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113 pages 3 hours read

Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2008

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"Hell-Heaven"Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story Summary: “Hell-Heaven”

A woman named Usha narrates this story. She opens by recalling Pranab Chakraboty, “[a] fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the barren shores of [her] parents’ social life in the early seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square and could number their acquaintances on one hand” (60). Because Usha had no true uncles in the United States, her parents instructed her to call the man Pranab Kaku. He, in turn addressed Usha’s father using the formal Shyamal Da, and Usha’s mother using the word Boudi, “which is how Bengalis are supposed to address an older brother’s wife” (60).

Pranab had spotted Usha and her mother, named Aparna, one day as they walked along Massachusetts Avenue, recognizing them as Bengalis immediately. Unbeknownst to them, he followed them for several blocks before finally asking Aparna if they were Bengali. Given Aparna’s red and white bangles, worn exclusively by Bengali married women, her Tangail sari, and the generous dusting of vermillion powder covering the center part of her hair, the answer was obvious. Too, he took note of the several safety pins that Aparna had pinned to her thinner gold bangles, which singularly called his own female family members in Calcutta to mind.

At that point, Usha and her family had lived in Central Square for three years. Her father was working as a researcher at Mass General. Prior to that, they resided in Berlin, where Shyamal had earned an advanced degree in microbiology and Usha had been born. Before that, both of her parents had lived in India, although they did not know one another prior to their arranged marriage.

Usha remembers her family’s Central Square apartment as her first home—and Pranab Kaku is always present in her memories of that home. Aparna invited Pranab to tea in their home the very same day that they met—and then promptly served him a generous Bengali dinner (of leftovers) after learning that he had not eaten a real Bengali meal in several months. That day, Pranab stayed until evening, when Shyamal came home, and then came for dinner almost every night thereafter, for a period of many years.

Pranab came from an affluent family in Calcutta, and therefore grew up pampered. The realities of traveling to America to study engineering at MIT were stark and unanticipated, and Pranab, having arrived in Massachusetts in the dead of winter, had come very close to boarding a plane and flying back to Calcutta. At the last minute, however, he relented from abandoning the goal he had worked his entire life to realize. At the time that he met Usha’s family, his less-than-ideal living situation—in the house of a divorced women with two small, incessantly fussy and noisy children—inured his parents to opening their home to him at all times. He was therefore always leaving small indicators of his presence—unfinished cigarette cartons, an odd sweater, unopened mail—around their home, and eventually Aparna even set aside one of her teacups for him to use as an ashtray. 

Usha remembers that Pranab was a strikingly handsome man—tall, thin, bursting with laughter, and “with a high forehead and a thick mustache, and overgrown, untamed hair that [her] mother said made him look like the American hippies who were everywhere in those days” (62). His scientific vocation sat incongruously with his loose and unpredictable manner. Although Pranab was an excellent and decorated student, he was blasé about his coursework, and played hooky frequently.

Shortly after Pranab’s arrival in their lives, Usha observed the way that her mother, once bursting at the seams to escape the apartment upon Usha’s arrival from school, could now be found happily rolling out dough for luchis in the kitchen or installing new, freshly-purchased curtains. However, Usha did not know that Pranab Kaku’s visits were the sole anticipated bright spots of her mother’s days, nor did she know that Aparna combed her hair and changed into a fresh sari prior to his arrivals. Aparna spent weeks perfecting and devising the snacks that she turned around and served to him casually, and she “lived for the moment she heard him call out ‘Boudi!’ from the porch and…was in a foul humor on the days he didn’t materialize” (63).

Usha deeply enjoyed Pranab’s visits as well: he taught her card tricks and funny pratfalls as well as her multiplication tables, far earlier than her schoolteachers did. He enjoyed photography in his spare time and Usha rapidly became his favorite subject: “round faced, missing teeth…thick bangs in need of a trim” (64). Usha confesses that these photographs of her are still her favorites, as they portray her in the possession of a youthful confidence that she no longer has—especially before a camera. She recalls that, although there is only one photograph of her from that period in which her mother appears, Pranab never came to the apartment in the absence of Usha, as it would have been unseemly to do so: it was always the three of them.  

