Lecture Notes Jhumpa Lahiri (born 1967) • “Once in a Lifetime” (2006) Material Quoted from the Text Appears in Pink Font

Some Biographical Highlights ¶¶¶ Jhumpa Lahiri’s first name is a nickname, given to her by a grade-school teacher who found her given name challenging to pronounce. An acclaimed writer of short stories and novels, Lahiri (pictured on the left of this paragraph) mixes cultures, both in her own life and in the lives of many of her fictional characters. She was born in 1967 in London, England, to immigrant parents from Calcutta (now usually spelled Kolkata), capital of the northwest Indian state of West Bengal. When she was just three, the family moved to the U.S. because her father had secured employment as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island. She earned an undergraduate degree (in English) from Barnard College, the women-only college of Columbia University, New York. Next, she obtained three literature-related master’s degrees from Boston University before completing, at the same institution, a PhD in Renaissance Studies. Her international sensibility is further reflected in her mastery of Italian; she has both written and translated fiction in that language. In 2014, President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal; and the following year Princeton University appointed her a professor of creative writing. ¶¶¶ Lahiri’s short story titled “Once in a Lifetime” was first published in The New Yorker magazine in 2006 and later republished as part of Unaccustomed Earth (2008), a book of short stories. Hema, the narrator or speaker, may, from early in life, have been pressured by her parents to over-achieve academically. One wonders if Lahiri, too, may have felt similar pressure, if not from home then from elements within Indian- American society, which numbers around four-and-a-half million people. When stereotyping that community as fixating on its children’s scholastic success (a phenomenon often called “tiger parenting”) some observers cite the disproportionate representation of Indian-Americans in the top-tier of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. In 2019, eight of the nine young people declared co-winners of the competition were of that ethnic background. We note that, in adolescence, Hema was “quizzed” each Sunday by her father in anticipation of her “weekly [school] spelling test.” ¶¶¶ For several centuries, India was colonized by the British: initially by a for-profit commercial enterprise, the British East India Company; then by the regular British state or crown (a regime known as the Raj). Arguably, the priority on achievement manifest among members of the Indian diaspora (i.e. those who identify as Indian but live abroad) is a response to India’s long history of being treated as second-class and dependent — as a subservient, oriental (or Eastern) unit

1 within the British Empire. “Once in a Lifetime” is peppered with pop-cultural references, such as one, at the conclusion of a discrete sequence within the narrative, to The Empire Strikes Back, the second release in the Star Wars series and the highest-grossing film of 1980. (Its famous plot twist is Dark Vader’s revelation to Luke Skywalker that they are father and son.) Modern Indians who relocate abroad and then accomplish great things have sometimes been seen as instances of India’s “striking back” against the British Empire in particular and the West in general. One notes that the top slot on the “rich list” in present-day Britain is occupied by two Indian-born brothers, the Hindujas, whose Hinduja Group is an industrial behemoth that embraces truck-manufacture, petrochemicals, banking, media, and more. One can also readily acknowledge the disproportionate impact of Indian-born scientists and entrepreneurs upon the US technology sector, a matter merely touched on in the following graphic:

¶¶¶ Hana, the narrator of “Once in a Lifetime,” and Kaushik, her teenage infatuation, represent two different responses to the Indian diaspora’s emphasis on achievement. Given her references to school, piano, and other related activities, we can assume that Hana’s parents strongly encouraged — and perhaps even actively compelled (or harassed) — her to build an outstanding resume. It seems that, by contrast, Kaushik resented and resisted similar pressure from his parents. Hema observes that he “eluded [his] parents’ grasp,” in part by “not … talk[ing] to them very much.” Behind his back, his father would criticize Kaushik as “a typical American teen-ager,” implying that the youth refused to align with the norm for his ethnic community. Tellingly, the 16-year-old Kausik declined Hema’s invitation to go to the movies to catch The Empire Strikes Back. In general, he may have wished to avoid “epic” gestures in asserting Indian attainment; however, as we shall see, he was not always passive as regards claiming a piece of the colonial pie — or, in his case, the colonial trifle. ¶¶¶ Lahiri’s first major published work, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) — a collection of nine short stories — won the Pulitzer Prize; and she has garnered several other top literary and humanities honors in addition, not least the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. ¶¶¶ Of particular relevance to key plot details in the short story “Once in a Lifetime” is Lahiri’s debut novel The Namesake (2003), which traces a Bengali family’s odyssey from Calcutta to suburban Boston, “eight thousand miles away.” While the husband, Ashoke, adjusts fairly well

