Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond By Jhumpa Lahiri, HarperCollins, Rs 150 The stories are quiet. There is no distracting dazzle of exotica being made familiar or clamour of drama in the East meets West themes of Jhumpa Lahiri?s first collection of short stories. Lahiri does not seem to belong to the school that likes to draw attention to unusual points of view. It is not as if her stories do not have the unexpected narrator or the offbeat angle. But these are played down rather than up. The narrative angle, which varies from story to story, always seems just right. The sense of just-rightness, of chiselled precision and classical restraint are the most striking features of this collection. These qualities are particularly noticeable in a story like ?When Mr Pirzada came to dine?. A ten year old Indian girl, Lilia, living in Boston, tries to understand the nature of the bond which ties her parents to Mr Pirzada, who has come for a six month academic project to the United States from a place called Dacca. The year is 1971, and in the evenings the three adults watch on television the spectacle of armoured tanks rolling on the streets of Dacca as Mr Pirzada?s country changes from Pakistan to Bangladesh. The alienation of the outsider and the secret, inexplicable bonds within the diaspora are much worn themes. Also a little wearying, unless the writer is able to release the wellspring of the bewildering dynamics of distance and difference. At her best, Lahiri can do just that, without fuss. Young Lilia tries to match her observations with her father?s explanation as to why their Indian looking visitor is not Indian. The man is undeniably strange; Lilia records with unaffected solemnity the essential facts about him: ?In Dacca Mr Pirzada had a three storey home, a lectureship in botany at the university, a wife of twenty years, and seven daughters between the ages of six and sixteen whose names all began with the letter A.? Mr Pirzada is candid about his confusion over them: ?How am I to distinguish? Ayesha, Amira, Amina, Aziza, you see the difficulty.? The author?s non-committal humour and quiet wit lurk unobtrusively behind Lilia?s first person narration. As the adults seek solace from the tensions of war at home through the cooking and eating of piles of familiar food in a strange country, Lilia has to make her own rules for the bonding so new to her. She swallows each candy Mr Pirzada brings her with a wish for the safety of his wife and daughters. For her, the strangest memory of the most stressful days of the war on TV is that of the three adults from two countries operating ?as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.? Food is again one of the keys to a strange bonding in ?Mrs Sen?s?, a story told from the point of view of eleven year old Eliot. Mrs Sen, an Indian professor?s wife, minds Eliot after school in her own house until his mother can pick him up on her way home from work. Mrs Sen?s loneliness breeds in her a passion for fish. To get it from the shop she ultimately forces herself to drive, something that actually terrifies her. Eliot watches with the stirrings of an inarticulate, unfamiliar fellow feeling her swings of mood as she goes through her routine chopping of vegetables with magical dexterity on a blade hinged on to a slab of wood. In her best stories, Lahiri?s skill with the unspoken, the unmentioned, touches off hidden springs of cultural memory and history which resonate within the slightest incidents. The title story, ?Interpreter of Maladies? is an intimate and disturbing account of another close encounter, this time set in India, between an Indian driving a tourist car and the Indian family from America he takes to visit Konarak. Lahiri?s gently ironic use of everyday detail, whether it is a woman chopping vegetables on the living room floor of a house in an alien land or a driver drawn sporadically into the vortex of his passenger?s moods, is always functional to the narrative. These moments form the passage through which strangers enter one another?s lives, almost always to depart. The forms of distance and difference explored in the stories are many. The bonds these spawn are indefinable, transitory, based on an irresistible attraction born of sympathy and caution of one towards another. The core of the story is seldom in the predictable place. In ?Sexy?, cross-cultural adultery seen through a child?s eyes unexpectedly takes the stuffing out of a Midwestern girl?s relationship with a married Indian man. The central encounter is not between the man and the woman, but between the woman and an Indian seven year old, whose father has left his mother for an English girl. But sometimes there is no obvious catalyst. In ?A Temporary Matter?, the alienation of the Indian husband and wife from each other is as much a function of the environment as of emotional betrayal. Restraint sometimes runs the risk of passionlessness. Although this never really happens in Lahiri?s stories, the possibility is present in two of them. The two tales set in Calcutta, ?A Real Durwan? and ?The Treatment of Bibi Haldar?, which relentlessly record the exploitation of ?outsiders? within closed communities formed by class and ?normalcy?, miss out a little on the suppressed intensity and desolation of the East meets West stories. In Lahiri?s narratives, difference is stimulating. Its role is perhaps best symbolised in ?The Third and Last Continent?, in which the presence of an astonishing old American woman lays the foundation for the lifelong friendship between a newly married, emotionally uncommitted Indian husband and wife. Lahiri?s tales are a repository of old fashioned virtues. Tightly knit, gripping narrative, sharply outlined and varied characters, a refreshingly unsentimental approach, irony, humour and impersonal compassion ? these make for a clean limbed classic quality a little unusual in an age of flamboyance.