To read this book was a painfully sweet agony. The manner in which Jhumpa Lahiri has chronicled the events and emotions of her characters is sickeningly genuine. It would suffice to say that I could not have written such an account of my own life. Her prose is so effervescent that you feel like you are living in her world.

The story is about a migrant family from India that settles in US – their aspirations, struggle, and everyday life; the teenage troubles of children accentuated because of the conflicting cultures at home and in society; the struggle of the wife to adjust to the cultural shock; the husband who shoulders all the responsibility in the background. They all learn, fight, move away, and come together having won some wars and lost others.

It is unfathomable for me to believe that one could write so deeply about fictional characters. For instance, about the wife who battles loneliness at home on a foreign soil, Lahiri writes:

“For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.”

Can this be written without experiencing pregnancy, or without being a foreigner, and only by observation? May be Jhumpa had experienced pregnancy by the time of writing this book, but she was definitely just an observer of a foreigner – her parents. Of course, even if it is inspired from her real life, it is no ordinary talent that would lead to such a selection and arrangement of words.

It is a book that will force you to think about your lives, relationships, and question the mundane routine of it. Here is another excerpt from towards the end that I loved where Gogol, the son, sits reminiscing:

“… These events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”

Another point that amazed me while reading is how inconspicuously the author paces the book. The book lingers on a scene – etching out the whole ceremony when the newborn is given his first grain step by step, or when Gogol meets Ruth (a girl he will eventually date) on the train; and yet she manages to tell a story straddling 4-5 decades in her book. Here is an example:

“In the autumn of his sophomore year, he boards a particularly crowded train at Union Station. It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. He edges through the compartments, his duffel bag heavy with …

(A scrupulous description about his train ride follows where he meets Ruth – in around 1500 words, or about 4 pages of a novel! And then they part at a station after exchanging numbers. So he thinks about her on his onwards journey)

… Most often he thinks of the train, longs to sit beside her again, imagines their faces flushed from the heat of the compartment, their bodies cramped in the same way, her hair shining from the yellow lights overhead. On the ride back he looks for her, coming each and every compartment…”

Observe how she so effortlessly skips the details about the vacation – his reason for boarding the train in the first place! Not even a line or a word is mentioned about it. And yet, if feels so natural because the reader is enchanted with the development of this new love affair, is enticed by a longing heart – will he find her?

This book is the first fiction book that I have read that has been written in present tense, as opposed to the past tense that most authors prefer to write in. And I did not notice that until I had already read some pages.

It is one of those books that I will remember as deep and sentimental, would want to read again at times, but will never be able to bring myself to do so; because, as I said, it is a painfully sweet agony.