Jhumpa Lahiri was born on July 11, 1967. She has the Bengali background by her parentage. She is interested in learning various languages, which she mentioned in her recent work, “In Other Words”. She possessed a number of awards to her credit in the literary field. She is a leading diasporic writer holds a distinctive place in the literary world. Her short stories represent the experiences of the various set of people both in India and America. Most of the research articles on Lahiri focused only on the viewpoint of feminism, culture and gender studies, thematic approach etc. “The narrative is not the story itself but rather the telling of the story” (miamioh.edu). According to the above saying, Lahiri’s way of storytelling is something related to her personal touch. Since she too is an immigrant she perfectly explicit the feelings in her narratives. This research paper focuses her "A Real Durwan" one of the short stories in her famous collection "Interpreter of Maladies" in narratological point of view by …show more content…
This is one of the stories in the famous collection Interpreter of Maladies. Boori Ma is the main character of the story. She has a good background but now she is a poor sweeper in the particular apartment. To console her poverty she recited her luxurious past to the people. Even though they have doubt in her saying they look her as an entertainer. She acts as a durwan for the building. The people things they do not need a real durwan for the building because they have no valuables. Later in the story, they equipped their status and blamed Boori Ma for a theft. Poor Boori Ma too lost her savings in the market but says nothing when they charged her. She only says that she did not inform the robbers. Anyway, at the end, they sent her out and looking for a real durwan for the building. Thus, the story ends. The following application will enrich the meaning and gives the story
...is an American by virtue but Indian due to her parent’s upbringing. That is the reason why she is referred to being an Indian-American author which she has embraced. Due to the fact Bengali marries within their caste, Lahiri married a Latin American Journalist Alberto Vourvoulias and have two sons, Octivian and Noor. After getting married, Lahiri does not feel the need to be shy about speaking in Bengali or any other language. Currently residing in Rome with her family to feel how immigrants adapt to change and to go experience what her characters and parents do in her short stories. Through writing, Lahiri has discovered the fact she belongs to both the worlds and the generations of Indian-American immigrants will change and bring intense joy. "It has been liberating and brought me some peace to just confront that truth, if not to be able to solve it or answer it.”
This man handles a knife with him. He was thinking to kill someone to revenge for poor people. That man was arrested by the police. The writer said the man was thinking about the way to solve the problems between the wealthy class and the poor class. Then, the writer described the tenements. The tenements look bad. All that tenements in New York were hard to live in it. Then, the writer gave facts about the people’s life in the tenements. The writer said he never said that New York had tenements less slum than those in old cities. After that, he said that the dangerous class, which is poor class, is less dangerous than the other classes. He blames the wealthy people because of the poverty of the other people. He said that he talked about tenement problems in a meeting. He talked to protestant denominations, and they discussed it. He said that a few of business men was listening to the cry of a Christian, who said that those people can’t understand the love of God because they are only a greedy men. They tried to give a solution that instead of the thinking of the man with the knife. At last, the writer wrote his discussion with a minister, and he said that the minister must put the man where he can respected
Sen had been forcefully removed from her homeland Boori Ma also had to emigrate, unfortunately when Boori Ma arrives at her new home she has a warped sense of reality. While Mrs. Sen left for marital reasons, Boori Ma left due to the Partition. Written by Lahiri, A Real Durwan Portrays the life of Boori Ma, an elderly woman who was separated from her family. She spends her days cleaning the apartment complex and warding off strangers all the while reminiscing about the good times of her old life. While reminiscing about her old life Boori Ma talks about possessions from that life. “The turmoil had separated her from a husband, four daughters, a two-story brick, house, a rosewood almari, and a number of coffer boxes whose skeleton keys she still wore, along with her life savings, tied to the tree end of her sari.” (Lahiri 71) This displays what Boori Ma has lost from her separation. Clashing with what Boori Ma currently has living in the apartments as well it is clear that Boori Ma has lost a lot of her culture in the partition as well. She went from a happy mother of four to a durwan. A durwan is a gatekeeper whose job is to keep away strangers, this is the position of a warrior. The cultural shift for her was detrimental. In addition it is interesting that even though Boori Ma does not possess any of the locked items that the skeleton keys unlock she still keeps the keys with her. They are in practice useless, she cannot unlock anything with them. They
Jhumpa Lahiri composed the two short stories: “Interpreter of Maladies” and “Sexy” that conveyed the recurring theme of feeling like an outsider. During the first story, “Interpreter of Maladies,” there was a character named Mr. Kapasi, a “self-educated man,” who was a “devoted scholar of foreign languages,” who dreamed of becoming an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, where he could aid in “resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides” (Interpreter of Maladies). This dream became a fantasy after his parents settled his arranged marriage that turned for the worse. Mr. Kapasi’s wife “had little regard for his career as an interpreter,”and she despised the thought of him
Boo’s story begins in Annawadi, a trash-strewn slum located by the Mumbai International Airport. This “sumpy plug of slum” had a population of three thousand people living within 335 huts (Boo, 2011, xi). The land owned by the Airport Authority of India and was surrounded by five hotels that Abdul’s younger brother described as “roses” versus their slum, “the shit in between” (Boo, 2011, xi). Abdul is a Muslim teenage who buys garbage of the rich and sells it to recyclers to support his family. Abdul’s family, Muslim, is a religious minority in the slum of Hindus; in fact a major element of tension within the book can be distilled to these Hindu-Muslim tensions. This difference in religion makes Abdul fearful of his neighbors for two reasons: (1) they would attempt to steal the family’s wealth, and (2) if Abdul were caught, he would not be able to support his family. The other major character was Fatima, a woman who burned herself by attempting suicide through self-immolation. She accused Abdul, his father, and sister of beating and threatening her; in India, it is against the law to convince someone else to kill him or herself. With a corruption-ridden legal sys...
