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a story. But I remember the excitement of watching my mother purchase it for me

Reflections and of bringing it home. Inside the front cover, beneath the declaration “This book is
especially for,” was a line on which to write my name. My mother did so, and also
Trading Stories wrote the word “mother” to indicate that the book had been given to me by her,
Notes from an apprenticeship. though I did not call her Mother but Ma. “Mother” was an alternate guardian. But
she had given me a book that, nearly forty years later, still dwells on a bookcase in my
By Jhumpa Lahiri June 6, 2011
childhood room.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant, and were of
little interest to me. There were books about China and Russia that my father read
for his graduate studies in political science, and issues of Time that he read to relax.
My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called
Desh, but they were in Bengali, even the titles illegible to me. She kept her reading
material on metal shelves in the basement, or off limits by her bedside. I remember a
yellow volume of lyrics by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which seemed to be a holy
text to her, and a thick, fraying English dictionary with a maroon cover that was
pulled out for Scrabble games. At one point, we bought the rst few volumes of a set
of encyclopedias that the supermarket where we shopped was promoting, but we
never got them all. There was an arbitrary, haphazard quality to the books in our
house, as there was to certain other aspects of our material lives. I craved the
opposite: a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and
cheerfully lining the walls. At times, my family’s effort to ll our house with books
seemed thwarted; this was the case when my father mounted rods and brackets to
hold a set of olive-green shelves. Within a few days the shelves collapsed, the
The author, at around the age of three, with her parents, Amar and Tapati, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Sheetrocked walls of our seventies-era Colonial unable to support them.
circa 1970.
Photograph courtesy Jhumpa Lahiri What I really sought was a better-marked trail of my parents’ intellectual lives:
bound and printed evidence of what they’d read, what had inspired and shaped their
ooks, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to
B possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a
minds. A connection, via books, between them and me. But my parents did not read
to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any ction, and the stories my
librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down. My rst
my parents considered buying books for me an extravagance, or perhaps because experience of hearing stories aloud occurred the only time I met my maternal
people generally acquired less then than they do now, I had almost no books to call grandfather, when I was two, during my rst visit to India. He would lie back on a
my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the bed and prop me up on his chest and invent things to tell me. I am told that the two
rst time. I was ve or six. The book was diminutive, about four inches square, and of us stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, and that my grandfather
was called “You’ll Never Have to Look for Friends.” It lived among the penny candy kept extending these stories, because I insisted that they not end.
and the Wacky Packs at the old-fashioned general store across the street from our
rst house in Rhode Island. The plot was trite, more an extended greeting card than
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Bengali was my rst language, what I spoke and heard at home. But the books of my My love of writing led me to theft at an early age. The diamonds in the museum,
childhood were in English, and their subjects were, for the most part, either English what I schemed and broke the rules to obtain, were the blank notebooks in my
or American lives. I was aware of a feeling of trespassing. I was aware that I did not teacher’s supply cabinet, stacked in neat rows, distributed for us to write out
belong to the worlds I was reading about: that my family’s life was different, that sentences or practice math. The notebooks were slim, stapled together, featureless,
different food graced our table, that different holidays were celebrated, that my either light blue or a brownish-yellow shade. The pages were lined, their dimensions
family cared and fretted about different things. And yet when a book was in my neither too small nor too large. Wanting them for my stories, I worked up the nerve
possession, and as I read it, this didn’t matter. I entered into a pure relationship with to request one or two from the teacher. Then, on learning that the cabinet was not
the story and its characters, encountering ctional worlds as if physically, inhabiting always locked or monitored, I began helping myself to a furtive supply.
them fully, at once immersed and invisible.
In the fth grade, I won a small prize for a story called “The Adventures of a
In life, especially as a young girl, I was afraid to participate in social activities. I Weighing Scale,” in which the eponymous narrator describes an assortment of
worried about what others might make of me, how they might judge. But when I people and other creatures who visit it. Eventually the weight of the world is too
read I was free of this worry. I learned what my ctional companions ate and wore, much, the scale breaks, and it is abandoned at the dump. I illustrated the story—all
learned how they spoke, learned about the toys scattered in their rooms, how they sat my stories were illustrated back then—and bound it together with bits of orange
by the re on a cold day drinking hot chocolate. I learned about the vacations they yarn. The book was displayed brie y in the school library, tted with an actual card
took, the blueberries they picked, the jams their mothers stirred on the stove. For me, and pocket. No one took it out, but that didn’t matter. The validation of the card and
the act of reading was one of discovery in the most basic sense—the discovery of a pocket was enough. The prize also came with a gift certi cate for a local bookstore.
culture that was foreign to my parents. I began to defy them in this way, and to As much as I wanted to own books, I was beset by indecision. For hours, it seemed, I
understand, from books, certain things that they didn’t know. Whatever books came wandered the shelves of the store. In the end, I chose a book I’d never heard of, Carl
into the house on my account were part of my private domain. And so I felt not only Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories.” I wanted to love those stories, but their old-
that I was trespassing but also that I was, in some sense, betraying the people who fashioned wit eluded me. And yet I kept the book as a talisman, perhaps, of that rst
were raising me. recognition. Like the labels on the cakes and bottles that Alice discovers
underground, the essential gift of my award was that it spoke to me in the
hen I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that, in the
W beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to
imperative; for the rst time, a voice in my head said, “Do this.”

connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at VIDEO FROM THE N YORKER
school. We would sit together, this friend and I, dreaming up characters and plots, Inside the Minds of the New Crossword Constructors
taking turns writing sections of the story, passing the pages back and forth. Our
handwriting was the only thing that separated us, the only way to determine which
section was whose. I always preferred rainy days to bright ones, so that we could stay
indoors at recess, sit in the hallway, and concentrate. But even on nice days I found
somewhere to sit, under a tree or on the ledge of the sandbox, with this friend, and
sometimes one or two others, to continue the work on our tale. The stories were
transparent riffs on what I was reading at the time: families living on prairies,
orphaned girls sent off to boarding schools or educated by stern governesses, children
with supernatural powers, or the ability to slip through closets into alternate worlds.
My reading was my mirror, and my material; I saw no other part of myself.

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accompanied me would be removed. My upbringing, an amalgam of two

hemispheres, was heterodox and complicated; I wanted it to be conventional and
contained. I wanted to be anonymous and ordinary, to look like other people, to
behave as others did. To anticipate an alternate future, having sprung from a different
past. This had been the lure of acting—the comfort of erasing my identity and
adopting another. How could I want to be a writer, to articulate what was within me,
when I did not wish to be myself ?

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

June 13 & 20, 2011

Life and Letters Fiction Briefly Noted Comm

The Russian Professor Asleep in the Lord Siberian Education Storm

As I grew into adolescence and beyond, however, my writing shrank in what seemed By Vladimir Nabokov By Jeffrey Eugenides By Eli
to be an inverse proportion to my years. Though the compulsion to invent stories
remained, self-doubt began to undermine it, so that I spent the second half of my
childhood being gradually stripped of the one comfort I’d known, that formerly It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for
instinctive activity turning thorny to the touch. I convinced myself that creative guidance, for in uence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing
writers were other people, not me, so that what I loved at seven became, by stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of
seventeen, the form of self-expression that most intimidated me. I preferred willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing
practicing music and performing in plays, learning the notes of a composition or short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this
memorizing the lines of a script. I continued working with words, but channelled my willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to
energy into essays and articles, wanting to be a journalist. In college, where I studied saying, “Listen to me.”
literature, I decided that I would become an English professor. At twenty-one, the
writer in me was like a y in the room—alive but insigni cant, aimless, something This was where I faltered. I preferred to listen rather than speak, to see instead of be
that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me seen. I was afraid of listening to myself, and of looking at my life.
alone. I was not at a stage where I needed to worry about rejection from others. My
t was assumed by my family that I would get a Ph.D. But after I graduated from
insecurity was systemic, and preëmptive, insuring that, before anyone else had the
opportunity, I had already rejected myself.
I college, I was, for the rst time, no longer a student, and the structure and system
I’d known and in some senses depended on fell away. I moved to Boston, a city I
For much of my life, I wanted to be other people; here was the central dilemma, the knew only vaguely, and lived in a room in the home of people who were not related
reason, I believe, for my creative stasis. I was always falling short of people’s to me, whose only interest in me was my rent. I found work at a bookstore, opening
expectations: my immigrant parents’, my Indian relatives’, my American peers’, above shipments and running a cash register. I formed a close friendship with a young
all my own. The writer in me wanted to edit myself. If only there was a little more woman who worked there, whose father is a poet named Bill Corbett. I began to visit
this, a little less that, depending on the circumstances: then the asterisk that the Corbetts’ home, which was lled with books and art—a framed poem by Seamus

