursery rhymes, throwing loads of laundry into the machine. Ruma had never spent a week alone with her father. When her parents visited her in Brooklyn, after Akash was born, her father claimed an armchair in the living room, quietly combing through the Times, occasionally tucking a finger under the baby’s chin but behaving as if he were waiting for the time to pass.” 

In this passage, we see Hema’s parents enacting entrenched gender norms. Hema’s mother is clearly the emotional center of the family, and therefore enjoys a much more intimate and involved relationship with Hema. That relationship, however, is not without its obstacles, as the consequence of such explicit closeness is conflict and open confrontation. We see, here, though, that Hema drew comfort and stability from her close yet contentious relationship with her mother— something she does not share with her much more emotionally aloof and passive father. This quote therefore helps Lahiri to solidify her assertion about the role of women throughout this story collection. It is women who hold families together, although they do so imperfectly. 

“No matter how they went, those trips to India were always epic, and he still recalled the anxiety they provoked in him, having to pack so much luggage and getting it all to the airport, keeping documents in order and ferrying his family safely so many thousands of miles. But his wife had lived for these journeys, and until both his parents died, a part of him lived for them, too. And so they’d gone in spite of the expense, in spite of the sadness and shame he felt each time he returned to Calcutta, in spite of the fact that the older his children grew, the less they wanted to go.” 

This quote gives us insight into Ruma’s father’s interiority. While it’s true that Lahiri is invested in plumbing the depths of the cultural, familial, and social roles of females within these stories, she also does not shy away from conferring her male characters with their own complexities. While it is women who are tasked with being the emotional centers of their families, men, too, struggle internally with the responsibilities and expectations that having a family entails. Here, we see the inner conflict that Ruma’s father contended with during his years as a father to a growing family.