Interpreter of Maladies

“What didn’t they know about each other? He knew she curled her fingers tightly when she slept, that her body twitched during bad dreams. He knew it was honeydew she favored over cantaloupe. He knew that when they returned from the hospital the first thing she did when she walked into the house was pick out objects of theirs and toss them into a pile in the hallway […]. When she was satisfied, she stood there staring at the pile she’d made, her lips drawn back in such distaste that Shukumar had thought she would spit. Then she’d started to cry.” 

There’s an irony at work between what Shukumar knows and doesn’t know—he’s correct that he has seen Shoba at her most vulnerable, but their distance from each other now keeps him from seeing the purpose of their game; he also doesn’t see the connection between her desire to throw away their belongings and her desire to leave him since he reminds her so much of their shared grief.

“It sickened Shukumar, knowing that she had spent these past evenings preparing for a life without him. He was relieved and yet he was sickened. This was what she’d been trying to tell him for the past four evenings. This was the point of her game.” 

For Shukumar, the game he and his wife have been playing is a move toward healing—after months of being emotionally distant from each other, he is starting to feel excited about their relationship again. The reveal that this was all a ruse for Shoba to work up the courage to leave him comes as a shock, but it is accompanied by ambivalence due to his feelings of relief.

“He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of the hospital. He had held him until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise.” 

One of the tensions surrounding the miscarriage is Shukumar’s absence, and he has allowed that image of him to persist through their period of grief, even though he arrived in time to hold their son. His final confession, which is in line with the rules of the game Shoba set out, is an act of cruelty and intimacy at the same time.

“It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands. Like my parents, Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before entering a room, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for dessert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea. Nevertheless my father insisted that I understand the difference […].” 

Lilia, the narrator of this story, has a child’s understanding of national identity and no real political understanding of the Partition of India, so she is unable to see how Mr. Pirzada’s presence in the household is significant. To her, they are the same. This view is bolstered by the way her education others both cultures; she has an Americanized idea of East Asian identity that lacks the nuance that her parents and Mr. Pirzada have.

“What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.”

Mr. Pirzada is bemused by the American idiosyncrasy of using thanks as a matter of politeness. To him, the thanks is undeserved, a view that echoes his own feelings of powerlessness in his situation; what is there to thank him for when he is trapped in the wrong country unable to help those he loves?

“What resulted was a disproportionately large hole the size of a lemon, so that our jack-o’-lantern wore an expression of placid astonishment, the eyebrows no longer fierce, floating in frozen surprise above a vacant, geometric gaze.”

The jack-o’-lantern, which was marred by Mr. Pirzada when he heard news of Dacca, is a symbol for his feelings in that moment and the family’s desire to help him get through this period of his life. Mr. Pirzada, in Lilia’s view, doesn’t seem to be someone in distress, but this moment makes it apparent. When Lilia returns home to a ruined jack-o’-lantern, she finds Mr. Pirzada in ruins, too, as violence has broken out in Dacca while she was trick-or-treating.

“It was similar to a feeling he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words [...] In those moments Mr. Kapasi used to believe that all was right with the world, that all struggles were rewarded, that all of life’s mistakes made sense in the end. The promised that he would hear from Mrs. Das now filled him with the same belief.” 

Mr. Kapasi takes an interest in Mrs. Das because her attention helps him feel seen, providing him with a sense of his own capability and worth that he has forgotten in his years in a loveless, grief-stricken marriage.

“‘My job is to give tours, Mrs. Das.’

‘Not that. Your other job. As an interpreter.’

‘But we do not face a language barrier. What need is there for an interpreter?’” 

Mrs. Das has taken a metaphoric view of Mr. Kapasi’s skills—she sees him as the person providing relief, whereas he sees himself primarily as a go-between. What she wants from him is for him to explain her to herself, but he cannot do that, and her confession has changed his view of her. They were both considering the idealized version of each other, not the reality.

“Why demand specifics? Why scrape lime from a betel leaf? Believe me, don’t believe me. My life is composed of such griefs you cannot even dream them.” 

Boori Ma’s story of her rich life before arriving at her present station is a topic of constant fascination for her, but the residents of her building have doubts. Boori Ma’s assertion here is part of the central theme of this story; the specifics of what she has lost are far less important than the loss itself, and the people in her building aren’t willing to empathize with her as someone who has lived a life before they met.

“But Boori Ma preferred to think that what irritated her bed, what stole her sleep, what burned like peppers across her thinning scalp and skin, was of a less mundane origin.” 

Boori Ma is a proud woman who has fallen into poverty yet retains her belief in her own significance. She does not want her problem to be something typical like prickly heat, preferring to have an ailment that is unique.

“‘Believe me, believe me,’ she said once more as her figure began to recede. She shook the free end of her sari, but nothing rattled.” 

Boori Ma’s assertion has shifted slightly; she now needs the compassion and empathy of the people around her at the exact moment they are casting her out. The final scene of the story reveals the truth to her—that her presence was only tolerated when she was useful to her neighbors.

“Unlike the boys she dated in college, who were simply taller, heavier versions of the ones she dated in high school, Dev was the first always to pay for things, and hold doors open, and reach across a table in a restaurant to kiss her hand. He was the first to bring her a bouquet of flowers so immense she’d had to split it up into all six of her drinking glasses, and the first to whisper her name again and again when they made love.” 

