The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

¶ … Maladies

An Alternative Title for "The Interpreter of Maladies"

The Interpreter of Maladies," which opens up Jhumpa Lahiri's 1999 collection of short stories and provides the book's title, is a tale of a marriage gone wrong and a fantasy of adultery gone wrong. The story relates the experiences of the Dases, an unhappy Indian-American couple visiting the Sun Temple at Konarak with their three children. Mr. Kapasi, their local guide, also works at a doctor's office, where he acts as an interpreter for the patients. He is fascinated by Mina Das and her American ways, and grows excited when she gives him her American address. Then, he finds his idealized conception of her shattered when she reveals that her children are not fathered by her husband, but by another man. She clearly hopes, in her exotic, Americanized view of her native culture, to gain some reprieve from confessing this sin to Mr. Kapasi, but he can only ask: "Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?" (66) the character's illusions of purity and sexuality fused into one perfect Indian-American woman vanish.

The Interpreter of Maladies" functions as a kind of tragic-comedy of romantic and cross-cultural miscommunication. Another story from the collection, "The Third and Final Continent" addresses similar themes with a more positive narrative spin. It would thus offer another possible lead story to the collection, as it also addresses the divide between Indian and American cultures in a romantic context. The narrator, like the interpreter Mr. Kapasi, is to some extent bicultural. He has lived and studied in Calcutta, England, and America and is engaged to a woman through an arranged marriage. The story chronicles his first months in America, as he becomes acquainted with the new culture and eventually his frightened new wife. However, rather than ending on a pessimistic note that stresses the distance that exists between America and India, and husband and wife, the newly married couple form a bond. This occurs when the narrator's landlady approves of his new wife, even though she is wearing a sari. The man begins to feel closer towards his newly arrived bride and to America all at once.

Interestingly, according to the author: "The title came to me long before the book did, or, for that matter, the story to which it refers," after she met a medical translator ("A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri," From a Reader's Guide for Interpreter of Maladies, 1999). She vowed, "one day I'll write a story with that title [interpreter of maladies]. When I was putting the collection together, I knew from the beginning that this had to be the title story, because it best expresses, thematically, the predicament at the heart of the book -- the dilemma, the difficulty, and often the impossibility of communicating emotional pain and affliction to others, as well as expressing it to ourselves" ("A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri," From a Reader's Guide for Interpreter of Maladies, 1999). Cultural miscommunication is a metaphor for romantic miscommunication and vice versa.