Sexy

Nilanjana Sudeshna “Jhumpa” Lahiri is a UK-born Indian American novelist, poet, and essayist. Born in 1967 to first-generation immigrant Bengali parents, she moved to Rhode Island with her family as a child. The family maintained close links with their Bengali culture and travelled often for extended visits to relatives in India. Lahiri grew up speaking Bengali at home. She has stated: “When I was growing up… I felt neither Indian nor American. Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things” (“Jhumpa Lahiri Biography.” Chicago Public Library, 31 Oct. 2006). In her work, Lahiri often sets up a “culture clash” of identities, behaviors, and locations and explores the experience of those who feel inherently divided between “two things.” Her body of work engages with facets of identity, assimilation, and tensions, especially centered around Indian, American, and British characters and settings. “Sexy” is no exception: it presents the complex relationships between a group of American and Indian American characters negotiating life in Boston, especially the ways in which culturally and racially diverse identities and relationships can be enriching, intoxicating, educative, and challenging. In following the experience of a white American protagonist’s interaction with members of the Indian diaspora community, “Sexy” is unusual in the Interpreter of Maladies collection and Lahiri’s work more generally, which most often concentrates on a “culture clash” as experienced by characters with Indian heritage.

The daughter of a librarian and schoolteacher, Lahiri started writing while at school, engaging in the occupation seriously after completing her bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1989. While writing, she continued to study, gaining three masters (in English, creative writing, and comparative literature and arts) and a doctorate (in Renaissance studies) at Boston University in the 1990s. Lahiri’s scholarly interest in language and the literary tradition is evident in her writing: she is noted for her adherence to the realist tradition of writing in English. This encompasses her everyday settings, dispassionate tone, precise observational detail and accurate diction. Reflecting Lahiri’s own experience and the experience of the Indian diaspora, especially in a Boston location, the story “Sexy” is situated in the middle-class sphere of young, relatively prosperous and well-educated professionals. Despite these cozy aspects, her short stories in particular are imbued with melancholy and regret, a sense of dislocation and, often, awkwardness or shame. As Lahiri writes of her own identity: “I will always feel like an outsider wherever I am, and I continue to explore that in my work and my life” (“An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri”, Harvard Business Review, 2022).