Slices of life

Some lines from Jhumpa Lahiri's short story Hell-Heaven that caught my ear for one reason or another.

She and Pranab Kaku would argue passionately about these matters, raising their voices in playful combat, confronting each other in a way she and my father never did. ...

My father had a survivor’s mentality. From time to time, he liked to remark, in mixed company and often with no relevant provocation, that starving Russians under Stalin had resorted to eating the glue off the back of their wallpaper. ...

At larger gatherings, they kissed and held hands in front of everyone, and when they were out of earshot my mother would talk to the other Bengali women. “He used to be so different. I don’t understand how a person can change so suddenly. It’s just hell-heaven, the difference,” she would say, always using the English words for her self-concocted, backward metaphor. ...

Having me in the back seat allowed Pranab Kaku and Deborah to practice for the future, to try on the idea of a family of their own. Photographs were taken of me and Deborah, of me sitting on Deborah’s lap, holding her hand, kissing her on the cheek. We exchanged what I believed were secret smiles, and in those moments I felt that she understood me better than anyone else in the world. ...

As usual, my father said nothing in response to my mother’s commentary, quietly and methodically working though his meal, his fork and knife occasionally squeaking against the surface of the china, because he was accustomed to eating with his hands. He cleared his plate and then my mother’s, for she had pronounced the food inedible, and then he announced that he had overeaten and had a stomach ache.

Jana Leon photo of Lahiri via Leon's website; uncredited photo via Young India.