2 to graduate school at M.I.T. (where his PhD focuses on fiber optics), the wife, Ashima, battles homesickness for Bengal. One instance where the diaspora’s psychological and emotional discomfort echoes in “Once in a Lifetime” is the characterization (by the narrator or speaker, Hema) of living in the U.S. as “the struggle that my parents and their [fellow Bengali-immigrant] friends … embarked on.” In Boston in August 1968, Ashima gives birth to a son, who receives from his dad the nickname Gogol. The boy, thus, is the namesake of the Ukrainian-born, Russian-language author Nickolai Gogol, a book of whose short stories Ashoke had once received from his beloved grandfather, a literature professor. Mira Nair directed a 2006 movie version of The Namesake, whose tagline declared, “the greatest journeys are the ones that bring you home.” Some Plot Basics

Kaushik’s Family Hema’s Family !কৗিশক or Kaushik means “sentiment [feeling] of !হমা or Hema means “golden” love” and traditionally referred to a sage or wise man Choudhuri Family Name not given Means “land-holder” and traditionally referred to the leader within a community Shibani Parul Mother Refers to the Hindu goddess of war, Durga, in her capacity as the wife of Shiva, destroyer of Means “graceful” or “gracefully flowing water” evil, one of the supreme beings not given Father Teaches economics at Northeastern University, Dr. Choudhuri Boston Choudhuri Family Leaves Greater Boston Area for Bombay in 1974 ¶¶¶ “Once in a Lifetime” is narrated by Hema, an adult who may be in or beyond her twenties. She does not address the reader but, instead, a “you.” That individual turns out to be Kaushik Choudhuri, three years her senior. Both Hema and Kaushik are only children. In 1974, when Hema was six, her parents (whose family name we never learn) hosted a “farewell” party for Kaushik and his parents, who had determined to leave Cambridge (near downtown Boston), Massachusetts, and return to India. At that time, Hema’s family was living in Inman Square, a neighborhood in Cambridge; later, they moved to Sharon, a town almost 30 miles south of Cambridge. (Sharon is a half-hour direct train ride from Northeastern University, Hema’s father’s place of employment.) Both families are Bengali Hindus who emigrated from the city of Calcutta (Kolkata), capital of Bengal, so the fathers could earn doctoral degrees, probably from “Harvard [or] M.I.T.,” prestigious universities located in Cambridge. As an adolescent, Hema was perplexed by her parents’ insistence that she always refer to and address Kaushik’s father as Dr. Choudhuri; she complains, “Baba [daddy] has his Ph.D. and no one calls him a doctor.” ¶¶¶ In 1974, the Choudhuri family was not going back to Calcutta or some other part of Bengal, but instead was moving to the city of Bombay (Mumbai) — almost 1,300 miles from Calcutta — where Dr. Choudhuri had been hired by “Larsen & Toubro”: an offer “too good to turn down.” Natives of Bengal speak Bengali (230 million native speakers), while the dominant language in Bombay is Marathi (83.1 million native speakers). At one juncture, Kaushik emphasizes that “Bombay is nothing like Calcutta.” Further complicating the identity calculus is the fact that Larsen & Toubro, a multinational corporation, was founded in Bombay in 1938 by two immigrant engineers from the European nation of Denmark. It is a major industrial conglomerate with substantial presences in several sectors, including, but by no means limited to: construction, engineering, and manufacturing (of ships, trains, defense systems, and more).

