A Temporary Matter: A Symbol of Immigrant Experience by Richie Dee

                          A Temporary Matter: A Symbol of Immigrant Experience

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories that commonly talks about home and identity.  It explores the lives of South-Asian immigrants who moved to the United States. The stories revolve around the challenges that usually happen to immigrants’ family as they adapt to a new culture far different from their own. In one of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter,” there was a married couple, Shoba and Shukumar, who were once a happy and a romantic couple living together until a tragedy happened that tore their relationship apart. It was the day when Shoba gave birth without Shukumar by her side. As the news came that their baby died prior to birth, they changed a lot as a couple. When the electric company announced blackouts for five days, the couple had seen it as an opportunity to reconcile. However, when the electricity came back, Shoba surprisingly mentioned about ending their marriage. This story has a tone of longing and isolation despite being together like what immigrants feel when transferring from one country to another, that results in losing their sense of belongingness and alienation to their new homes. In one of Jhumpa Lahiri’s interview, she stated that she, as an immigrant, longs for finding her identity. She felt that moving from India to the United States made her belong into two separate worlds, and worse, none of these. She had been feeling uneasy not knowing where she really belongs and what culture she should abide, therefore, describing it as living two different lives (Readers Read 2003). Remembering her close bond with India, she finds it difficult to claim the United States as her home, for she feels a bit of an outsider (Densingh 2012).

Immigrants suffer not just culture shock but also experience loss of identity through diasporic experiences. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, diaspora is defined as the “dispersion of any people from their original homeland”. It includes ideas about multiplicity and differences of cultures, traditions, languages, history, individuals, society, places, and time (Densingh 2012). Robert Cohen defines diaspora as "the communities of people living together in one country who acknowledge that the old country-- a nation often buried deep in language, religion, custom or folklore-- always has some claim on their loyalty and emotions" (Densingh 2012). After immigrants move to and from one culture, language, traditions and values to another, it allows them to see the reality of being in a diasporic state in which they constantly shift their concept of identity between their homeland and their adopted home. This paper aims to prove that in “A Temporary Mater,” Jhumpa Lahiri used symbolism to present the process in the lives of immigrants being driven to leave their country, change their lifestyles and then yearn to find their identity by going back to their home countries, as in Shoba and Shukumar’s situation throughout their marriage.

Lahiri used a particular situation in the story where it symbolizes the drive or the need that makes immigrants leave their country. In the middle of the story, it was said that when Shoba had an emergency labor three weeks prior her due date, Shukumar attended a conference in which Shoba insisted that he should go. When a telephone call from the hospital reached Shukumar, he immediately returned and went to the hospital. Unfortunately, it was too late: the baby was born dead(2). After the death of their son, it followed that Shoba put some things away, piled them up, cried and grew anxious, but Shukumar did not bother coming in her way. It was also stated in the story that when Shoba was still pregnant, the couple was happy and intimate with each other. But after the tragedy, they “became experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible.”(3) He thought of how he no longer looked forward to weekends, of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled or whispered his name, and how they no longer reached for each other's body before sleeping (3).

This portrayed the beginning of the change they experience as a married couple. They failed to connect with each another and they have fallen into a habit that made them deal with their emotional grief alone (Briseno 2017). Moving away from each other made them lose their identity and forget their duties to each other as husband and wife. Similarly, when immigrants are forced, driven or just have to leave their home countries to settle for good in an alien country, the traditions and cultures from where their personalities were shaped from are being threatened by the norms of their adopted homes. Immigrants now feel the loss of their sense of belongingness in their own new homes like the loss Shoba and Shukumar felt in their own home regardless of being together as a couple. Thus, Lahiri used the situation wherein the death of Shoba and Shukumar’s son became the drive or the primary reason for the change they had, as a symbol for what drives the immigrants to leave their home countries. For them, migrating also results to a big change they will face such as losing their identity and sense of belongingness.

Readers of this story would react that the Shoba and Shukumar changed not just their lifestyles but also their roles in their home. The death of their son provokes the couple to switch gender roles (Chi-Wi K 2009). At the beginning of the story, when Shukumar is on his way to the conference while Shoba is waving him goodbye at the house door holding her belly, it depicts a normal setting that a husband will work for the aid if his family and the wife will be at home doing chores. But now, when the electric outage was announced, Shoba said that “they should do this sort of thing during the day." And Shukumar answered her “When I'm here, you mean.”(1) This reveals that Shoba filled herself and took her time outside the house to go to work, take additional projects, go to the gym and do other outside errands while Shukumar stayed at home to write about his dissertation, cooks for dinner and being lazy to do groceries, to get a mail, to pay bills and other house chores. The couples find comfort where the other does not frequent rather than find comfort to each other. Furthermore, they changed how they function and how they respond to their responsibilities. Shukumar said that Shoba has now “treated the house as if it were a hotel”(3). Shukumar’s description that “she wasn’t this way before”(3) marks the character’s transformation which implies that Shoba feels that the house has become more of a temporary space to stay for a while rather than a permanent space or home that she lives in with Shukumar. In viewing the story as a reflection of the experiences of immigrants, this passage seems to symbolize the feeling that immigrants have about their adopted homes. For many immigrants, the country in which they have migrated is seen as a space they simply dwell in and not having a care for it, like a hotel, where they stay because of being away, physically and culturally, from the place they really consider home (Briseno 2017).

