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Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

“He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.”

Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

Work

Unaccustomed Earth

This book is a collection of short stories that delve into the complexities of life in the United States for immigrants and their descendants. The narratives explore themes such as cultural adaptation, the struggle for belonging, and the intricate relationships within immigrant families. more

Author

Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is an Indian-American author known for her insightful exploration of immigration and multiculturalism. Her works often focus on the inner world of second-generation immigrants, delving into themes of identity, belonging, and cultural conflict. Born on July 11, 1967, Lahiri graduated from Brown University and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. more

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“I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being-- the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person-- than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.”

“For that half-hour in the hospital delivery room I was intimate with immensity, for that half-minute before birth I held her hands and for that duration we three were undivided, I felt the blood of her pulse as we gripped hands, felt her blood beat in the rhythm that reached into the baby as she slipped into the doctor's hands, and for a few days we touched that immensity, we saw through her eyes to an immense intimacy, saw through to where she had come from, I felt important being next to her, and the feeling lasted when we entered our car for the drive home, thinking to myself that we weren't to be trusted with our baby, the feeling lasting while I measured us against the landscape, the February rain, the pewter sky, and then the rain freezing to the roadway, the warmth of the interior of the car with its unbreakable transparent sky dome and doors, until the car spun on the ice in the lane and twirled so that I could take an hour to describe how I threw up my hands in anguish as the baby slipped from her arms and whipped into the face of her mother reflected in the glass door, and she caught the baby back into her arms as the car glided to a stop in its usual place at the end of the drive, and nothing but silence and a few drops of blood at a nostril suggested that we would now be intimate with the immensities of death ("Interim")”