Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" Author(S): Laura Anh Williams Source: MELUS, Vol

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Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" Author(s): Laura Anh Williams Source: MELUS, Vol. 32, No. 4, Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures (Winter, 2007), pp. 69-79 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029832 . Accessed: 02/04/2014 19:06

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Laura Anh Williams Purdue University

"Preparing fish is a political act."

-Janice Mirikitani,"Why Is Preparing Fish a Political Act?" (86)

Proposing a "Gastronomic Theory of Literature," Brad Kessler ponders a friend's observation that "every good novel she'd ever read opened with a food scene in the very first or second chapter" (149). He questions how these early meals function, whether they "stimulate the reader'sappetite for the largermeal ahead" (151). For Kessler, food in great fiction "opens doors to double and triple meaning" (156). Discussing a scene in Ralph Ellison's InvisibleMan in which the narrator purchases a hot baked yam from a street vendor, Kessler notes its racialized significance: "the yam is as packed with meaning as it is with pulp. Eating it openly, on the street, is an act of defiance and liberation for the narrator"(156). The narratorrejects the internalized impulse to repress his pleasure, thinking to himself, "to hell with being ashamed of what you liked" (266). As this example demonstrates, writings about food and eating may serve to draw the reader into racialized subjectivity,but they may also complicate desires and appetites. Describing his own early response to reading about Wang Lung's hunger in Pearl S. Buck's novel The Good Earth, Kessler states:

His hungerbecame mine.Some chapterslater, when Wangfinally eats a handfulof hot rice,and then wheatbread folded arounda sprigof garlic, I could barelycontain myself. I ran to the kitchen,ravenous, ransacking cupboardsfor white rice,jasmine tea, bags of take-outnoodles (anything that seemed Chinese)trying to fill mysefwithwhat WangLung lacked.I didn'tknow what to do next:read or eat. (148)

Kessler slips into what Lisa Marie Heldke refers to as "cultural food colonialism," as "Chineseness" becomes a commodified quality that can be approximated with a variety of foodstuffs easily located in his well-stocked American cupboard. Such an impulse to consume

MELUS,Volume 32, Number4 (Winter2007)

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Chinese food approaches Orientalist desire, as Rey Chow discusses it in her notes on a museum exhibit of 10,000 Chinese restaurantmenus: "[A]ll those items that signify 'Chineseness' even while the ingredients and methods of preparation may be 'inauthentic' or nonexistent in China-are not unlike the ideologically suspect literary,historical, and cultural texts that, as Said rightly cautioned, depict the non-Western world with implicit Western motives and desires" (20). Questions of "authenticity,"desiring, and consuming the Other remain unaddressed by Kessler's gastronomic theory.1 In Asian American literature, food as metaphor frequently constructs and reflects relationships to racialized subjectivity and also addresses issues of authenticity, assimilation, and desire. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has argued, in this literaturethe first generation is often preoccupied with food as necessity-associated with nourishment, sta- ples, and survival-while the second views food as extravagance-excess, treats, and desire. Yet the short stories in Jhumpa Lahiri'sThe Interpreter of Maladies(1999) complicate this binary; the snacks and treats con- sumed by characters,and even an abundance of ingredients, can reflect those characters' poverty (both monetary and emotional) and isolation. Although food functions as an important metaphor throughout the collection, culinary knowledge and practice is especially important in "A Temporary Matter,""Mrs. Sen's,"and "This Blessed House." In these stories food is the means for charactersto assert agency and subjectivity in ways that function as an alternativeto the dominant culture. Lahiri'sfemale immigrant characters,in particular,work to complicate the comfortable association between "home" and food. As Gayatri Gopinath notes, "the centrality of [male-male or father-son] trope as the primary trope in imagining diaspora invariablydisplaces and elides female diasporic subjects" (5). These stories highlight the elided female diasporic subject and invest food practices-the things characters eat and the ways they eat them, as well as how characters relate to the preparation of food-with significance that speaks to conditions of migration and diaspora. The women in these stories, wives of Indian academics, all utilize foodways to construct their own unique racialized subjectivity and to engender agency.

