A Real Durwan

After her 1999 short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, Lahiri went on to write critically acclaimed novels: The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Her second short-story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008), was also award-winning. As of 2023, Lahiri resides in Italy where she translates works from Italian to English, including her novel Whereabouts (2018) and a short-story collection from Italian writers.

Many of Lahiri’s stories detail the experience of Indian immigrants in the United States, while others, like “A Real Durwan,” are set in India. Boori Ma’s character, because she is a refugee and endures drastic displacement and alienation, likewise typifies Lahiri’s work. Akin to the author herself, Lahiri’s characters often feel torn between two places—or, their identities are tied to multiple places—and in “A Real Durwan,” the pattern plays into a theme of The Connections Between Place and Identity. Growing up in Rhode Island in the 1970s, Lahiri struggled to reconcile her Bengali heritage with her experience in the United States:

I also entered a world my parents had little knowledge or control of: school, books, music, television, things that seeped in and became a fundamental aspect of who I am.