3 ¶¶¶ Yet another addition to the ethnic and religious landscape is the Choudhuris’ decision to hire, as they established themselves in Bombay, “Zareen, [a] fabulous Parsi cook.” The term Parsi means “Persian” (or Iranian), and it refers to how in the seventh century a community of Persians who followed the prophet Zoroaster migrated to India (and South Asia more generally) due to a Muslim invasion of their homeland. While Parsis are numerically few (only around 61,000 in present-day India), they are especially concentrated in Bombay. Their entrepreneurial, commercial, and military contributions to India have been exceptional. In 1966, the Parsi Cyrus Poonawalla founded Serum Institute of India, now earth’s largest manufacturer of vaccines. (It’s working on a Covid-19 vaccine.) Two famous Parsi musicians are the classical conductor Zubin Mehta and the late popstar Freddie Mercury. ¶¶¶ Zoroastrian theology emphasizes that humans have free will and should use it to choose good thought, words, and deeds. Given that the Parsi individual invoked (briefly) in “Once in a Lifetime” is a “fabulous … cook,” we should perhaps consider the story’s references to preparing, offering, and eating food as moments when the characters are obliged to confront the moral test of whether to ponder good thoughts, voice good words, and/or perform good deeds. The tale’s title, “Once in a Lifetime,” evokes food because Kaushik’s mother, Parul, speaks it in the body of the text when referring to “the extravagance” of flying first class from Bombay to Boston. Deploying alliteration — “[c]hampaign, chocolates … caviar” — she pronounces “the amount of food you get in first class” to be “remarkable”: a “[o]nce in a lifetime” splurge. Seven Years Later, in 1981, Choudhuri Family Returns to Greater Boston Area from Bombay ¶¶¶ On New Year’s Day of 1981, Hema’s parents learn of the Choudhuri family’s imminent return to Massachusetts. The reason given is the patriarch’s having obtained “a new job”; later, however, we discover the real motive. Although his parents will not share the information publicly, Kaushik uses a wintertime episode, when alone with Hema in a kind of family cemetery, to reveal that his mother has terminal “cancer in her breast” and that their relocating back to America “was not so much for [the] treatment” available to her at “Mass General” — i.e. Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospital) — “as it was to be left alone,” unmolested by well-wishing Indian “family and friends” in and beyond Bombay. ¶¶¶ Between their arrival Stateside and their purchase of “a house of the North Shore … designed by a well-known Massachusetts architect,” the Choudhuris live with Hema’s family in its home in Sharon, a place named after a plain in the Holy Land that the Bible associates with pastoral beauty. Events during the “weeks of forced intimacy” that the two families share in and around the Sharon residence form the basis of much of what Hema recollects as the short story unfolds. By the way: the North Shore refers to the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, an area often associated with wealthy, exclusive communities. While openness is engineered into the Choudhuris’ newly acquired house in the form of “whole walls of glass” (see the image of a North Shore dwelling to the right of this paragraph), Hema remains the only member of her family to know about Parul’s condition, at least until that woman dies after two years in her fancy, light-filled domicile. Hema’s Condition While Parul gradually expires because of a severe physical illness, the fully adult Hema may be suffering, too, but due to psychological anxiety — specifically, psycho-sexual anxiety. Reading between the lines of “Once in a Lifetime,” one might reach the conclusion that Hema’s decision to imaginatively revisit past events has everything to do with her unrequited (i.e. not reciprocated) emotional and even sexual desire for Kaushik — at least the 16-year-old version of Kaushik who lived in her familial home in Sharon during

4 some of 1981. Perhaps appropriately for a work of literature, Hema recollects Kaushik’s entry into manhood in verbal terms: “Your voice had deepened, no longer a child’s.” At the time, her mother was more direct, declaring, “Kaushik must practically be a man by now.” ¶¶¶ Hema’s failure to gain some degree of personal intimacy with Kaushik seems to have been, in part, a factor of his lacking interest in her (unsurprising, surely, given the three-year age difference between them). During the family-cemetery scene mentioned above, he “never” fulfills a wish on her part, namely “ask[ing] [her] to pose” for a photograph, which he would have “capture[d]” by means of “the camera hanging around [his] neck” — a “costly” item that, because it belongs to Dr. Choudurhi, can be interpreted as a symbol of masculinity, even a phallic object. (In a later tale, “Going Ashore,” Lahiri presents Kaushik again, decades later, as a successful international photojournalist.) In narrating “Once in a Lifetime,” Hema admits to “my crush” on Kaushik; however, in 1981 she did not act on that feeling, despite her fantasy of “sticking [her] hand through [the wall]” in her parents’ bedroom in order to “touch [Kaushik],” asleep in what had been her bed in the next-door room. Hema exhibits the condition encapsulated in the meaning of the word Kaushik: “Sentiment of Love.” ¶¶¶ While Kaushik did not encourage Hema to become some type of girlfriend, her mother, Shibani, actively discouraged her from emerging into early womanhood. Growing up in Calcutta, the capital of Bengal, in and after the 1940s (see the graphic to the left of this page), Shibani, the daughter of a lowly post-office “clerk,” “had slept in the same bed as her parents,” doing so “until the day she was married,” a scenario that she deems “perfectly normal.” As the isolated and lonely immigrant mother of a 13-year-old girl in Sharon, Massachusetts in the early 1980s, she found American cultural norms unsettling. Thus, she leant into the Bengali lifestyle and Hindu religious precepts of her upbringing to a greater degree than she might have had she been raising Hema in Calcutta, Bombay, or some other Indian city. Being socially secluded in the Greater Boston area, she relied on a past, conservative version of India as a frame of reference. Hema asserts that “Bombay … made [Kaushik’s parents] more American” than their years of living in America affected or changed her parents. ¶¶¶ A potent symbol of the moral conservatism espoused by Shibani is the “seal of the [Indian] textile company” on the “inseam” of the wide-waisted, white “pajamas” that her mother (Hema’s grandmother) had “sent [Hema] from Calcutta.” In girlhood, Hema considered the oversized, body-negating garment to be obnoxious, but Shibani attempted to calm her by “assur[ing] [her] that the seal would come out in the wash.” This statement implies that Hema had no choice but to wear the pajamas until they and the tradition they represented no longer seemed odd to her. Hema did not find her Bengali cultural heritage a comfortable fit; instead, she felt marked and pressured by it. The brief discussion of the seal on the pajamas renders the reader aware that Hema had to navigate a set of sensibilities, expectations, and prejudices that extended generationally back beyond her mother. We use the term atavistic to refer to matters and conceits that derive from the past, prior to one’s parents. ¶¶¶ By contrast with Shibani’s early years, growing up in a house with no toilet, Parul’s socioeconomic background and, thus, education in Calcutta were privileged, for she was the daughter of one of the city’s