Stocking Up: "A Temporary Matter"

In the opening story of the collection, "A Temporary Matter," a young husband and wife slowly drift apart after their baby is stillborn. The couple barely speaks to one another and they spend "as much time on separate floors [of their apartment] as possible" (4). The despair that characterizes their relationship is reflected in the state in which they keep their home. The wife, Shoba, carelessly kicks off her sneakers without untying them and never puts away her sneakers or satchel. Dried out potted plants languish, although they are "inches from the

This content downloaded from 128.123.35.41 on Wed, 2 Apr 2014 19:06:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FOODWAYS AND SUBJECTIVITY 71 tap" (10). Theirs is a cultivated isolation. The husband, Shukumar, transforms what would have been the baby's nursery into his own workspace, dismantling the nursery before bringing Shoba back from the hospital. Shukumar works on his dissertation in this space "delib- erately,partly because the room soothed him, and partly because it was a place Shoba avoided" (8). The story does not linger over this insensi- tivity and passive aggression toward the wife, but it does remain a clue to Shoba's eventual leaving. That Shoba does have knowledge and agency outside of her husband's imagining is evident in both characters'knowledge of and rela- tion to food. Shukumardescribes Shoba by contrasting her against the way she was before losing the baby. Primarily,these are observations of deficiency contrasted against surplus. He notes, "She wasn't this way before" (6). Shukumar'searlier memories of Shoba are associated with abundance, especially relating to food shopping:

It astonishedhim, her capacityto think ahead.When she used to do the shopping,the pantrywas alwaysstocked with extrabottles of olive and corn oil, dependingon whetherthey were cookingItalian or Indian.There were endless boxes of pasta in all shapes and colors, zipperedsacks of basmatirice, whole sides of lambsand goats from the Muslimbutchers at Haymarket,chopped up and frozenin endlessplastic bags. (6)

His catalog of her abundance continues with artichokes, plums, gin- gerroot, and yams, as well as "things she had frozen and bottled, not cheap things in tins but peppers she had marinated herself with rose- mary, and chutneys that she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes." Shukumar notes not only that they both "invariablymarveled at how much food they'd bought," but also that "It never went to waste" (7). It is Shoba's foresight and extravagant preparedness-rendered visible by her pantry of surplus ingredients- that Shukumar loves. After the baby's death, Shukumar reflects, "if it weren't for him, he knew, Shoba would eat a bowl of cereal for her dinner" (8). Yet it is also Shoba's preparedness that Shukumartakes for granted. Whereas Shoba's emotional state is reflected in the abundance of her pantry, or the increasing emptiness of her shelves, Shukumar can be characterizedby his consumption. Even as a student, he has a "facility for absorbing details without curiosity" (4). Because Shoba no longer shops for ingredients in the market, Shukumarplows through the surplus foods, "Her labeled mason jars lining the shelves of the kitchen, in endless pyramids, enough, they'd agreed, to last for their grandchil- dren to taste. They'd eaten it all by now. Shukumar had been going through their supplies steadily, preparing meals for the two of them, measuring out cupfuls of rice, defrosting bags of meat day after day." His culinary knowledge is entirely dependent on hers. He cooks din-