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Heaney, drawings by Philip Guston, a rubbing of Ezra Pound’s gravestone. I saw the creative callings that they were known to the world, and had been described to me.
desk where Bill wrote, obscured by manuscripts, letters, and proofs, in the middle of My mother spoke of them reverently. She told me about the day that my grandfather
the living room. I saw that the work taking place on this desk was obliged to no one, had had to take his nal exam at the Government College of Art, in Calcutta, and
connected to no institution; that this desk was an island, and that Bill worked on his happened to have a high fever. He was able to complete only a portion of the portrait
own. I spent a summer living in that house, reading back issues of The Paris Review, he had been asked to render, the subject’s mouth and chin, but it was done so
and when I was alone, in a bright room on the top oor, pecking out sketches and skillfully that he graduated with honors. Watercolors by my grandfather were
fragments on a typewriter. brought back from India, framed, and shown off to visitors, and to this day I keep
one of his medals in my jewelry box, regarding it since childhood as a good-luck
I began to want to be a writer. Secretly at rst, exchanging pages with one other charm.
person, our prescheduled meetings forcing me to sit down and produce something.
Stealing into the office where I had a job as a research assistant, on weekends and at Before our visits to Calcutta, my mother would make special trips to an art store to
night, to type stories onto a computer, a machine I did not own at the time. I bought buy the brushes and paper and pens and tubes of paint that my uncle had requested.
a copy of “Writer’s Market,” and sent out stories to little magazines that sent them Both my grandfather and my uncle earned their living as commercial artists. Their
back to me. The following year, I entered graduate school, not as a writer but as a ne art brought in little money. My grandfather died when I was ve, but I have
student of English literature. But beneath my declared scholarly objective there was vivid memories of my uncle, working at his table in the corner of the cramped rented
now a wrinkle. I used to pass a bookshop every day on the way to the train, the apartment where my mother was brought up, preparing layouts for clients who came
storefront displaying dozens of titles that I always stopped to look at. Among them to the house to approve or disapprove of his ideas, my uncle staying up all night to
were books by Leslie Epstein, a writer whose work I had not yet read but whose get the job done. I gathered that my grandfather had never been nancially secure,
name I knew, as the director of the writing program at Boston University. On a lark and that my uncle’s career was also precarious—that being an artist, though noble
one day, I walked into the creative-writing department seeking permission to sit in and romantic, was not a practical or responsible thing to do.
on a class.
Abandoned weighing scales, witches, orphans: these, in childhood, had been my
It was audacious of me. The equivalent, nearly two decades later, of stealing subjects. As a child, I had written to connect with my peers. But when I started
notebooks from a teacher’s cabinet; of crossing a line. The class was open only to writing stories again, in my twenties, my parents were the people I was struggling to
writing students, so I did not expect Epstein to make an exception. After he did, I reach. In 1992, just before starting the writing program at B.U., I went to Calcutta
worked up the nerve to apply for a formal spot in the creative-writing program the with my family. I remember coming back at the end of summer, getting into bed, and
following year. When I told my parents that I’d been accepted, with a fellowship, almost immediately writing the rst of the stories I submitted that year in workshop.
they neither encouraged nor discouraged me. Like so many aspects of my American It was set in the building where my mother had grown up, and where I spent much
life, the idea that one could get a degree in creative writing, that it could be a of my time when I was in India. I see now that my impulse to write this story, and
legitimate course of study, seemed perhaps frivolous to them. Still, a degree was a several like-minded stories that followed, was to prove something to my parents: that
degree, and so their reaction to my decision was to remain neutral. Though I I understood, on my own terms, in my own words, in a limited but precise way, the
corrected her, my mother, at rst, referred to it as a critical-writing program. My world they came from. For though they had created me, and reared me, and lived
father, I am guessing, hoped it would have something to do with a Ph.D. with me day after day, I knew that I was a stranger to them, an American child. In
spite of our closeness, I feared that I was alien. This was the predominant anxiety I
y mother wrote poems occasionally. They were in Bengali, and were
M published now and then in literary magazines in New England or Calcutta.
had felt while growing up.

