How can I compose a list of short stories and not have Lahiri on it? If you exist in a particular ethnic and class niche – that is to say someone raised in the West, of bookish bent, whose family left India long ago – reading Lahiri is inevitable. And this story is something of a classic, from her debut prizewinning collection. Lahiri shows us Mrs Sen, an academic’s wife who babysits a young American boy, Eliot. Mrs Sen is seen through Eliot’s eyes when he goes to her house after school. The child is the only witness to Mrs Sen’s repressed desperation, her homesickness and her frustration with the lack of Indian home comforts in her new life.
“‘They think I live the life of a queen, Eliot.’ She looked around the blank walls of the room. ‘They think I press buttons and the house is clean. They think I live in a palace.’”
Published in Interpreter of Maladies, Flamingo, 2000
A Personal Anthology 