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ners using her cookbooks, even "following her penciled instructions to use two teaspoons of ground coriander seeds instead of one, or red lentils instead of yellow" (7). The central scenes of "A Temporary Matter" occur over the course of five evenings when Shoba and Shukumar'spower is cut off. During those evenings, Shukumar prepares elaborate dinners, and they dine together and trade secrets in the intimacy of the darkness. His relative- ly benign admissions of forgetting to tip a waiter, cheating on an exam, getting a refund for a sweater vest, and lusting after a magazine pho- tograph reflect his misplaced assumption that their nightly admissions are part of a game, "an exchange of confessions-the little ways they'd hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves" (18). Shukumar's confessed minor misadventures, the knowledge of which he has kept from his wife, have no real bearing on her. In contrast, Shoba's secrets, leading up to the admission that she has already prepared for a new life apart from her husband, consistently assert an alternative knowledge, subjectivity,and agency outside of his knowledge and his control. Her confessions of peeking through his address book without his knowledge, lying about going out with a friend for drinks, allow- ing Shukumar to embarrass himself with his department chair, and finding his published poem "sentimental,"suggest a progression away from her husband, and increasing degrees of knowledge and agency. For Shukumar,the candle-lit dinners suggest a renewed vitality for the marriage,but the story shows this to be a misinterpretation. Shukumar'sexhaustion of Shoba's well-stocked pantry,without replenishing it, therefore becomes a signifier of the way he has exhausted and emptied his wife, the way he has assumed their marital problems were temporary without investing any care in restoring or replenishing their relationship.Although the story is told from Shukumar'sperspec- tive, Shoba has agency outside of his knowledge, as demonstrated by her refusal to restock the pantry or cook for her husband, actions that correspond to her development of an independent self that Shukumar knows nothing about. Finally this agency allows her to move past their tragedy to a new life that does not contain Shukumar'snutritionally and psychically consumptive and exhaustive presence and practices.

Missing Ingredients: "Mrs. Sen's"

While knowledge of food enables or exemplifies Shoba's escape, it marks the tragic foreclosure of eleven-year-old Eliot's relationship with his caretaker in "Mrs. Sen's." Like "A Temporary Matter," this story is filled with lists of produce, catalogs of ingredients, and de- scriptions of recipes. Eliot's previous relationships to babysitters and caretakersare described through their culinary inappropriateness.The first sitter continually sipped whiskey-spiked coffee from a thermos. The second "refused to prepare any food for Eliot containing meat"

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(111). Both are determined unsuitable for the care of a growing boy, and Eliot's mother grudgingly settles with Mrs. Sen. The central character identifies and advertises herself as Mrs. Sen and as a professor's wife; in other words, rather than possessing an autonomous and self- defined identity, she is defined through her husband's name and em- ployment. By way of introduction, she tells Eliot's mother, "Mr. Sen teaches mathematics at the university" (112), a statement she repeats at key times of crisis in the story. However, as the story unfolds, food preparation becomes a way Mrs. Sen can construct her own identity and assert her subjectivity outside of any prescribed role as a newly immigrated spouse. Food is immediately connected with Mrs. Sen as she serves tea with butter biscuits in a room carpeted in pear green. While in her care, Eliot enjoys watching Mrs. Sen preparing vegetables for dinner, and much of the story is occupied with lists of things she chops:

she took whole vegetablesbetween her hands and hacked them apart:cauliflower,cabbage, butternut squash. She split thingsin half, then quarters, speedilyproducing florets, cubes, slices,and shreds.She could peel a po- tato in seconds.At times she sat cross-legged,at times with legs splayed, surroundedby an arrayof colandersand shallowbowls of waterin which she immersedher choppedingredients. (114)

The story's listing of cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash, potatoes, spinach, cucumber, eggplant, onions, chicken pieces, mackerel, butter- fish, sea bass, and so on, draws attention to the parade of components but never the final dish. Of courses, dishes are mentioned: "It was merely dinner for herself and Mr. Sen, as indicated by the two plates and two glasses she set" (117). Yet specific meals are pre-empted and frustrated by a lack of correct ingredients. A tuna croquette served to Eliot's mother is "reallysupposed to be made with a fish called bhetki" (123), and a stew with fish and green bananas must be made without green bananas (133). Instead, the emphasis is placed on ingredients and the act of preparation. Mrs. Sen's preparation of food, alone but for Eliot's company, is a culinary performance that reaches across continents toward the excess of voices and laughter, of blades and vegetables, and of rooftop community celebrations. The surplus of ingredients and the blade used to chop them all are connected, Mrs. Sen explains, with abundant communal gatherings:

She had broughtthe bladefrom India,where apparently there was at least one in everyhousehold. "Whenever there is a weddingin the family,"she told Eliot one day,"or a largecelebration of any kind, my mother sends out word in the eveningfor all the neighborhoodwomen to bringblades just like this one, and then they sit in an enormouscircle on the roof of

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our building,laughing and gossiping and slicingfifty kilos of vegetables throughthe night."Her profilehovered protectively over her work, a con- fetti of cucumber,eggplant, and onion skinsheaped around her. (115)

Her solitary chopping and the stories she tells Eliot of her past life are a means of crafting her identity. She prepares food despite the absence of her friends and family. Most of all, she performs specific acts-caring for Eliot and chopping vegetables-that are well within her knowledge and expertise. Receiving news of fresh fish from the local merchants is the only thing that makes her as happy as receiving mail from India. Food preparation is linked not only to Mrs. Sen's subjectivity,but also her ethnic identity and her ability to forge a con- nection with others. In contrast to Shoba's experience in "A Temporary Matter," the culinary knowledge and practices of Mrs. Sen do not engender any escape or integration. Pressured by her husband to learn to drive, which for him represents greater "independence" and "freedom" for her, Mrs. Sen's sense of identity and knowledge are shaken when she crashes her car into a telephone pole. Her reiteration of the statement, "Mr. Sen teaches mathematics at the university" to the police as an explanation for her car accident reflects her lapse in confidence, in self-identification (132). When, at the story's end, she leaves Eliot to a plate of peanut butter crackers, with instructions that her husband give him a Popsicle if he is still hungry, the poverty of nourishment in the snacks reflects a poverty of emotional nourishment for Mrs. Sen as well. As Anita Mannur points out, "Mrs. Sen returns to a world where she negotiates the pangs of loneliness and alienation that she feels as a woman located far away from her family with no real community to speak of besides her husband in the United States" (65). In attempting to engender "independence" in his wife (for his own convenience), Mr. Sen ironically dismisses and strips her of what agency she has attained through her cooking. He does not ever appear to consider what community and agency she has given up to join him in the United States, or that, as Lahiri describes this story in an interview, there were many "women like her who were basically living in the United States because of their husbands and didn't have an identity or a purpose of their own here" (Frankfort and Ciuraru 132). Mr. Sen cannot seem to conceive of the existential importance of fresh fish, or the ways cooking helps his wife shape her identity in the United States. The story closes with Eliot receiving independence from caretakers by his mother, who, like Mr. Sen, prioritizes her own convenience over Eliot's needs. Although the boy claims he will be "fine" as an independent latchkey kid (135), he remains marked by his experience with Mrs. Sen, as is hinted at in the story's title. The possessive form of Eliot's caretaker'sname, "Mrs. Sen's"suggests her own ownership, while the possessed object remains intangible. Does the title refer to Mrs. Sen's

This content downloaded from 128.123.35.41 on Wed, 2 Apr 2014 19:06:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FOODWAYS AND SUBJECTIVITY 75 relationship to Eliot? To Mrs. Sen's longing for India? To her special cooking knife or mountain of produce? The apostrophe "s" suggests what is present and elusive in the story; that is, an alternative knowledge and autonomy which, while not granted full fruition in the course of the story, at least hints at more productive and nurturing ways of creating relationships with others.