Aparna and Pranab shared commonalities that Aparna and Shyamal never had: “a love of music, film, leftist politics, [and] poetry” (64). They were even from the same block in Northern Calcutta. Pranab would often play songs from the Hindi movies both he and Aparna knew from their youth on his reel-to-reel. These songs, bursting with romance and mirth, brought Aparna back to the life she had left behind upon her marriage, and served as fodder for boisterous recollections and playful pugilism that Aparna never indulged in with Shyamal. Shyamal, in contrast, had grown up in the distant suburbs of Calcutta, in an area that was utterly foreign to Aparna and in an unadorned, spartan home that Aparna was only too happy to have been spared from inhabiting. Aparna also called Pranab by his first name freely, given that he could be socially regarded as a younger brother, while never calling her own husband by his first name.

Shyamal, quiet and solitary by nature, had wedded Aparna solely to pacify his parents, who would only accept his departure from Calcutta if he left in the company of a wife: “He was wedded to his work, his research, and he existed in a shell that neither [Aparna nor Usha] could penetrate” (65). While one could not fault Shyamal should he have developed a jealousy of Pranab, and the way the young man animated his wife, he never became envious. In fact, Usha suspects that Shyamal appreciated the companionship and happiness that Pranab brought to Aparna, and that the young man’s presence also assuaged some of the guilt Shyamal must have felt for taking Aparna away from her home.

The following summer, Pranab bought a Volkswagen Beetle and commenced taking Aparna and Usha on day trips. They began to go to Walden Pond two times a week. Aparna would always pack a picnic and recount stories about the elaborate winter picnics of her childhood, spent in the company of tens of family members. Pranab would listen absorbedly to these stories in a way that neither Shyamal nor Usha were capable. During these trips, any passing stranger would have assumed that the three of them were a family.

Usha announces that it is clear to her now that although Pranab was always respectful and deferent to Shyamal, her mother was in love with Pranab. Although Aparna would sometimes solicitously show Pranab pictures of her younger cousins in Calcutta (her way of trying to keep him in the family, in Usha’s opinion), Usha is convinced that the young man brought her mother “the first and…only pure happiness she [had] ever felt” (67). Even Usha, who only served as a reminder of the marriage to which Aparna was tethered, had never brought Aparna the joy that Pranab did.

During the autumn of 1974, Pranab began dating a white American woman named Deborah, and Deborah began to come along with him to Usha’s home. Pranab taught her to regard Usha’s parents using the proper, formal Bengali language, and Usha asked her mother if she should call Deborah Deborah Kakima in return. Aparna’s sharp reply was: “What’s the point?...In a few weeks the fun will be over and she’ll leave him” (68). However, Deborah remained steadfastly by Pranab’s side. She even began accompanying him to the weekend Bengali parties in which Usha’s parents had become more active by that time, and at which Deborah was the only outlier. Deborah wore her long hair in an unbraided ponytail, a style Aparna found indecent. Usha believed Deborah to be completely beautiful, while Aparna wasted no opportunity to malign Deborah’s looks.

Initially, Pranab still regularly visited once a week, although most of his time with the family was spent trying to glean Aparna’s approval of Deborah. He told Aparna that Deborah’s parents were both PhDs and professors at Boston College, and that her father was a published poet, in an attempt to ingratiate Deborah to her.

Pranab taught Deborah the proper ways to eat Bengali food, and sometimes they fed each other at the dinner table, causing Aparna and Shyamal to “look down at their plates and wait for the moment to pass” (68). Their open affection at larger parties would cause Aparna to gossip to the other Bengali women: “[Pranab] used to be so different. I don’t understand how a person can change so suddenly. It’s just hell-heaven, the difference” (69).

Aparna’s resentment of Deborah grew simultaneously with Usha’s love for her. Usha began to long to be able to replicate Deborah’s easy and casual beauty. In contrast, Aparna would always force Usha to wear restrictive dresses reminiscent of the Victorian style and a simple, if perhaps dour, barrette hairstyle to all gatherings. Deborah would always inevitably peel away from the party, and her forced socializing with the Bengali women, in order to play with Usha—and she brought Usha delightful presents that her parents had neither the means nor imagination to buy for her. They conversed together in English, which felt more egalitarian and natural to Usha at that age than Bengali, which she was forced to use at home. Usha, aware of Deborah’s ostracized position, also began to feel protective of her.

