Jhumpa Lahiri · 2008 · exile
Lahiri's 2008 collection closes with Hema and Kaushik, three linked stories running a hundred and ten pages. Two Bengali families meet in a Cambridge park in the sixties; their children meet again by chance in Rome forty years later; and one of them is on a beach in Thailand on the morning of 26 December 2004.
- 1Cambridge
Two Bengali families who met in a Cambridge park, and a farewell party in 1974 when Kaushik's parents decide to go back to India - Hema not yet seven, and narrating the whole thing to him decades later as you.
- 2Bombay
Seven years in India that Kaushik will not talk about afterwards - and then the family returns to Massachusetts, and stays in Hema's house while they look for their own, and Hema gives up her room.
- 3The North Shore
The house they buy on the coast north of Boston, chosen for the sea - and the reason they came back at all, which the Choudhuris do not mention for months: Parul's cancer, and a doctor at Mass General.
- 4The Maine coast
Kaushik in his last year of college, told by telephone that his father has remarried - and driving north up the coast for days afterwards, sleeping in the car, looking at water and not going home.
- 5Rome
Twenty years on, and the chance meeting the whole trilogy is built toward: Hema in Rome on sabbatical as a classicist, six weeks from an arranged marriage, and Kaushik passing through as a photojournalist.
- 6Volterra
Six weeks driving round Tuscany looking at Etruscan tombs, which is her work and becomes their affair - and the offer he makes at the end of it, which is to come to Hong Kong and is not a proposal.
- 7Calcutta
Hema goes and marries Navin, as she had already arranged to - the choice she makes rather than the one she wants, and the one Lahiri declines to punish her for.
- 8Khao Lak
Kaushik takes a week on the Thai coast before the next assignment, swims out from the beach on the morning of 26 December 2004, and the story ends there - which is the ending readers argue about and nobody forgets.