A Dash of That: "This Blessed House"

While "A Temporary Matter" and "Mrs. Sen's" both grant central female characters a dimension of autonomy and agency through spe- cifically racialized knowledge of food, in "This Blessed House" the female character's lack of traditional cultural knowledge and conse- quent willingness to improvise with ingredients engenders transformation and constructive relationships. "This Blessed House" tracks the growth of young, newly married Indian immigrants Sanjeev and Twinkle as they settle into a new home. Like Mrs. Sen, Twinkle has joined her academic husband in the US. While the drama of the story centers on Sanjeev's reactions to the Christian paraphernaliaTwinkle discovers throughout their new house, the story opens with Twinkle's simultaneous discovery of a white porcelain Christ effigy and an unopened bottle of malt vinegar (136). While Sanjeev dismisses both equally,Twinkle finds value in each. The statue is "pretty" and might be worth something, and the vinegar is unopened, filled with potential. Like '"ATemporary Matter," "This Blessed House" is told in third person, largely from the husband's perspective. Sanjeev's character is constructed through references to his food affinities and his memories from an earlier time in the relationship. He recalls with fondness "when he would walk each evening across the Mass Avenue Bridge to order Mughlai chicken with spinach from his favorite Indian restaurant on the other side of the Charles, and return to his dorm to write out clean copies of his problem sets" (138). He remembers the night they met at a Chinese restaurantin Palo Alto, "with a revolving platter of spareribs and egg rolls and chicken wings, which, they concurred, all tasted the same" (143). At their housewarming party,he plans a simple menu: "samosas from an Indian restaurantin Hartford, and big trays of rice with chicken and almonds and orange peels, which Sanjeev had spent the greater part of the morning and afternoon preparing" (150). Additionally, "it was Sanjeev who, on weekends, seasoned mus- tard oil with cinnamon sticks and cloves in order to produce a proper curry" (144), in contrast to Twinkle who is "not terribly ambitious in the kitchen" (143), "detested chopping garlic, and peeling ginger, and could not operate a blender" (144). Although Sanjeev possesses some culinary knowledge and experience, he does not realize his taste is no- tably unadventurous. His foods taste the same. His fondest memories

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of Boston center on eating the same meal. He does not stray from his comfort zone and finds anything outside of it threatening. While Sanjeev's memories and thoughts are centralized, the time- line of the story is marked by Twinkle's intermittent discoveries of Christian trinkets, figurines, and statues in their new home. This ongo- ing scavenger hunt allows for the emergence of Twinkle'sidentity, most commented upon by Sanjeev after her haphazard dinner creation. She fashions a meal featuring the discovered vinegar. Though admittedly "aromatic"to Sanjeev,this dish unsettles him and forces him to think, rather uncomfortably, that she might have an autonomy and creativity beyond his comprehension or control. After she describes her meal plainly as a stew to which she added the malt vinegar, he reflects on her impulsive qualities,which he fails to understand, "She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see" (142). While Twinkle appears to embrace difference, Sanjeev finds himself unsettled by it. His ensuing interrogation about the stew reflects the degree to which his ways of knowing and understanding are at odds with hers. He demands:

"How did you make it?" "I made it up." "What did you do?" "I just put some things into the pot and added the malt vinegar at the end." "How much vinegar?" She shrugged, ripping off some bread and plunging it into her bowl. "What do you mean you don't know? You should write it down. What if you need to make it again, for a party or something?" (144)

Twinkle's assuring Sanjeev that she will be able to remember how to make the soup despite the fact that she has not measured out or writ- ten the recipe down suggests a confidence, a sense of self-possession as well as a form of knowledge that he cannot access or comprehend. With her concoction steaming in a kettle that rests on a found Jesus trivet, Twinkle smiles, saying "Face it. This house is blessed" (144). The association of the blessedness of the house the multitude of discovered religious trinkets-with Twinkle'sraw culinary talent seems to point to a larger transformation that plays out in the story's conclusion. Having grown more combative with each discovered object, Sanjeev is left alone as his entire housewarming party joins his wife in an impromptu trinket hunt in their attic. Rejecting what he sees as a mean-

