Interpreter of Maladies

The story begins with the narrator taking a cargo ship from India to England in 1964. In England, he lives in a house with more than a dozen other Bengali men. He lives there for several years, with men moving in and out when someone gets married, until his own marriage is arranged around the same time he is offered a job in the library at MIT in Boston.

He flies to Calcutta to get married before heading to Boston to begin his job; his wife, Mala, has been rejected several times, and though they spend five nights together, she cries each night, and he does not assuage her, choosing instead to read a guidebook of America. He arrives in America on the day the crew of the Apollo 11 lands on the moon. For a week, he stays at the YMCA and eats cornflakes for every meal; he is determined to live cheaply until his wife arrives in six weeks, but as he is looking for an apartment for both of them, he finds a room available immediately for eight dollars a week. He calls and makes an appointment.

At the house, a very old woman, Mrs. Croft, greets him. She is strange and stern—she demands the rent be paid on time and left above the piano, and she insists the narrator say that an American flag on the moon is “splendid.” This becomes their nightly ritual, with Mrs. Croft wearing the same old-fashioned clothes and demanding that the narrator sit with her to have the same conversation about the flag until she drifts off to sleep. On Friday, he hands the rent to her instead of putting it above the piano, and when he returns from work, she is still sitting in the same place holding the envelope; she says it was kind of him to hand it to her.

That Sunday, Mrs. Croft’s daughter Helen, who is in her late sixties, comes over. She brings groceries once a week, and she takes the time to meet with the narrator and interrogate him about his life. Mrs. Croft shouts for them to come downstairs and then chides them for being alone together, which she finds improper. Helen opens a week’s worth of soup for Mrs. Croft and leaves it in a saucepan; when the narrator questions this, Helen reveals that it’s all that Mrs. Croft will eat since she turned 100 years old. The narrator is alarmed by her extreme age and her widowhood—his father’s death drove his mother to grief. He begins to worry about Mrs. Croft. He thinks that he should do more than pay her rent, but he is not her son.

When Mala’s arrival approaches, the narrator begins to worry about his responsibility toward her. He finds an apartment for them and is disappointed that his departure from Mrs. Croft’s house is so meaningless to her. When Mala arrives, she has her head covered in a traditional display of modesty and keeps it covered after the narrator says she doesn’t have to. For the first week, he struggles to get used to her presence. He suggests they go out one night, and they end up paying a visit to Mrs. Croft’s house. Helen answers; Mrs. Croft has had an accident, and Helen asks if they will stay with her while Helen goes to the store.

Mrs. Croft fell off her bench in the night, and when she asks the narrator what he thinks of that, he says, without thinking, “Splendid!” Mala laughs, and for the first time, the narrator starts to think about the long life they will have together; he worries what Mrs. Croft will think of his wife, particularly in relation to her Indian identity, but Mrs. Croft says that she is perfect.

The narrator sees this moment as the one that began to soften him toward Mala. From that point on, they explore the city together, and they build a life and find their community. By the time the narrator comes across Mrs. Croft’s obituary, Mala is able to comfort him when he realizes how much it affects him.

The story ends with the narrator and Mala deciding to grow old together in Boston; they have a son who grows up and gets into Cambridge, and every time they visit him, the narrator makes a point to drive past Mrs. Croft’s house—she’s the first person he respected and mourned in America, and she is the one who helped him and Mala no longer be strangers. He thinks about the journey he has made to be in America; it’s an ordinary one, but when he thinks about it, he can’t imagine what he’s accomplished.