Daytrips in the VW Beetle now included Deborah, although Aparna also began to make up excuses to get out of them, while surprisingly still allowing Usha to go. Aparna was waiting for the breakup that she saw as inevitable, and the return of a wounded and solicitous Pranab. But the breakup didn’t come. Usha later realized that her mother allowed her to go on those day trips because, having lost four pregnancies to miscarriage since Usha’s birth, she was pregnant again, and too sick and fatigued by worry to do much more than sleep all day. At ten weeks, she suffered another miscarriage, and the doctor counseled her to stop attempting to bring another child into the world. 

Pranab proposed to Deborah before the start of summer. The diamond ring that now adorned Deborah’s finger was something Aparna had never received from her own husband. Pranab had even brought the ring to the apartment prior to proposing and asked Aparna to try it on so he could see it on someone’s hand—a request Aparna resolutely refused. It was consequently Usha’s finger that was experimented upon. Pranab also asked Aparna and Shyamal to write a letter to his parents endorsing Deborah, which Shyamal, having neutral feelings toward the situation, obliged. Aparna acquiesced, but “the following day [Usha] saw the teacup Pranab Kaku had used all this time as an ashtray in the kitchen garbage can, in pieces, and three Band-Aids taped to [her] mother’s hand” (71).

A short time later, an incensed Mr. Chakraboty calls Usha’s parents in the middle of the night. He tells Shyamal that Pranab will be disowned if he proceeds with his plans to marry Deborah. Pranab’s mother asks to speak with Aparna. She rips into Aparna as if they are close friends, telling Aparna that it is her fault that Pranab and Deborah are dating. She informs Aparna that the family has already selected a Calcutta girl for Pranab to marry, and purchased for an apartment for them, and that Pranab had already agreed to the arrangement prior to leaving for America. Aparna defends Deborah while Pranab’s parents beg both her and Shyamal to talk Pranab out of the marriage. Shyamal, believing that it is not their place to exert such a heavy hand in Pranab’s life, refuses. Aparna and Shyamal later relay a partial summary of this conversation to Pranab—omitting the harsh tirades and threats of disownment and stating, simply, that the Chakrabotys declined to give their blessing. Pranab is nonchalant and asserts that the blessing given by Aparna and Shyamal will suffice.

Pranab and Deborah begin to become more remote. They move into an apartment together in the South End, which Usha’s parents believe to be a dangerous neighborhood. Usha’s family also relocates to a house in Natick. The family does, however, manage to host Pranab for the only aspect of the engagement that is Bengali: Aparna prepares a special dinner for Pranab, alone, a few weeks prior to his wedding. The meal marks the conclusion of his bachelorhood. Usha recounts that there is a photograph of the dinner—it’s the only known photograph of Aparna and Pranab together. In the photograph, Pranab is trying to explain how to work the camera to Shyamal, and Aparna touches Pranab’s head in the manner of a blessing. It is “the first and last time she was to touch him in her life” (73). Aparna later tells her friends that she is certain that Deborah will abandon Pranab, and that Pranab is wrecking his life. 

The wedding is held at a church in Ipswich, and the reception at a country club. Aparna and Shyamal are shocked when only about 40 people are in attendance, and troubled by the fact that they are the only Bengalis on the guest list. Usha and her family are not included in the formal, posed family wedding photographs, despite being the closest thing to a nearby biological family that Pranab has. Aparna does not express gratitude for the way that Deborah sees to it that their family, which does not eat beef, is served fish instead of the filet mignon that all the other guests receive. Aparna keeps up a running commentary of complaints in Bengali while Shyamal, in his typical manner, carries on eating his meal in silence.

Shyamal and Aparna stay seated when the dancing starts, and soon decide that it is time to leave, despite the fact that Usha has begun to dance in a circle with the bride, groom, and some of the children. Deborah tries to get Aparna to allow Usha to stay, assuring Aparna that there are other guests who can eventually bring Usha home, but Aparna refuses the offer. During the drive home, Usha tells her mother that she hates her.

During the year following the wedding, Usha’s family receives a birth announcement—in the form of a photograph of twin girls—from Pranab and Deborah. The photograph does not find a treasured position in their home. The twins are named Srabani and Sabitri, although they go by Bonny and Sara. The Chakraboty family now resides in Marblehead, and the birth announcement and thank-you card following the wedding are the only two correspondences that Usha’s family receive from the Chakrabotys for a long time. Gradually, the Chakrabotys also fall out of touch with the Bengali community at large. It is unanimously agreed upon that Deborah has robbed Pranab of both his roots and his autonomy, and their mixed marriage is seen as a cautionary tale. However, the young family does make occasional appearances at social gatherings. Usha feels a twinge of jealousy for the twin girls, who barely look Bengali and are not subject to the conflicted trappings of being raised by immigrants who are caught between two worlds. Meanwhile, Deborah, who has cut her once-long hair into a bob, makes idle promises to call Usha to babysit.

