One more rubbish book

Newsflash! Jhumpa Lahiri has written a new book called Unaccustomed Earth. The story is typical: a Bengali girl, Dolna, estranged from her second husband (an Israeli), is living in an efficiency apartment in Brooklyn. She dreams of her hometown (Santiniketan, near Calcutta) while making rotis and frying fish in mustard oil. She is a sex-worker during the night and a Dunkin Donuts employee by day. In despair, she marries one of her clients, a caring American called Tom. But Tom cannot relate to her angst and finally she runs away from him and returns to Calcutta. In the final scene of the book, Dolna is standing on the banks of the Hooghly when she has a vision of herself covered in savories and Bengali sweetmeats and lying on a funeral pyre. Tormented, she throws herself into the river and is swept away.

Yaar, this is an utter crap of a book. Even the bullshit-type serials on Star TV are better and more realistic. For example, in the last episode of Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki, the heroine Namrata is faced with a difficult choice: to revenge herself on her rival Kamalika, or to forgive her and move on with her life. The producers have handled this scene with great delicacy. Instead of portraying Namrata as an angst-ridden prostitute (as Jhumpa might have done), they show her as a traditional, loving Indian woman. Hats off to them, yaar, for showing the world what Bharatiya naari means!

I hope to God that the American public rejects Jhumpa’s book and that she is exposed as a mischief-maker. Yes, average American person is very stupid, but definitely they cannot be so gullible that they will buy any trash that she churns out. But they are also sex-mad and maybe they will fall for the mouth-watering descriptions of Dolna’s affairs with her clients. Actually, the so-called high intellectuals in America, who pretend to be reading voraciously, are only surfing through the books for this kind of spicy fare. Jhumpa is very cunningly pandering to them, but in the process, the real story of Indian angst is being given the cold shoulder.