This changing of the couple’s roles and responsibilties is similar to that of immigrants when they change their lifestyles-how they live within the different norms, values, cultures and tradition on their new adopted homes. As immigrants move from one place to another, they will have to adjust to their adopted homes, to follow the rules and force themselves to be one with the people living there. If they don’t, they will be isolated , which will create anxiety and lose a sense of belongingness to where they now claim as their homes. Shukumar and Shoba lost the same in their own home while isolating themselves from one another. In the beginning of the story, Shoba has become “what she'd once claimed she would never resemble.”(1) It is the same when immigrants force themselves to change their personalities as they switch to another culture, of which they don’t expect they would become. As they create their new identities, they forgot their pledge to their home land, to keep their culture within them. It is similar with what Shoba and Shukumar did when they came up with their new roles, they forgot to keep their marriage vows to each other.

As immigrants have been facing this change of lifestyles after being driven to leave their home countries, they long to go back to their old lifestyles, their old cultures, traditions and home. Many times, in the middle as well as in the near end of the story, longing for one’s old home country was symbolized. First, when Shoba tried to reconsider doing her duty again as a wife to Shukumar when “she would rest her hands on his shoulders and stare with him into the blue glow of the computer screen”(4) and then tell him "Don't work too hard”(4). But Shukumar knows that she was just forced to do it. Similarly, whenever immigrants try to be like their old selves, it seems that it is hard for them to naturally be like one of the natives from their old countries because their personalities have been mixed now with the cultures of their adopted home which confuses them to what and where they really belong. Second, when Shukumar wrote a dissertation of the Agrarian Revolts in India-- a revolt in India against the decree of the British East India Trading Company (1852-1857), which caused the enormous scattering of people from the place they call “home“(Briseno 2017)-- it was said that the thing that motivated him to write about India as his final paper is his father who died and the memories, characteristics, and hobbies he had as an Indian. Shukumar wants to know more about India which he did not had the chance before because when he got sick, his parents moved Shukumar away from whatever causes his sickness in India. This effort or desire he has enables Shukumar to reconcile his own self back to his old and original self to find more about his identity as an Indian race and not just an immigrant in United States. Immigrants somehow also long to go back to their own countries and remember how they were differently from what they had become. They constantly want to feel belonged thus constantly staying in touch with what is happening to their home countries. Lastly, when Shoba announced the end of their marriage and wanted some time alone, it was like she stated that she wants to find and restore her lost identity as many people do when they want to be alone. It symbolizes the desire of immigrants to go back where they were formed as a unique personality and regain their cultural identities that was lost.

This story expresses the situation and feeling of many people who struggle to build and rebuild a sense of self while constantly shifting notions of home (Briseno 2017). These symbolism in Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” let the readers view the unstableness every immigrants feel whenever they force themselves to belong in a country which puts pressure to their own personalities and their lives as a family. They then tend to alter their personalities and adjust with the cultures of their new homes. After all the adjustments, changes and efforts to try to become one with their adopted homes, immigrants still feel incomplete and lost because they still doesn’t let go of a part of the culture of their homeland regardless of the influences of the culture of their adopted homes. Their orginal culture is threatened to be hidden inside themselves in order to fit in a different society. Still, immigrants miss their old selves and suffer from homesickness. They long to go back to their home countries. They desire that their nationalities will not always be divided into two cultures. Generally, it shows that even in someone’s own home, individuals still experience conflicts and sill cannot control the circumstances they will face until the only solution is to change themselves.

Sources Cited:

Densingh, L.D. Easter Raj. “Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies: An Exploration of the Diasporic            Realities .” Language In India, 2012. Vol. 12, 60–68.

Kim, Mary Chi-Whi. "Interior Frontiers in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies." N.p., n.d. 2009. Web.

Briseno, Aaron. “Notions of Home, Identity and Belonging in Fiction, Sketching in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and “The Interpreter of Maladies.” Inspire at Redlands.2017.Web