But, as Jackson and Koshy point out, Lahiri also wants to explore how
such power relations break down or otherwise get complicated. Here she uses
Mrs. Croft’s dialogue to indicate that Mrs. Croft has a genuine, almost child-
like ability to marvel at the moon landing and that she wants to share her
pleasure in it with her new boarder. The authorial disclosure, in other words,
is that her marveling at the moon landing is also a way to connect with this
stranger whose age, sex, race, and nationality are so different from hers. (This
inference also invites reflection on how the implied Lahiri enacts her con-
nection with the character narrator across differences of gender and age.)
Third, Lahiri uses the character narrator’s restricted reporting of what he had
read about the landing to convey her own sense of the mixed quality of the
event: on the one hand, the astronauts had traveled “farther than anyone in
the history of civilization,” but on the other, they had found only rocks and a
“magnificent desolation.” By using the passive voice in the last sentence of the
restricted narration, Lahiri distances both the character narrator and herself
from the assessment that the voyage was “man’s most awesome achievement.”
Together these communications have multiple effects that give a signifi-
cant texture to the politics of the scene. Lahiri guides her audience to view
Mrs. Croft as a kind of benevolent, even endearing, dictator to whom the
character narrator must pay tribute. She invites her audience to smile at the
incongruities of the scene, even as it remains very serious for the character
narrator. As the scene continues, Lahiri shifts from restricted narration to nar-
ration that is simultaneously reliable and unreliable:
I was both baffled and somewhat insulted by the request. It reminded me of
the way I was taught multiplication tables as a child, repeating after the mas-
ter, sitting cross-legged . . . on the floor of my one-room Tollygunge school.
It also reminded me of my wedding, when I had repeated endless Sanskrit
verses after the priest, verses I barely understood, which joined me to my
wife. I said nothing.
“Say ‘splendid’!” the woman bellowed once again.
“Splendid,” I murmured. I had to repeat the word a second time at the
top of my lungs, so she could hear. (179–80)The narration is reliable because the character narrator at some level reg-
isters the first layer of Mrs. Croft’s command and evaluates it appropriately:
as in the other situations, she is imposing her view of things on him, regard-
less of his own (lack of ) connection to them. But the narration is unreliable
because the character narrator misses the second layer of Mrs. Croft’s com-
munication. This misinterpretation has bonding rather than estranging effects
222 • CHAPTER 1 1