This content downloaded from 128.123.35.41 on Wed, 2 Apr 2014 19:06:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FOODWAYS AND SUBJECTIVITY 77 ingless endeavor, Sanjeev fights an hysterical urge to shut the entire party into the attic and "sweep Twinkle's menagerie into a garbage bag and get in the car and drive it all to the dump" (155). He imagines himself returning to his empty house, erasing the traces of the party, and "eat[ing] a plate of warmed rice and listen[ing] to his new Bach CD while reading the liner notes so as to understand it properly" (155). In this moment, however, Sanjeev's eyes rest on Twinkle's shoes, kicked off in her excitement. Twinkle's "black patent-leather mules with heels like golf tees" knock Sanjeev out of the fantasy comfort space he has created, with its bland reheated rice and "properly"understood classi- cal music. Like her impromptu dinner, impossible and impractical but more delicious than his own "proper curry,"her spike-heeled shoes and her infatuation with the religious trinkets reflect a relationship to food, objects, and culture that is flexible and constructive, and that may contain the transformative potential for their marriage.

Conclusion: Unsettling Tastes

As Jennifer Ho comments, "Food is a critical medium for com- pliance with and resistance to Americanization, a means for enacting the ambiguities of an Asian-ethnic identity that is already in a con- stant state of flux" (3). For writers, food may also function autobi- ographically to enact identities that are always unstable and in flux. Lahiri has described the stories in Interpreterof Maladiesas containing resonances of her own family experience. Mrs. Sen's experience as a transplanted wife is a reflection of Lahiri's mother's experience. Twinkle's unrecorded culinary knowledge is also a shadow of Lahiri's mother, who "owned no cookbooks, just as she owned no measuring cups or spoons. To this day, if friends ask how she made a particular dish, she cryptically replies, 'It's nothing, really,you simply take all the ingredients and put them in the pot."' ("Long Way Home" 83). To Lahiri'smother, cooking "was her jurisdiction. It was also her secret." For individuals such as Lahiri'smother, cooking constructs a sense of identity, interrelationship, and home that is simultaneously communal and yet also highly personal. While the stories in Lahiri'scollection meet Kessler's criteriafor great fiction, they also complicate his theory. Lahiri's novel The Namesake opens with a character,Ashima Ganguli, standing in her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen, attempting to cobble together a version of hot mix and puffed rice:

combiningRice Krispiesand Planters peanuts and choppedred onion in a bowl. She adds salt,lemon juice,thin slices of green chilipepper, wishing therewere mustardoil to pour into the mix. Ashimahas been consuming this concoction throughouther pregnancy,a humble approximationof the snacksold for pennieson Calcuttasidewalks and on railwayplatforms

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throughoutIndia, spilling from newspapercones. Even now that thereis barelyspace inside her,it is the one thing she craves.(1)

The commonplace spicy snack that Ashima concocts evokes both home and displacement, abundance and lack, well-stocked American cupboards as well as a certain hunger. For transplanted,racialized sub- jectivities, culinary practice may be a comfort as well as a bittersweet act, a surrender to pressures to assimilate and an articulationof difference. These articulationsare acts of subjectivity-makingand self-asser- tion, expressions of desire and yearning which participate in a literary tradition connecting the Asian American immigrant experience with a visceral, embodied experience of difference. Lahiri'sstories often deny narrativeclosure, making them slightly unsettling and difficult to swal- low, yet her foodways open up spaces in which marginalizedidentities generate a sense of agency and difference with transformative and productive potential.

Notes

1. GayatriGopinath continues this discussionby describing"the patriarchal and heteronormative underpinnings of the term 'di-aspora' . . . evident in StefanHelmreich's exploration of its etymologicalroots," essentially tracing the word to its metaphoriclink to the scatteredseeds of male animals(5).

Works Cited

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Mirikitani,Janice. "Why Is Preparing Fish a Political Act?" Bold Words:A Centuryof Asian AmericanWriting. Ed. Rajini Srikanth and Esther Y. Iwanaga. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 86. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. ReadingAsian AmericanLiterature: From Necessity to Extravagance.Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

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