Review of the Day: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine stories about people who have recently left India to come to the United States. I would like to pick my favorite story, “Mrs. Sean’s” as a synecdoche of what I like about the book. In the story, a eleven year old boy named Eliot spends his afternoons being babysat by Mrs. Sen, a recent immigrant from Calcutta, who is having trouble integrating into the community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, partly because her math professor husband is very busy and partly because she has never really learned how to drive a car.

For Mrs. Sen, fresh fish is a symbol of the place she has left behind:

“It is very frustrating,” Mrs. Sen apologized, with an emphasis on the second syllable of the word. “To live so close to the ocean and not to have so much fish.” In the summer, she said, she liked to go to a market by the beach. She added that while the fish there tasted nothing like the fish in India, at least it was fresh. Now that it was getting colder, the boats were no longer going out regularly, and sometimes there was no whole fish available for weeks at a time. 

“Try the supermarket,” his mother suggested. 

Mrs. Sen shook her head. “In the supermarket I can feed a cat thirty-two dinners from one of thirty-two tins, but I can never find a single fish I like, never a single.” Mrs. Sen said she had grown up eating fish twice a day. She added that in Calcutta people ate fish first thing in the morning, last thing before bed, as a snack after school if they were lucky. They ate the tail, the eggs, even the head. It was available in any market, at any hour, from dawn until midnight. “All you have to do is leave the house and walk a bit, and there you are” (p. 123).

In the story “Mrs. Sen”, Lahiri does an excellent job showing how the places we leave behind stay with us in important ways.

kindle and LibroFM audiobook. 198 pgs. 21 March 2026