Jhumpa Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies

At the end of August, Mala's passport and green car were ready. I received a telegram with her flight information; my brother's house in Calcutta had no telephone. Around that time I also received a letter from her, written only a few days after we parted. There was no salutation; addressing me by name would have assumed an intimacy we had not yet discovered. It contained only a few lines. "I write in English in preparation for the journey. Here I am very much lonely. Is it very cold there. Is there snow. Yours, Mala."
I was not touched by her words. We had spent only a handful of days in each other's company. And yet we were bound together; for six weeks she had worn an iron bangle on her wrist, and applied vermilion powder to the part of her hair, to signify to the world that she was a bride. In those six weeks I regarded her arrival as I would the arrival of a coming month, or season - something inevitable, but meaningless at the time. So little did I know her that, while details of her face sometimes rose to my memory, I could not conjure up the whole of it.

Indická večeře, indická kniha, jak prosté, nezmůžu se dnes na lepší asociaci (to už je poněkolikáté, flákota jsem!). Nenápadná povídková kniha, převážně o osudech Indů, žijících v našem koutě severní Ameriky. Potíže s přizpůsobováním se americké zběsilosti, hledání cesty mezi indickou výchovou a západním životním stylem, pocity cizince v Bostonu - Lahiriová vypráví zasvěceně a podrobně, zdálo se mi, že žádné straně vlastně nenadržuje, spíš tak trpělivě vysvětluje pohledy z obou stran. Každá povídka jako malá cesta.