Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies


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      JHUMPA LAHIRI

      Interpreter of Maladies

       Stories

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge St London SE1 9GF

      www.harpercollins.co.uk This edition published by Flamingo 2000

      First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Flamingo

      First published in the USA in 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company

      Copyright © Jhumpa Lahiri 1999

      Jhumpa Lahiri asserts the moral right to be

      identified as the author of this work

      These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents

      portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

      actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      Some of the stories in this collection have appeared elsewhere, in a slightly different form: ‘A Temporary Matter’ in the New Yorker; ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’ in the Louisville Review; ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ in the Agni Review; ‘A Real Durwan’ in the Harvard Review; ‘Mrs Sen’s’ in Salamander; “This Blessed House’ in Epoch; and ‘The Treatment of Bibi Haldar’ in Story Quarterly.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN 9780006551799

      Ebook edition © AUGUST 2012 ISBN 9780007381647

      Version 2018-11-05

       Dedication

       For my parents and for my sister

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       A REAL DURWAN

       SEXY

       MRS. SEN’S

       THIS BLESSED HOUSE

       THE TREATMENT OF BIBI HALDAR

       THE THIRD AND FINAL CONTINENT

       Acknowledgments

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Praise

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       A Temporary Matter

      THE NOTICE INFORMED THEM that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years.

      “It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar’s. She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble.

      She’d come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her other hand. “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.”

      “When I’m here, you mean,” Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since January he’d been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in India. “When do the repairs start?”

      “It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?” Shoba walked over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn’t celebrated Christmas that year.

      “Today then,” Shoba announced. “You have a dentist appointment next Friday,