5 “most prominent lawyers.” Coming to America, she already possessed more sexual knowledge than Shibani. Indeed, Hema’s mother did not realize that she had become pregnant until Parul suggested that her dizziness likely signaled that condition. The above acknowledged, we should also point out that Shibani was not altogether hostile towards sexuality, even Western sexuality. In the very first paragraph of “Once in a Lifetime,” we learn that she wore French perfume on “special occasions.” As careful readers, we pay attention to: (1) the fact that Hema identifies the brand as “L’Air du Temps”; and (2) the remembered detail that the “firm squirt” that Shibani applied to the preteen Hema’s clothing “temporarily darkened whatever [she] was wearing.” The latter observation perhaps indicates something dark about Hema’s future experiences with sexuality. L’Air du Temps (translatable as “spirit of the times”) was launched in 1948, the year after Indian Independence, by Nina Ricci, a French fashion house. The product became famous for its crystal bottle — the so-called Bottle of the Century — introduced in 1951 and designed by Marc Lalique. Its lid (see the image to the right of this paragraph) depicts two doves. While they are courting each other (and while the dove is a symbol of love and peace), it is also possible to view the avian encounter that Lalique depicts as antagonistic, a matter to which we will return. ¶¶¶ Hema’s rehearsal of Shibani’s ambivalence towards the socialization of teenaged American girls receives its most intense expression in the episode that Hema recalls as occurring in “the lingerie department in Jordan Marsh,” a Boston department store founded in 1851 (but defunct since 1996). Historically, the establishment was famous for retailing Paris-made Fleur de Lis-brand corsets and the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin, as well as for staging, in the run-up to Christmas, the Enchanted Village of St. Nicholas. Snow plays an important role in “Once in a Lifetime”; one thinks, for example, of Kaushik’s exclamation, “This is beautiful,” uttered in response to the “snow blanket[ing]” the “lawn” at Hema’s parent’s home. Immediately after, he and Hema penetrate “a long way” into the neighborhood wood, where Kaushik reveals to her the family cemetery “belong[ing] to people named Simonds, a family of six.” Arguably, the entire sequence has an enchanted quality, and perhaps the same applies to the Jordan Marsh purchase, by Parul — despite Shibani’s “protests” — of Hema’s “first three bras” Sidelining Shibani, the “saleswoman” assumed Hema “was [Parul’s] daughter.” The overall initiation into womanhood constituted by the lingerie-department experience may achieve its apotheosis in Hema’s being present when Parul “tried things on as well … without shame” in front of Hema in a changing room. That activity revealed to the younger woman, who had “yet to get [her] period,” the older woman’s naked upper body. Clearly, Shibani’s preference would be for her daughter to remain prepubescent. She is sufficiently anxious about American life to characterize some of it cultural “practice[s]” as “cruel.” Pop-Cultural Allusions in “Once in a Lifetime” ¶¶¶ Already, we have discussed Hema’s invocation of the movie, The Empire Strikes Back. A more oblique allusion occurs in a short sequence where Hema recalls being distressed by Kaushik’s using (without permission) her father’s beloved, high-end “turntable” to play an LP. Presumably, the narrator could have named the record, but she elects not to; instead, she merely refers to “an album, something by the Rolling Stones,” with “something like a cake” on its “jacket.” (As already noted, food is a chronic concern in the tale.) Hema’s coyness over the record’s name effectively obliges the reader to become a kind of pop-cultural detective. It turns out that the album is Let It Bleed, a 1969 release by the Rolling Stones. The titles of several of its tracks seem exceptionally germane to themes and interests in Lahiri’s “Once in a Lifetime.” The first song on Side One is “Gimme Shelter,” which is, in essence, the request that Dr. Choudhuri makes over the phone to Hema’s father on the first day of 1981. Once the Choudhuris are being sheltered by their fellow Bengalis in the “modest home” in Sharon, Massachusetts, the title of Side One’s second song, “Love in Vain,” becomes increasingly relevant as an expression of Hema’s condition vis-à-vis Kaushik. The title

