This story, which describes the narrator’s journey from Calcutta to London in 1964, and then, five years later to Boston, is funny and entertaining, but also deeply moving. I’ve travelled in India and lived in America and adjusted to the differences between Britain and both countries, and I wondered whether this was partly why I found it so relatable, but I think that really, it’s because it’s a story about a common human experience: being alone in a strange place and gradually finding community and a connection with others.
The bulk of the story, set in Boston in 1969, where the narrator works in a library at MIT, centres on his relationship with his first American landlady, a woman of 103, who lives alone and takes in students as lodgers. The narrator’s interactions with her begin with her insistence that he says, “Splendid!” every time she announces that there’s an American flag on the moon, a request which leaves him “baffled and somewhat insulted”, but becomes a comforting ritual between them. Their relationship opens out into tenderness and a sense of warm attachment, and the point where he finds out how old she is and thinks back to how he took care of his own widowed mother as a teenager is very emotional.
The story of settling in a new country is interspersed with the story of the narrator’s new wife, Mala, who he has left with his brother in London, to wait for the documents which will allow her to join him and who cries every night for India and her parents. It’s an arranged marriage and though the narrator comes across as warm, kind, and well-meaning in every other area of his life, he has little sympathy for Mala, who he barely knows. It’s only when she finally arrives in Boston and he introduces her to his erstwhile landlady, who scrutinises her with what at first seems like hostility, that he starts to see her more empathetically:
“I remembered my first days in London, learning how to take the Tube to Russell Square, riding an escalator for the first time, unable to understand that when the man cried “piper”, it meant “paper”, unable to decipher, for a whole year, that the conductor said “Mind the gap” as the train pulled away from each station. Like me, Mala had travelled far from home, not knowing where she was going, or what she would find, for no other reason than to be my wife.”
First published in the New Yorker and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