Usha enters middle school and begins to develop crushes on American boys—although none of them give her the time of day. Aparna prohibits Usha from attending school dances and makes sure that Usha knows that she is forbidden from marrying an American boy. Though marriage is far from Usha’s 13-year-old mind, she resents her mother for those pronouncements. The two begin to have frequent arguments, during which Aparna invokes Deborah as her debased counterpoint: “If she were your mother…she would let you do anything you wanted, because she wouldn’t care”, she says (76). When Usha’s first period comes, Aparna lectures Usha about how she must forbid any boy from touching her. Usha hides her knowledge about sex from Aparna.

Usha begins to keep many secrets from her mother as she surreptitiously attends parties and begins to sexually experiment with boys. Usha begins to feel pity for her mother’s barren existence as a housewife without any prior career and nothing to look forward to but soap operas, cleaning, and cooking. She observes that when Aparna expresses her unhappiness with the suburbs and the fact that she is lonely, Shyamal’s terse response is always that Aparna can go back to Calcutta if she is so unhappy. Usha begins to treat her mother with the same coldness and disdain, redoubling Aparna’s isolation.

During Usha’s senior year of high school, Deborah and Pranab invite Usha and her parents to their home for a Thanksgiving celebration. The occasion is a way for the Chakrabotys to reunite with all of the people with whom they were once close in Cambridge. Deborah’s family—including her parents, siblings, and her siblings’ children—are also in attendance. Usha takes note of Deborah’s nephew, Matty, with whom she had danced when she was a child at the Chakrabotys’s wedding. Matty, like her, has grown up and is now a “freshman at Amherst with wide-set green eyes and wispy brown hair and a complexion that reddened easily” (78).

Also, while Usha admires the carefree, youthful clothing that Deborah and all of her sisters wear, she feels incensed at her mother, who has forced her to wear a formal shalwar kameez—garb that makes her feel like an outsider. Deborah, however, is quick to include Usha, putting her to work in the kitchen and sneaking her beer.

The alternating boy-girl seating arrangement makes the Bengali guests uncomfortable. The food makes Usha’s mouth tantalizingly water, but she knows that she will bear an earful of complaints about it from her mother on the way home. After Gene, Matty’s father, recites the meal’s prayer, he jokes that he never thought he’d have the opportunity to say, “Here’s to Thanksgiving with the Indians” (78). The joke does not garner many laughs.

Pranab then stands up to address his guests, and tells the story of the day he met Aparna and Usha. He wrests Aparna from her seat and declares that she gave him his first true American Thanksgiving when she fed him supper the day they met. He credits Aparna as the reason he did not return to Calcutta. Aparna, embarrassed, looks away. Usha observes that Aparna looks frail and elderly next to the perennially youthful Pranab. Then, Pranab pronounces that if had he gone back to India, he never would have met Deborah, his darling, and he kisses her on the mouth. The table erupts into applause reminiscent of their wedding party. 

After dinner, Pranab proposes a walk on the beach with the family dogs. While Deborah’s family members enthusiastically agree, none of the Bengalis want to join in. Matty seeks Usha out and encourages her to come along on the walk while Usha feels her mother’s furious gaze upon her. Usha then goes upstairs with Deborah to borrow a more appropriate outfit (jeans, a heavy sweater, and sneakers) for the stroll. Deborah treats Usha with the intimacy of a girlfriend and informs her that Matty has a crush on her. As Usha descends the staircase, enlivened by that information and finally feeling at ease with herself in the new outfit, Aparna stares silently at her.

Usha and Matty splinter from the group and flirt with each other. They eventually find their way to a rocky enclave and share a joint. It is dark when the entire group makes its way back to the house; Usha dreads coming back into her parents’ presence while still high. She returns to find that they have already left, having agreed to allow someone to drive Usha home later. Matty drives her home and, as Usha feels a thrill at the prospect of her mother stepping out onto the lawn to catch her, Usha and Matty share a kiss. She gives the boy her number and foolishly expects a call from him that never comes.