6 of the fourth and final song on Side Two — that is, the album’s closing number — can be read as a summary of what Hema must ultimate conclude: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” ¶¶¶ The fact that Hema wanted Kaushik but did not get him certainly seems to prompt her narrative. In James Joyce’s “The Dead” (written in 1907; set in 1904) — a short story that, as we shall see, informs “Once in a Lifetime” — the protagonist, Gabriel, ends up engaging his sexually distant wife, Molly, in a kind of “talking cure.” Gabriel understands German and, thus, may have read Sigmund Freud’s talking- cure theory. Essentially, Gabriel facilitates a non- professional version of a psychiatric-therapy session. The impromptu session, conducted in a hotel bedroom, helps Molly access cognitively and articulate verbally a trauma from an intense affair in her early womanhood. ¶¶¶ It is possible that, in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Once in a Lifetime,” readers find themselves eavesdropping on a professional therapy session in which Hema’s psychiatrist (or “shrink”) has convinced her to participate in a cognitive- treatment method called therapeutic role-playing in order to deal with her psycho-sexual anxieties, derived from her mother’s conservative value system and, most of all, from Kaushik’s snubbing her. It may be that Hema has been instructed to visualize her psychiatrist as Kaushik so that she can talk to that individual (addressing him as ‘you”) and share things that as a 13-year-old she did not feel able to communicate. Those things include: “imagining you kissing me”; and the desire that “in the course of the afternoon and evening our paths might intersect.” In essence, the psychiatrist plays the role of Kaushik in hopes that the resulting interpersonal exchange will not just prove cathartic for Hema but also ultimately bring her to new understandings about Kaushik, her mother, and herself. (In more technical terms — which you need not worry about, unless you’re interested — we might say that the maternal regime under which Hema grew up prevented her from undergoing adequate ego development as she transitioned from the latency period into early-adult sexuality.) The theory of therapeutic role-playing was elaborated by several thinkers, with one important contributor being Jacob L. Moreno, who coined the term psychodrama. ¶¶¶ Returning to the Rolling Stones reference in “Once in a Lifetime”: the overall album title, Let It Bleed, can suggest female sexuality, either mensuration or the notion of a woman’s bleeding upon the loss of her virginity. Both of these matters, but especially the first, seem potentially relevant in Hema’s case. We could say that Hema’s mother resisted her only daughter’s entry into womanhood, whereas Parul (as a kind of alternative mother to Hema) actively encouraged that transition, the outward and visible sign of which is the bleeding that accompanies mensuration. Parul’s intervention in Hema’s upbringing — the purchase of three bras — may have been prompted by a sense of urgency brought on by her diagnosis of terminal breast cancer. In general, however, Parul is considerably more worldly than Shibani. She drinks Johnnie Walker- brand Scotch whisky each evening, and she smokes “[o]ne cigarette a day.” In Hollywood movies “of a

7 certain period” — the “one thing that [Shibani] loved wholeheartedly about the West”— the cigarette often functions as phallic. Famously, the 1942 film Now, Voyager ends with a romantic suggestion or offer when the male protagonist, played by Paul Henreid, lights two cigarettes in his mouth before passing one of them to the female protagonist, played by Bette Davis, asking rhetorically, “Shall we just have a cigarette on it?” The fact of Hema’s catching Parul smoking (in the bathroom) imports a frisson of sexuality into the text, a matter intensified by Parul’s “command,” expressed as a question: “Our little secret, Hema?” ¶¶¶ Assuming that Hema realized her parents’ ambitions for her academic and professional success, she would likely have the income necessary to hire a psychiatrist. Rebuffed by Kaushik, she may well have put aside serious attempts to date and, instead, focused on racking up achievements in her studies and, then, career. Therapy might afford her an opportunity to get beyond a longstanding and debilitating erotic hang-up about Kaushik, an image of whom she once cut out from a photograph, only to “[keep] [it], hidden … locked up for years.” Just as Joyce’s “The Dead” centers on a fairly formal group supper during a snow event, followed by its male protagonist’s visiting (in his imagination, as dawn approaches) a snow-covered cemetery, a late sequence in “Once in a Lifetime” opens with the two Bengali families sharing a special repast — “a big pot of khichuri,” a traditional rice- and mung bean-based dish — in response to a snow storm and concludes, during the next morning, with Kaushik’s leading Hema to a cemetery. ¶¶¶ If Hema is narrating in the context of a professional therapy session, it is notable that she brings her discourse, directed at an imagined Kaushik, very close to its close by recollecting his “getting to [his] knees [in the cemetery] and pushing away the snow” from a “row” of family “tombstone[s],” the “last one” of which commemorates a daughter, Emma, who “died in 1923.” At the time, Hema was “disturbed by the similarity” between her name and Emma’s, but it is possible to interpret her reminiscence of the incident in more positive terms. By revealing (in the therapy session) that the being called Emma is dead and buried, the imagined Kaushik may, in effect, be indicating that — now, finally — the real-life, adult Hema can and should move forward, leaving behind the suite of psycho-sexual anxieties she has so long harbored. Those anxieties center on Kaushik, of course, but they also have much to do with how Hema was parented; thus, it seems significant that Kaushik’s identification of those interred in the family plot begins with “Mother,” with a capital M, followed by “father.” In the United States, the family’s name, Simonds, is most common in Massachuchetts; it derives from the Hebrew Simon, which means “listening” or “hearing” — precisely what Hema’s psychiatrist is doing, assuming that the “Once in a Lifetime” is a kind of transcript of a therapy session. From the Personal to the Political ¶¶¶ In addition to reading “Once in a Lifetime” as a story about deeply personal angsts on Hema’s part, it is also easy to find in it a political subtext having to do with the history of Bengal. This lecture does not provide enough time to explore those politics in detail, so we will finish up by merely touching on a few key points. We have established that Shibani’s over-protective stance towards Hema reflects her moral conservatism as a Bengali Hindu, a condition derived from atavistic traditions (symbolized by the stamp or mark on Hema’s pajamas) and reinforced by her perception of being isolated as an Asian immigrant in urban America in the 1970s and ’80s. But there is likely another major factor at work, namely, Shibani’s closeness to the rape-terror that accompanied the independence of India in 1947. Shibani could have been

