Interpreter of Maladies

Without exception, the central theme of each story in Interpreter of Maladies has to do with empathy for the other, either in the phenomenological sense, which concerns the way our perceptions of someone else influence and interfere with our understanding of them, or in the related phenomena first outlined in Edward Said’s Orientalism, which argues that Western colonialist history has created a divide between the Western Occident and the Eastern Orient, with the concept of the Orient as described in centuries of colonialist writing having an enormous sway over how Westerners engage with Asian cultures. Since most of the characters in this collection are immigrants of Indian or Bangladeshi descent, these two concepts are often interrelated throughout the stories: An immigrant’s national and cultural identity are inextricably tied to their interpersonal relationships in a way that is often invisible for non-immigrants.

In the phenomenological sense, characters’ assumptions about each other drive their behavior, and in stories like “A Temporary Matter” and “Interpreter of Maladies,” the epiphany that the viewpoint characters experience has to do with their assumptions about the other being challenged by the person’s intentions or confessions: Shoba is not using the confessional game to bring them closer together as Shukumar expects, and Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das both bring idealized versions of each other to their conversation about Mrs. Das’s infidelity. Two stories in the collection are from the viewpoint of children, which is a natural fit for stories about empathy as children are often in a situation that asks them to interpret the adult world—this is true of both Eliot in “Mrs. Sen’s,” as he watches his babysitter and her husband struggle with a new life, and of Lilia in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” who is trying to reckon with the title character’s worry and grief while coming to an awareness about her own role as a surrogate daughter to him.

When Said’s postcolonial theory of the self/other distinction is applied, a rich thematic trend emerges. Eliot and Lilia again serve as a model for understanding this: Eliot can set aside his assumptions about what’s strange or un-American about the Sen family, while his mother (and the people on the bus Mrs. Sen encounters) sees her as an outsider. He still understands the difference between American culture and Indian culture, but he approaches Mrs. Sen on her own terms. Lilia struggles with the concept of Mr. Pirzada’s nationality in comparison to her own—politically, they are not the same, but all she sees are their similarities. In her story, there is the added wrinkle of her education, which is stressing the importance of American history and attempting to suppress Lilia’s interest in learning about the Indian subcontinent. In “Sexy,” the difference between cultural identities is stressed even further: Miranda becomes interested in Indian culture because of her affair, and there is evidence that part of the excitement for her illicit relationship lies in Dev’s “exotic” identity. This idea mirrors a common colonial trope, in which the exotic, strange other is seen as a point of romantic fascination with little regard to the real life being lived by the people in that culture. For Miranda, the image of Dev falls away when she is confronted with the real pain of the young Indian boy who is also being hurt by an affair.

Interpersonal, cultural, and class identity are all entangled in whether characters can connect with each other and what barriers they face; even in the opening story, Shoba and Shukumar’s difficulty is in some way rooted in the fact that Shoba went to India often as a child and Shukumar did not, despite their shared heritage. In each story, the narrative centers around these questions of empathy; in some, the misunderstandings between characters fall away, leading to a realization that true empathy and connection were not possible after all. In others, empathy is the fulcrum point of successfully making a life in a new country (as in “The Third and Final Continent”) or moving past a stigmatizing illness (“The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”).