Sexy

“He seemed to be lingering, waiting, along with the saleswoman, for her to say something. She stared at some bottles, some short, others tall, arranged on an oval tray, like a family posing for a photograph.”

The image of the set bottles as a family grouping prefigures Dev’s status as a married man, and the family breakup that the story explores. Miranda does not know at this point that he is married and the family imagery suggests that part of her escapist experience at Filene’s and attraction to Dev is to do with imagining herself as an older, wealthier, married woman.

“‘They’re for my wife.’ He uttered the words slowly, holding Miranda’s gaze. ‘She’s going to India for a few weeks.”

Dev is clear with Miranda from the beginning that he is married and his deliberate calmness suggests that he feels little guilt about pursuing her. By telling Miranda that his wife is going away, he is letting her know that there is a temporary vacancy. He seems to be practiced at infidelity and knows what to expect. This is an example of the mistaken assumptions and misunderstandings in the story. Miranda doesn’t understand that Dev considers it obvious that she shouldn’t expect anything emotionally serious from him and that he’s not misleading her. She sees his infidelity as proof of the strength of their connection.

“He showed her the deepest spot on earth, seven miles deep, above the Mariana Islands. They peered over the bridge and saw the Antarctic archipelago at their feet, craned their necks and saw a giant metal star overhead.”

Miranda returns to this moment repeatedly in her mind as proof of a connected interaction between her and Dev. He shows her his favorite place and tells her interesting things about the Mapparium and about the world. However, the episode highlights the distinct differences between them and the power imbalance between Dev as an unavailable, cultivated, and knowledgeable middle-aged man and Miranda as a young, inexperienced woman with a fairly narrow education. The map points to their vastly different experiences of the world, physically, culturally, and emotionally. Miranda and Dev are simultaneously in a world of their own and worlds apart.

“If my husband so much as looked at another woman I’d change the locks.”

Laxmi indicates a hardline stance on sexual infidelity and characterizes the cousin’s husband as inherently untrustworthy and unforgivable (91). The cousin’s husband is an unseen parallel to Dev, who also seems to be a serial cheater. Miranda pretends to agree with Laxmi but “Dev’s wife was coming back from India the next day,” and they are entering into a different, increasingly dishonest, relationship.

“It was the first time a man had called her sexy, and when she closed her eyes she could still feel his whisper drifting through her body, under her skin.”

This is part of a memory of the Mapparium while Miranda is buying the clothes she thinks a mistress should have. She is inexperienced and doesn’t know how to take being called “sexy” by a married man twice her age. Instead, she seeks to become sexier for him by buying provocative clothes and playing the role of mistress. The whisper she feels is indicative of her continual fantasizing and expressive of her loneliness: it is not only an illusion of intimacy because she’s remembering it but because in the Mapparium it was a trick of the acoustics.

“During the week it wasn’t so bad. Work kept her busy, and she and Laxmi had begun having lunch together at a new Indian restaurant around the corner, during which Laxmi reported the latest status of her cousin’s marriage.”

Miranda longs for Dev and is preoccupied by him. Their relationship exists mostly in her head now that he is absent most of the time. One of the interests which happily distracts Miranda is her friendship with Laxmi, paradoxically bringing more information to Miranda about the other side of an affair, information which she chooses to ignore.

“She pictured him whispering into his cell phone, in a room upstairs, a hand on the doorknob, the hallway filled with guests.”

Dev calls Miranda while he has people over at his house. Miranda can hear the guests’ voices in the background: sounds of Dev’s married life in the suburbs. Specific, precise images enter Miranda’s mind as she mentally begins to fuse what Dev is like with her with what Dev is like during the rest of his life. This is an example of the recurrent juxtaposition of closeness and separation in “Sexy.”

“Miranda sat in her cubicle and listened as Laxmi kept telling her cousin that there were better men in the world, just waiting to come out of the woodwork. The next day the cousin said she and her son were going to her parents’ house in California, to try to recuperate. Laxmi convinced her to arrange a weekend layover in Boston.”

While Laxmi’s conversation is presented through Miranda’s perspective as Miranda overhears Laxmi from the next cubicle at work. Laxmi’s words present Miranda with the serious impact of sexual infidelity. Laxmi’s assurance that there are lots of better (single) men is ironic, given that all the men in the story are married and the majority are unfaithful.

“It means loving someone you don’t know.”

Rohin’s childlike explanation of what he means by “sexy” gets to the heart of Miranda’s experience with Dev. She realizes that she doesn’t really know him and her interaction with Rohin brings home to her the damage caused by the sort of affair she is conducting with Dev. She has to face up to her moral priorities and balance her own desires against what she knows to be right.

“As Miranda imagined the scene she began to cry a little herself.”

Miranda sees her relationship in a new light after thinking of it as parallel to the distress she sees that Laxmi’s husband’s affair has caused. She cries tears of empathy for Laxmi’s cousin and for Laxmi’s cousin’s son Rohin. She also cries because she realizes that her relationship is an illusion, and she will need to end it.

“Do you remember that day we went to the Mapparium?”

Miranda just told Dev not to meet her. Prompted by an intense wave of sadness, Miranda has been processing her feelings about her relationship with Dev and about their affair’s impact on her and, potentially, others. While she begins to step away from Dev, she also begins to try to ascertain just what his feelings for her actually are. She asks him about what he remembers about their Mapparium outing. He remembers the day, but he does not accurately remember what he said to her and this fuels her sense of disillusionment.

“In spite of herself, she longed for him. She would see him one more Sunday, she decided, perhaps two. Then she would tell him the things she had known all along: that it wasn’t fair to her, or to his wife, that they both deserved better, that there was no point in it dragging on.”

In this excerpt, Jhumpa Lahiri shows Miranda’s thoughts and feelings as Miranda sorts through them. Miranda misses Dev, but she also knows that she should end things between them. As she thinks, and as she sorts through her feelings and priorities, Miranda gains the resolve and the confidence to do the right thing.

“The Sunday after that, the snow had melted, but Miranda made plans to go to the movies with Laxmi, and when she told Dev this over the phone, he didn’t ask her to cancel them.”

The snow gives Miranda time to metaphorically cool off and gradually stop seeing Dev. Miranda takes a step in this direction by making plans with her friend Laxmi on a Sunday she would have normally spent with Dev. At this point, Dev also seems ready to let the affair be over; for him it was always a casual and temporary thing and a sideline to his normal life.