8 a toddler at that time; however, she could have been older and, thus, conscious of events — indeed, perhaps even a direct victim of them. ¶¶¶ The British long maintained Calcutta as the administrative center of their imperial regime in India. Unsurprisingly, many Bengalis organized themselves in opposition to the colonists. As in Ireland, another British colony, the natives orchestrated a revival of their language, literature, and culture — the Bengali Renaissance — during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Also (again, as in Ireland), they established both pacifist and physical-force nationalist movements. Some of the anti-British activity sought to create a politically independent Bengal; some of it aimed, instead, to establish a sovereign India, of which Bengal would be a part. Always complicating matters in Bengal was the fact that while most of its people shared Bengali as a common language they were divided into two major religious groupings: Hindu and Muslim. ¶¶¶ By 1947, demands from Bengal and elsewhere for overall Indian independence were so undeniable that the British — who were severely stretched at home as a result of the recently concluded World War II — determined to pull out of South Asia. Most historians criticize the precipitous (i.e. over-hasty) manner in which the British withdrew from India. While the reality is complex, one could say that they dealt in too cursory a manner with the tensions in the subcontinent between various religious faiths, especially Hindus and Muslims. In February 1947, Britain’s Prime Minister announced that full self-government would be granted to India around the middle of the year. On June 3, 1947, the so-called Mountbatten Plan indicated that India would be partitioned into two states (an outcome known as the Partition of India). And on August 14, 1947, those new nations came into existence: the Hindu-majority (but officially secular) Republic of India and the Muslim-majority Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Bengal was split: its western section was placed within the new India (and labeled the state of West Bengal); while its eastern section was placed within the new Pakistan (and labeled the province of East Pakistan). While all the characters in “Once in a Lifetime” are Bengali Hindus, it is hard not to be reminded of the 1947 partition of Bengal as one listens to Hema describe the tensions that emerged as her family and Kaushik’s attempted to share living space. Consider, for example, her recollection of Kaushik’s “disappear[ing] into my room as if were yours.”

¶¶¶ Faced with a lack of clarity as to the future and fearful about the possibility of sectarian discrimination and even violence, a total of around 14.5 million people responded to the Partition of India and the creation of two republics by migrating into the new India from the new Pakistan — or vise-versa. This migration event (really, a crisis) remains the largest in human history. Around 2.6 million Hindus left the part of Bengal that had become the Pakistani province East Pakistan and relocated into the part of Bengal that had become the Indian state of West Bengal. More generally: across what had been British India, communal violence of a religious stripe, including attacks on refugee trains, became widespread in the immediate aftermath of the Partition announcement. A particularly disturbing feature of the chaos was the abduction