Ultimately, Aparna’s misgivings about Pranab’s marriage come partially true, except it is not Deborah who ends up straying, but Pranab, who falls in love with a married Bengali woman and thereby fractures two families. Deborah, now in her forties while Bonny and Sara are away at college, astonishingly turns to Aparna for comfort. She calls Aparna weeping, begging her to explain Pranab’s behavior, and Usha realizes that Deborah regards her parents as her quasi-in-laws. Usha also observes that while Deborah and Aparna’s hearts have now been broken by the same man, Aparna’s heartbreak has healed itself over the years. She also sees that Aparna and Shyamal have even developed a particular fondness and solidarity with one another. Aparna has also come to accept Usha’s simultaneously Bengali and American identity, and Usha’s preference for American boys. Aparna has also decided to get her degree in library science at age 50, after years of inactivity.

In one of their phone conversations, Deborah delivers a surprising revelation to Aparna: she had always felt impenetrably locked out of a portion of Pranab’s life, and had always felt jealous of and threatened by the intimacy that Pranab shared with Aparna’s Bengali family. Deborah also expresses her hope that Aparna never felt that she took Pranab away from her life. Aparna comforts and reassures Deborah, declining to assign any blame to her. She does not disclose any of the anguish that Pranab and Deborah’s marriage caused her so many years ago. She also does not tell Deborah that a few weeks after Deborah and Pranab’s marriage, she nearly intentionally set herself on fire in the family backyard, but was saved by a neighbor’s idle remark to her. It is Usha whom she entrusts with this story, when Usha’s heart is broken by a man she’d hoped to wed.

Story Analysis: “Hell-Heaven”

This story carefully parses the complexities of the Bengali-American family that serves as its subject. Within the relationship that Pranab strikes up with Usha’s family, we witness both the beauty and the pain of their immigrant experience. His relationship with Aparna brings Aparna’s bereft isolation into sharp relief, and also explicates Pranab’s sense of shock and loss as a Bengali immigrant. In a key way, both Aparna and Pranab are lucky to find each other, so that—even if temporarily—they can insulate each other from the trauma and shock of immigration to America. This holds true even when Pranab ultimately brings great misery and anguish to Aparna’s life—misery and anguish which are notably resolved by the story’s end through the passage of time and Aparna’s eventual acceptance of reality.

We also see the complexities of Usha’s experience as the first generation in her family to grow up in America. Although the Bengali language ties her inextricably to her parents and their origins, we see her explicitly articulating that she does not feel like a fully-formed adult when she uses the language, and is instead more comfortable with English. This fact, common to many first-generation immigrant children, poignantly articulates the conflicting directions that these children are pulled in, and also demonstrates the complicated notion of home in the consciousness of this generation.

By saving the emotionally-detailed and deeply resonant depiction of Aparna’s near-suicide until the very final moments of the story, Lahiri demonstrates the character’s profound humanity. We plainly see Aparna’s abject loneliness and unhappiness in those moments: she is scorned and rejected by her own husband and daughter. It is also significant that Usha only learns of this episode in her mother’s life because her mother offers it as a form of commiseration and comfort to her daughter, when she has been jilted by a man she hoped to marry. This fact demonstrates Aparna’s capacity for love, despite all of the pain she has endured over the course of her life.

The figure of Deborah also parses the culturally and racially-contentious elements of Usha and her family’s immigrant experience. While Aparna repeatedly invokes Deborah as her debased and cautionary counterpart, the jealousy and threat that Aparna feels regarding Deborah can never be mastered by her aspersions. In fact, it is the very things that Aparna tries to cast as decadence or failure on Deborah’s part—her American sense of fashion, her comparative freedom with herself, and the liberty that she hopes to bestow upon Usha—that endear her to Usha. This can be surmised to be a result of Usha’s undeniable Americanness, which exists simultaneously with her Bengali ancestry and culture. Deborah, in her whiteness and in her alluring American ways, also erects a kind of feminine ideal that neither Aparna nor Usha can ever reach. In so doing, she emphasizes the liminal space that the Bengali women perennially occupy within American culture, even though our final image of Aparna is not one of abjection, but of quiet and unexpected strength. Through this choice, Lahiri forgoes the facile decision of casting Aparna as a tragic trope, and affords the character a full and complex humanity. 

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