She seemed proud of her efforts, but she did not call herself a poet. Both her father I was my parents’ rstborn child. When I was seven, my mother became pregnant
and her youngest brother, on the other hand, were visual artists. It was by their again, and gave birth to my sister in November, 1974. A few months later, one of her
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closest friends in Rhode Island, another Bengali woman, also learned that she was y father, who, at eighty, still works forty hours a week at the University of Rhode
expecting. The woman’s husband, like my father, worked at the university. Based on Island, has always sought security and stability in his job. His salary was
my mother’s recommendation, her friend saw the same doctor and planned to deliver
at the same hospital where my sister was born. One rainy evening, my parents
M never huge, but he supported a family that wanted for nothing. As a child, I
did not know the exact meaning of “tenure,” but when my father obtained it I
received a call from the hospital. The woman’s husband cried into the telephone as sensed what it meant to him. I set out to do as he had done, and to pursue a career
he told my parents that their child had been born dead. There was no reason for it. It that would provide me with a similar stability and security. But at the last minute I
had simply happened, as it sometimes does. I remember the weeks following, my stepped away, because I wanted to be a writer instead. Stepping away was what was
mother cooking food and taking it over to the couple, the grief in place of the son essential, and what was also fraught. Even after I received the Pulitzer Prize, my
who was supposed to have lled their home. If writing is a reaction to injustice, or a father reminded me that writing stories was not something to count on, and that I
search for meaning when meaning is taken away, this was that initial experience for must always be prepared to earn my living in some other way. I listen to him, and at
me. I remember thinking that it could have happened to my parents and not to their the same time I have learned not to listen, to wander to the edge of the precipice and
friends, and I remember, because the same thing had not happened to our family, as to leap. And so, though a writer’s job is to look and listen, in order to become a
my sister was by then a year old already, also feeling ashamed. But, mainly, I felt the writer I had to be deaf and blind.
unfairness of it—the unfairness of the couple’s expectation, unful lled.
I see now that my father, for all his practicality, gravitated toward a precipice of his
We moved to a new house, whose construction we had overseen, in a new own, leaving his country and his family, stripping himself of the reassurance of
neighborhood. Soon afterward, the childless couple had a house built in our belonging. In reaction, for much of my life, I wanted to belong to a place, either the
neighborhood as well. They hired the same contractor, and used the same materials, one my parents came from or to America, spread out before us. When I became a
the same oor plan, so that the houses were practically identical. Other children in writer my desk became home; there was no need for another. Every story is a foreign
the neighborhood, sailing past on bicycles and roller skates, took note of this territory, which, in the process of writing, is occupied and then abandoned. I belong
similarity, nding it funny. I was asked if all Indians lived in matching houses. I to my work, to my characters, and in order to create new ones I leave the old ones
resented these children, for not knowing what I knew of the couple’s misfortune, and behind. My parents’ refusal to let go or to belong fully to either place is at the heart
at the same time I resented the couple a little, for having modelled their home on of what I, in a less literal way, try to accomplish in writing. Born of my inability to
ours, for suggesting that our lives were the same when they were not. A few years belong, it is my refusal to let go. ♦
later the house was sold, the couple moving away to another town, and an American
June
This article appears in the print edition of the June 13
June 13 &
13 & 20,
& 20, 2011
2011, issue.
20, 2011
family altered the façade so that it was no longer a carbon copy of ours. The comic
parallel between two Bengali families in a Rhode Island neighborhood was forgotten
by the neighborhood children. But our lives had not been parallel; I was unable to
forget this.

When I was thirty years old, digging in the loose soil of a new story, I unearthed that © 2019 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site
constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie
time, that rst tragic thing I could remember happening, and wrote a story called “A Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights. The material on this site may not be
reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written
Temporary Matter.” It is not exactly the story of what had happened to that couple, permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that
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nor is it a story of something that happened to me. Springing from my childhood,
from the part of me that was slowly reverting to what I loved most when I was
young, it was the rst story that I wrote as an adult.

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