Miranda has an affair with Dev and continues to justify that affair despite witnessing the damage a similar situation is causing to Laxmi’s cousin, because he is the first person to treat their relationship with adult concepts of romance and sexuality. He is putting in effort that she hasn’t experienced before, though once his wife returns this all falls away as she begins to realize that they are both behaving in ways that are fundamentally selfish.

“Once she went so far as to try to inscribe the Indian part of her name, ‘Mira,’ into her Filofax […] It was a scribble to her, but somewhere in the world, she realized with a shock, it meant something.” 

Miranda’s fascination with Dev’s Indianness is a key part of her understanding of him as a romantic fascination; he is symbolic of a wider world that she doesn’t understand (and that he actively obfuscates, as when he discards the magazine that discusses India instead of further explaining it to her). Her desire to know how she fits into his Indian heritage drives her to engage with Indian food and film (if only superficially), which can be read as both a critique of American desire to exoticize Indian identity and an empathetic portrait of a woman in a relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic.

“He cupped his hands around his mouth, and then he whispered, ‘[Sexy] means loving someone you don’t know.’” 

Rohin inadvertently reveals the truth of Miranda’s relationship with Dev: Their attachment is inherently superficial, and he has no desire to deepen it in any way or fulfill any of her needs. There is no hope for intimacy between them, and that, coupled with facing down the sadness that Rohin and his mother are going through, leads Miranda to end her affair.

“She, too, looked around the room, as if she noticed in the lampshades, in the teapot, in the shadows frozen on the carpet, something the rest of them could not. ‘Everything is there.’”

Mrs. Sen has come to America to support her husband’s career, and she is deeply lonely. The ‘everything’ here is not just her physical belongings—she feels as though she has no place in America without access to her family.

“But when he sat with Mrs. Sen, under an autumn sun that glowed without warmth through the trees, he saw how that same stream of cars made her knuckles pale, her wrists tremble, and her English falter.

‘Everyone, this people, too much in their world.’” 

Mrs. Sen’s driving is a symbolic and literal act of independence in America; aside from the actual fear of being on the road, there’s also the fear of integrating into American society, which Mrs. Sen isn’t ready to do. She is overwhelmed by her own difference in this new context and only attempts to drive on her own after that difference is pointed out to her in an insulting way on public transportation.

“She seemed content with whatever clothes she found at the front of the closet, with whatever magazine was lying around, with whatever song was on the radio—content yet curious. And now all of her curiosity centered around discovering the next treasure.” 

This description of Twinkle is at the heart of Sanjeev’s problem with her; he is a striver, and she is content, and her sense of wonder with the discoveries she’s making in the house functions without concern for what others might think of her. It’s this lack of self-consciousness that grates most on Sanjeev, particularly as he tries to secure his position at his company.

“In truth, Sanjeev did not know what love was, only what he thought it was not. It was not, he had decided, returning to an empty carpeted condominium every night, and using only the top fork in his cutlery drawer, and turning away politely at those weekend dinner parties when the other men eventually put their arms around the waists of their wives and girlfriends, leaning over every now and again to kiss their shoulders or necks.” 

Sanjeev is torn—he doesn’t think he loves Twinkle, and he thinks they may be a bad match, but he also sees how lonely his life has been up until their marriage. He is more interested in running away from that loneliness than in pursuing someone who would actually be a good fit for him.

“He thought of all the things he could do, undisturbed. He could sweep Twinkle’s menagerie into a garbage bag and get in the car and drive it all to the dump, and tear down the poster of weeping Jesus, and take a hammer to the Virgin Mary while he was at it.”

The story ends on an ambivalent note—Sanjeev doesn’t do any of these things, choosing instead to move his wife’s shoes for her, and he accepts his wife’s fascination with the Christian paraphernalia despite his hating it specifically because she loves it. At this moment, he indulges what he might do were he more like Twinkle in his attitude toward what other people think of him.

“GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETERS, SEEKS HUSBAND.” 

The advertisement for Bibi as a wife is obviously insulting to her and only enough for her cousin to say he tried. Throughout the story, the cousin’s behavior toward Bibi is similar—she is a burden to be borne, not a person to love and care for.

“But she was not our responsibility, and in our private moments we were thankful for it.” 

The townspeople who narrate this story are not much different from the cousin, all told, though they are able to operate from a position of superiority because they don’t have any real stake in Bibi’s life. When the cousin leaves Bibi alone, they do little to intervene or take care of her, choosing instead to keep a passive eye on her.

“By then, of course, there was no flag standing on the moon. The astronauts, I had read in the paper, had seen it fall before they flew back to Earth. But I did not have the heart to tell her.” 

Mrs. Croft’s fascination with the moon landing touches the narrator of “The Third and Final Continent,” particularly once he knows her true age. The flag on the moon—an obvious symbol of cultural greatness and accomplishment—has fallen, but the narrator spares Mrs. Croft from the truth.

“On Fridays I made sure to put the rent in her hands. There was nothing I could do for her beyond these simple gestures. I was not her son, and apart from those eight dollars, I owed her nothing.”

The narrator comes to care for Mrs. Croft in his short time living with her, and his fondness for her is a natural extension of his role in caring for his ill (now deceased) mother and his anticipation of how he will start a family of his own with his new bride. The small act of giving her rent reminds him of the obligations that have passed and the obligations to come.