Old Man Warner, an important person in society, advocates villagers continue to participate in the dated tradition of the lottery. The result of this was an innocent citizen in the village getting hurt. While the drawing and calling of names for the lottery is occurring,
Lahiri, a second-generation immigrant, endures the difficulty of living in the middle of her hyphenated label “Indian-American”, whereas she will never fully feel Indian nor fully American, her identity is the combination of her attributes, everything in between.
For all Annawadians except Asha, corruption ingrained in society prevents the impoverished citizens of a Mumbai slum from being able to become successful in life. Despite working hard, saving money, and only wanting to better the life of their family, the Husains’s story is demonstrative of the fact that an unintentional entanglement in the “great web of corruption” “in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched” could easily lead to near ruin (Boo 115). Over the course of her narrative, Boo shows that Annawadians recognize the issues of corruption present in their society, and the fact that they lack the power to change the system. For Annawadians, the courage and aspiration to become more successful in life meant taking a gamble, and Boo shows that their gamble could only be made in a system where the odds were forced against their
The author of the story was born in 1967 in London, and soon after she moved to Rhode Island in the United States. Although Lahiri was born in England and raised in the United States and her parent’s still carried an Indian cultural background and held their believes, as her father and mother were a librarian and teacher. Author’s Indian heritage is a strong basis of her stories, stories where she questions the identity and the plot of the different cultural displaced. Lahiri always interactive with her parents in Bengali every time which shows she respected her parents and culture. As the author was growing up she never felt that she was a full American, as her parents deep ties with India as they often visited the country.
The story begins with the passing of Grandmama. She has promised to send the family a sign of her leaving, a clear message that her life ended well. Father believes that without a clear sign, the family fortunes could be “altered, threatened”. Both Father
The two character, the young and the old, the poor and the rich, the prisoner and the official, the civilized and the barbaric, the narrator and the silent one, successfully, perfectly achieve the goal of the overturn of the colonial discourse. The magistrate is the strong, powerful part in terms of discourse. Comparatively, he is old and weak, with less physical power, while the barbarian girl is young and lively. During their journey back to the barbarian girl’s tribe, the magistrate along with others got very sick after drinking the water. However the barbarian girl was the only one to stay healthy.
The story Q & A, written by Vikas Swarup, illustrates the lives of those in the slums of India and how those living there experience life. The novel recites the unimaginable journey of a slum dog who becomes a billionaire. Throughout the rags to riches story of Ram Mohammed Thomas, he is presented with several catalysts which change his life.
Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, and involving persons renowned and of superior attainments... the writer presents incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to interpret its
Some people believe that opposites attract. Others believe that people who are more similar will have a better relationship. Some prefer relationships with older people, and some prefer them with younger people. Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, explores the dynamic of relationships in her works. In her short story “Interpreter of Maladies” a married woman confesses a secret to a man she barely knows. In her story “This Blessed House” a couple fights over the religious relics they find in their new home. While one reads Lahiri’s stories, a theme begin to emerge that shows the woman of the relationship behaving like an adolescent and the man behaving like her father due to the internalized idea of
The corruption in hospitals, where “doctors can keep their government salary and work in private hospitals”, sees people like Balram’s father die of horrible deaths every day. Dismayed by the lack of respect of the government for its dying citizens, Balram is corrupted by the fact that in the “darkness”, there is no service, not even in death. Balram also claims that “the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money”, which was for a government funded lunch program. However, Balram doesn’t blame him, which justifies that Balram, from such a young age gives into the idea of corruption saying that “...you can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet”. In addition to his father and the school teacher, Balram is corrupted by his childhood hero Vijay. Growing up, Balram idolises Vijay for having escaped “the darkness”. However what he is ignorant of is that even though Vijay is in “the light” he is still corrupted by “the darkness”. Balram explains that “Vijay and a policemen beat another men to death”, yet he doesn’t see it as a problem, because he understand that one cannot become successful in such a corrupt system without becoming as corrupt as the system itself. It is here that Adiga asks the question of how are impoverished Indians are expected to refuse to engage in corruption when they live in such poor conditions. Thus, the reader is able to sympathize with Balram’s corruption,