LAHIRI’S SYNERGIES
At the core of Lahiri’s story is the sequence of three scenes involving the Splen-
did Ritual. These scenes are crucial to her exploration of the politics of immi-
gration and illustrative of her handling of reliable narration and dialogue. In
addition, these scenes culminate in the crossover between readerly and textual
dynamics at the story’s turning point. Lahiri introduces the Ritual during the
character narrator’s first meeting with Mrs. Croft, when she assesses his suit-
ability as a lodger. In the following passage, she juxtaposes restricted narration
and dialogue:
“There is an American flag on the moon!”
“Yes, madame.” Until then I had not thought very much about the moon
shot. It was in the newspaper, of course, article upon article. The astronauts
had landed on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility, I had read, travelling far-
ther than anyone in the history of civilization. For a few hours they explored
the moon’s surface. They gathered rocks in their pockets, described their
surroundings (a magnificent desolation, according to one astronaut), spoke
by phone to the president, and planted a flag in lunar soil. The voyage was
hailed as man’s most awesome achievement. [. . .]
The woman bellowed, “A flag on the moon, boy! I heard it on the radio!
Isn’t that splendid?”
“Yes, madame.”
But she was not satisfied with my reply. Instead she commanded, “Say
‘splendid’!” (179)Lahiri uses the synergy between the restricted narration and the dialogue
to communicate much more than the character narrator is aware of, in large
part because the character narrator does not pick up on salient aspects of
the authorial disclosure. First, by putting the focus of Mrs. Croft’s exclama-
tion on the planting of the American flag rather than, say, the “giant leap
for mankind” that Neil Armstrong described, Lahiri constructs Mrs. Croft’s
exclamation as celebrating the extension of the imperial power of the United
States from the earth to the moon. Second, Mrs. Croft’s commanding the non-
American character narrator who wants her approval to join in her salute is
its own small-scale exercise of American imperial power, what we’d today call
a micro-aggression. By giving Mrs. Croft a British name, Lahiri subtly adds a
reminder of India’s colonial past: she suggests that there’s repetition with a dif-
ference in this exchange. In these ways, Lahiri dramatizes the macrostructural
relations that underlie the personal relations between host and immigrant.
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