involving the character narrator’s adjustment to Cambridge and those involv-
ing his—and his wife Mala’s—adjustment to their arranged marriage, which
took place in Calcutta shortly before the character narrator departed for the
United States. The character narrator’s adjustment to both situations is also
complicated by his recently having watched his own mother’s very painful
decline and death. But before Mala joins him in Cambridge, he lives for six
weeks in a room he rents from a 103-year-old woman, Mrs. Croft. She initiates
him into U.S. culture with what I will call the Splendid Ritual: she exclaims,
“There is an American flag on the moon!” (182) and requires him to respond
by shouting, “Splendid.” Mrs. Croft also becomes what Judith Caesar calls the
catalyst in the resolution of the intertwined instabilities, as she and the charac-
ter narrator gradually come to respect each other across their differences, and
they both extend that respect to Mala in a scene that functions as the turning
point in the story.
Critics have used postcolonial and cosmopolitan theory to illuminate the
story’s fresh take on the political dimensions of immigration and natural-
ization.^1 These critics contend that Lahiri complicates standard postcolonial
ideas about how large-scale power relations—between native-immigrant, first
world–third world, white-brown, center-margin—operate in the immigrant
experience. As Elizabeth Jackson puts it, Lahiri “deconstruct[s] simplistic
binaries of power based on geographical origin, geographical location, and
cultural identity” (113). Jackson identifies the turning point scene, where Mrs.
Croft’s and Mala’s warm connection across their cultural differences leads to
a new warmth between the character narrator and Mala, as a telling case in
point.
In an insightful analysis, Susan Koshy argues that the stories in Interpreter
of Maladies “reveal not only the growing relevance of relationships to those
who are less than kin and more than stranger but also . . . the dislocation and
consequent unreliability of the very categories through which we demarcate
the familiar and the unfamiliar” (598). In addition, the collection explores
what Koshy calls “minority cosmopolitanism” through its concern with “dia-
sporic citizenship” and the process of naturalization. In Lahiri’s stories, Koshy
argues,
the diasporic citizen inhabits an indeterminate space of belonging that aggre-
gates the discrepant identifications and trajectories associated with contigu-
ous words like resident alien, immigrant, exile, and minority subject. But it is
the process of naturalization as much as a specific identity like immigrant or- Other issues have also been explored: see Caesar on space, Garg and Khushu-Lahiri on
food, and Brada-Williams on the story’s placement in the final position in the collection.
216 • CHAPTER 1 1