9 and/or rape of women and girls, perhaps as many as 100,000 individuals. Britain’s abdication of responsibility in decoupling from its colony of India was undoubtedly a leading reason for the violent, bloody terror that came to characterize the Partition. One could say that the British attitude was “Let It Bleed.” ¶¶¶ On pages 133-134 of the 2017 edition of her study, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press), the renowned historian Yasmin Khan reflects that “[o]f all the horrors of 1947, the experience of the women who were raped” stands apart as “a history of broken bodies and broken lives.” She explains that “[r]ape was used as a weapon, as a sport, and as a punishment” and, thus, “sparked the deepest feelings of revenge, dishonor, and shame.” Khan makes multiple important points, not least: (1) that most rape- sufferers who survived rarely if ever spoke about the trauma; and (2) that “many of [the] victims were not really ‘women’ at all,” with some estimates suggesting that around one third were “under the age of twelve.” Knowing that Shibani was a child in Bengal in 1947 surely helps explain why she shields her daughter, Hema, to a significant degree. Eating and Not Eating ¶¶¶ The legacy of British rule in India is reflected in numerous ways. The image on the third page of these lecture notes shows the construction site of a huge cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, a city in northwest India. Although introduced by the British colonists, cricket is now considered by many to be India’s national sport. Kaushik’s favorite food, trifle (a custard-and-cream dessert) is also of British origin, and it provided the breakfast sustenance on the consequential day when he uncovered Emma Simonds’s “tombstone” in Hema’s presence. The marker stimulated the young man, who had “devoured bowl after bowl” of trifle, to reveal to Hema the tragedy of his mother’s health crisis (which was certainly no trifle in the sense of that word that means “insignificant thing.”)

¶¶¶ The careful reader may make a link between Kaushik’s considerable intake of the foodstuff trifle and his output of the grave truth that Parul is dying. Another term for trifle is fool; historically, cooks often used the words interchangeably (or fool was understood as a category-name for trifles and similar concoctions).

10 In Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Lear, few people will speak the truth to the powerful title character; a notable exception, however, is his ever-faithful acolyte, known as the Fool. That character proves to be a fearless truth-teller despite the fact that King Lear has the clout to coerce and punish him with “the whip.” In the cemetery episode, Kaushik acted in the manner that a so-called Wise Fool would by defying his mother’s wish of not “want[ing] anyone here [i.e. Stateside] to know” about her multiplying cancer and the hospital appointments that she and Dr. Choudhuri disguised as house-shopping. In a way, by choosing to be radically candid, Kaushik may have been honoring the Indian tradition associated with his name, which indicates a Brahmin (or elite Hindu) gotra (or lineage passed through the male line) that traces back to Vishwamitra, one of Ancient India’s greatest rishis (i.e. sages or wise-men). ¶¶¶ Arguably, Kaushik’s appropriation of trifle constituted an instance of the colonized “striking back” against the colonizer. In fine: as a Bengali or Indian, Kaushik enjoyed an opportunity to (both literally and metaphorically) get the cream, whereas historically the British — first as the British East India Company (1757-1858) and then as the Raj (1858-1947) — took from India layer upon layer of goods, from raw materials to finished luxury items. In the bigger picture: Kaushik and his parents (according to Hema’s memory) oscillated between consuming copious quantities of food and either declining food or causing food to be withheld. On the Choudhuris’ first evening at the house in Sharon, Kaushik “refus[ed] seconds” from the “[p]ans of food” prepared by Shibani, and Parul apologized because their tardy arrival from the airport had delayed the meal, resulting in Hema’s “[going] hungry because of us.” On a later occasion, Parul (in bed with a cold) “refused the food my mother made for the rest of us.” The text’s emphasis on food security is striking. Its opening episode, the farewell party in 1974, centers on such traditional Bengali dishes as “pullao [spice-fried rice],” with Shibani “worry[ing]” about “the quality and quantity of food,” a concern perhaps echoed in 1981, when she and husband “complain[ed]” that Hema’s use of a carrot for a snowman’s nose was “a waste of food.” Sometimes, in response to the availability of food, a character can act as if a threat existed of its not reappearing. Hema recollects being “fascinated” by Kaushik’s “practice” of “[eating] enormous amount of fruit, whole bunches of grapes, apples to their cores.” A notable moment in “Once in a Lifetime” comes when Hema fairly explicitly links food and politics by invoking weekend gatherings, hosted by her parents, where they and fellow Indian immigrants would “eat elaborate dinners and talk late into the evening about Indian politics.” ¶¶¶ Paralleling the Irish experience (to a degree), food has featured consequentially in Bengali history. One of the defining tensions in Bengal’s relationship with the British colonizer was famines. The policies of the British East India Company justly receive much blame for the Great Bengali Famine of 1769-1770, whose death toll may have been ten million. A poem written at the time (by John Shore, a senior British official) paints a distressing picture: “Still fresh in memory’s eye, the scene I view \ The shriveled limbs, sunken eyes, and lifeless hue \ Hear the mother’s shriek and infant’s moan \ Cries of despair and agonizing groans.” As for the Great Bengali Famine of 1943-1944 (almost exactly a century after Ireland’s Great Hunger or potato famine): its mortality figure of well over two million resulted from multiple factors, not least, World War II; an October 1942 tsunami; and a fungus affecting the rice crop. But another major factor was how the British colonial authorities — the Raj — mishandled and, thus, significantly exacerbated the disaster, which came to domestic and international public attention through the medium that “Once in a Lifetime” associates with Kaushik: the photograph. ¶¶¶ A turning point in the disaster was the courageous decision by Ian Stephens, editor-in-chief of the Calcutta-based, English-language Statesman newspaper to publish photo essays about famine victims in two Sunday issues: August 22 and 29 of 1943. In an editorial he composed to accompany the second essay, Stephens lambasted both governmental and commercial leaders for the “complacency and misjudgment, greed, myopia, and political spite” they exhibited when confronted by the human suffering in Calcutta and rural Bengal. The camera that Kaushik used was his father’s, and his parents’ being “slightly older” than Hema’s almost certainly means that they would have lived in Calcutta during the Famine of 1943-1944, not to mention the Partition of 1947. Given certain dates that the narrative provides, it seems reasonable to imagine that Dr. Choudhuri was born in or around 1938. It’s fascinating that the shot Hema feared Kaushik

