Jhumpa Lahiri has become her renowned author collecting various awards across the globe due to her contribution to the subject of human migration and how it impacts the cultures of the people. The majority of her work delves into the lives of people leaving and returning to their homelands. She also focuses on stories of people caught between cultures and worlds and how they adapt or fail to make the required changes. Lahiri was born to Indian parents in London and moved to the US as a young child. She, therefore, fully understands the concept of culture and how the same is affected by the aspect of moving to new worlds that have different practices. The paper focuses on the three stories of part II of the Unaccustomed Earth. Here she presents a trilogy of stories that explore the lives of a young immigrant girl and her friend who spent time traveling the world and always seeking to fit the customs of their reality. The first story Once in a Lifetime introduces the reader to Hema and Kaushik’s families and their time as children in America. The second story, Year’s End, covers the ordeal of Kaushik dealing with the death of his mother and his father remarrying a younger woman. In contrast, the last story Going Ashore highlights the coming together of Hema and Kaushik and how they separate. The essay explores the three stories to examine the theme of intergenerational trauma that comes from the loss of one’s home and culture.
People are pushed by various needs, including job opportunities, education, vacationing, among many others, to travel away from their homes. The idea of traveling and abandoning one’s culture comes from diverse backgrounds. For instance, Hema’s parents were Indians who had moved to the US for work purposes. On the other hand, Kaushik’s family traveled to India, leaving the US for a job position in Larsen & Toubro, Bombay. After a while, the father, Dr. Choudhuri, reported that he would come back to the US after securing a better job (Stoican 42). To this end, it becomes apparent that people will abandon their cultures to seek greener pastures. At the same time, the aspect of traveling is viewed as a weakness, especially by other immigrants. They consider moving back to India as a sign of weakness and being unable to adapt to the cultures of the western world. The family of Hema is more bewildered by the notion of coming back to America years after they had left to Bombay. Hema’s parents talked about the returning family stating that “They should have known it’s impossible to go back” (Once in a Lifetime 227). The statement shows that acclimatizing to a new environment can become challenging and that it was only the strong that could manage the changes. Hema’s parents feel that the Choudhuri family found getting back to the Indian culture quite challenging as they could not leave behind their newly acquired culture at the time they spent in America. As such, the family appears broken and seeks refuge in an environment they know better, hence the need to move back to the US.
Kaushik suffers the ultimate trauma following the loss of his mother and his home as well more than any other characters in the story. He states, “The whole thing was arranged by relatives… This remark upset me more than anything my father had said so far” (Year’s End 255). The remark comes from the time his father informed him of his new marriage and the woman who would become Kaushik’s stepmother. According to him, his father had crossed the line by choosing to forget about his dead wife and marrying a young woman for companionship (Taher 138). He seems unable to grasp his head around the whole idea of a new life without his mother. It is the new marriage that drives Kaushik away to become a wanderer of the world. Being deprived of his home and his mother, he seems unable to uphold a healthy relationship and does not end up with Hema even when they meet later in life. He dies a sad death from the Tsunami to mark the end of his turmoil with navigating the loss of his culture and home alike.
Hema, on the other hand, finds herself struggling with cultural problems that remain rampant throughout her parents and those of Kaushik, the aspect of arranged marriages. Kaushik’s parents were joined together in marriage through an arranged marriage, and the new union was also as a result of arranged marriage. Hema, while she was in Rome, she planned to marry Navin although “She refused to think of it as an arranged marriage, but knew in her heart that that was what it was” (Going Ashore 297). The statement shows that although Hema was educated, she finds herself in the trauma of falling with old traditions of arranged marriages. Although she had lost her culture by traveling abroad, her parents still hold on to the Indian practices, and she was to live through them as well. Concluding, Lahiri manages to showcase the impact of culture and how the young ones are affected as they travel to new traditions