Who is Jhumpa Lahiri writing in Whereabouts? Locating immigrant emotions in a country of one's choosing and a new life

I have to admit, Jhumpa Lahiri’s prose has confounded me. The question, a question which I never thought of asking for a book that has already been written, had always come to mind - why had she written about this mundane thing? Does it not happen to everyone?

From my two reads of Lahiri’s, which include the Interpreter of Maladies and, more recently, Whereabouts, I asked why she had written about these privileged classes and not anyone else. Weren’t the maladies of the privileged classes also a privilege?

But then like a searing ray of sun that is meant to burn ideals passes through her prose and brings to life the inane, the thing you carry with yourself all along but are unable to talk about. It is this very thing, call it loneliness, misery, sadness, what you may, it is this subtle kernel of humaneness that Lahiri carries throughout.

For example, let us take this one instance in the book Whereabouts, where the unnamed protagonist is irritated and upset out of her wits when a married friend’s daughter leaves a pen mark on her sofa. Now the protagonist doesn’t seem to be too materialistic a being; she is no dandy to be sure, yet this one instance she quite bitterly spells out for the reader. And to be sure, this one instance, it stays with you; why you may ask again, as you can ask of all of her prose.

Whereabouts by Pulitzer Prize Winner, Jhumpa Lahiri. Published by Penguin Random House

Well, in that one line drawn by the child is the summation of Lahiri’s protagonist’s entire life’s thesis, her loneliness, her lack of family and her helplessness that arises out of being too comfortable in the way or how she is. So, it seems, that for Lahiri, and for us - for many things go unnoticed in our lives - the mundane is where you cross paths with life, the mundane is where you think about life and it is yet again mundane where the embers of a “better life” come alive.