SUMMARY

     Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967) was born in London, but moved to the US at the age of 3.  Although she thinks of herself as an American, her stories often focus on the Indian immigrant experience including sacrifices that come with leaving one's home country.  Lahiri's first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was published in 1999, containing the short story, "Sexy."  This story is about Miranda, who enters into an affair with a married man, Dev.  Dev also makes her feel attractive, calling her "sexy" (which no one had done before) and treating her like a lady. However, after talking to her coworker's cousin's son, Rohin, who redefines the word "sexy" for her (as love for a stranger), she begins to realize the affair does not mean the same things to both her and Dev. This different understanding of the word highlights linguistic gaps that occur between different cultures and even different genders. Through her affair with Dev, Miranda is exposed to more of downtown Boston, opening up more of the world to her.  As she learns about Boston and about Dev's Indian culture, the story shows the postmodern multiculturalization of Miranda herself.  Her new experiences cause her to value different cultures, and learn and grow from them as a person, very much in the way the the postmodern multicultural movement in literature values the contributions of different cultures to the greater society.

     Bigger themes such as the treatment of "the other" also pervade the story. Miranda is reminded of her interactions with an Indian family, the Dixits, when she was growing up. She might view her affair with Dev as a chance to undo her past actions. Lahiri also uses issues of geography throughout her work, highlighting both Dev and Rohin's knowledge and Miranda's lack thereof. 

(WORD COUNT: 298)

QUOTES

"Miranda and Dev didn't argue. They went to movies at the Nickelodeon and kissed the whole time. They ate pulled pork and cornbread in Davis Square, a paper napkin tucked like a cravat into the collar of Dev's shirt. They sipped sangria at the bar of a Spanish restaurant, a grinning pig's head presiding over their conversation. They went to the MFA  and picked out a poster of water lilies for her bedroom. One Saturday, following an afternoon concert at Symphony Hall, he showed her his favorite place in the city, the Mapparium at the Christian Science Center, where they stood inside a room made of glowing stained-glass panels, which was shaped like the inside of a globe, but looked like the outside of one. " (3253)

•  With Dev, Miranda experiences new places in Boston, that are representative of different cultures and allow her to learn about the world outside of herself and what she has known growing up in Michigan.  Additionally, from her experience in Dev's "favorite place," Miranda gains a better understanding of geography and global relations, of which she had very little knowledge at the beginning of the story.  In the first two sentences of this passage, we also get a better idea of Dev and Miranda's relationship- it seems that their relationship is primarily based on attraction, and not as much on getting to know each other. 

"Rohin put down the almanac. 'You're sexy,' he declared. 'What did you say?' 'You're sexy.' Miranda sat down again. Though she knew it meant nothing, her heart skipped a beat. Rohin probably referred to all women as sexy. He'd probably heard the word on television, or seen it on the cover of a magazine. She remembered the day in the Mapparium, standing across the bridge from Dev. At the time she thought she knew what his words meant. At the time they'd made sense." (3262)

• Upon talking to Rohin, the meaning of the word "sexy" is no longer clear to Miranda. When she asks Rohin for his definition, he says "It means loving someone you don't know" (3263).  This definition calls into question everything that Miranda had been thinking about her relationship and it is at this moment that Miranda realizes she and Dev don't know each other as well as she may think. We learn at the end of the story that Dev and Miranda each hold to a different understanding of what the word "sexy" means.

"Miranda, then nine years old, had been too frightened to eat the cake. For months afterward she'd been too frightened even to walk on the same side of the street as the Dixits' house, which she had to pass twice daily, once to get to the bus stop, and once again to come home. For a while she'd even held her breath until she reached the next lawn, just as she did when the school bus passed a cemetery." (3256-3257)

• This memory illustrates Miranda's fear of "the other," that which is different, when she was a child.  The Dixits' Indian culture was mysterious and unfamiliar to her.  She didn't understand their ways, so she was afraid of them. Now, later on in her life, this fear of the unknown culture has turned into an attraction toward it, resulting in a feeling of shame for having behaved the way that she did as a child.  Postmodern multiculturalism says that we should not fear unfamiliar cultures, but embrace them and accept their value in society.

KEY TERMS

Postmodern multiculturalism- movement concerned with different cultures and their contribution to society. Literary works emphasize cultural dialects and ways of life.  They recognize that there is value in preserving these distinct cultural differences, not because they are vanishing, as with Regionalism, but because each culture is important as a part of the greater culture, and should be celebrated.

defamiliarize-allow experiences to be seen through a different viewpoint

Other material

Feel free to download the Google Earth .kmz file that I used during the lecture. You'll have to open the file within Google Earth, which is available to download for free.