11 taking with Dr. Choudhuri’s camera was one of her with “hands wedged up under [the] cheekbones” — “a pathetic display.” While Hema is no famine-victim, the description would, unfortunately, be all too appropriate in connection with several of the images that Stephens presented in The Statesman.

¶¶¶ Kaushik is the first of the Choudhuris identified by Hema as “refusing” food; and he is also the character in the tale most positive about India. Hema recalls his assertion, “I liked living in India,” as well as his exasperation over her comparative ignorance about that nation. At one juncture, he criticized her by asking, “Haven’t you ever looked at a map [of India]?” On another occasion, he questioned how truly engaged Americans typically are in their nation’s affairs, causing Hema to “feel responsible … for [her] [American] neighbors’ patriotism.” The inference is that Indians are considerably more invested than Americans in being historically informed patriots. As a young, pro-Indian man refusing food — or, indeed, eating food to excess, as if starving — Kaushik might well put readers of “Once in a Lifetime” in mind of another aspect of the Bengali consciousness of the dynamic between food and the British Empire. That matter is the 1929 prison hunger strike that the Bengali-born Indian nationalist Jatindra Nath Das (also referred to as Jatin Das or J.N. Das) sustained over 63 days until his death, aged just 24, from starvation. After Das expired (on September 13, 1929), the top British official in India, the Viceroy, communicated with the government in London concerning: (1) the “record size” of Das’s funeral procession, held in Calcutta; and (2) the numerous “[m]eetings of sympathy with [the late] Das and of condemnation of Government” that had been convened in multiple venues across India. Under the headline, “India: The [British] Empire’s Great Problem Today,” a fall 1929 British newsreel reported, “Fanatical hordes ‘martyrize’ Jatindra Nath Das, agitator!” ¶¶¶ Several Irish names occur in “Once in a Lifetime” — for example, Mrs. Hennessey, Hema’s piano teacher — however, the most remarkable is Kevin McGrath, the boy “two grades behind” Hema in school who “got lost” in the neighborhood woods and, despite helicopter and dog searches, was never found. The notion of a vanished Irish male fits with the discourse on refusing food in so far as the most internationally renowned instance of a hunger striker — and the inspiration for Das — was the Irish revolutionary Terence MacSwiney, who died on October 25, 1920, after a 74-day prison fast in an English jail. Upon Jas’s passing, MacSwiney’s family sent a telegram to Das’s, stating that it “[stood] by patriotic Indians in their hour of

12 sorrow and pride on the death of Jatin Das.” The message ended with the prediction, “Freedom is sure to arrive.” ¶¶¶ Questions and concerns. about Bengal’s political freedom and Hema’s emotional freedom propel “Once in a Lifetime,” a short story profoundly concerned with past events. In a way, both entities — Bengal and Hema — are held hostage to history, whether geopolitical or familial. It seems apt, then, that a matter of some interest to Kaushik — a matter explained to him by Hema — is the “yellow ribbons tied to … mailboxes” throughout the town of Sharon (and, indeed, across the US). Those ribbons symbolized being held hostage; specifically, they were remembrances of 52 Americas that a group of radicalized Iranian college students detained against their will in the US Embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran, for over a year (444 days, from November 1979 to January 1981). Lahiri’s brilliant tale does not end with a crystal-clear resolution for Hema; however, perhaps an indication that the act of narration has helped is her decision to include the following couple of references in the concluding paragraph: first, an invocation of “whole walls of glass”; second, a reflection about her being “on the other side of the wall” from her parents. ••• ••• •••

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