Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

Culinary Narratology 8
in which an individual longs for an idealized or purified version of an imaginary homeland or
an earlier time period. This yearning may instigate these diasporic women’s attempts to
recreate an aspect of their past lives by replicating the smells and the tastes of the past.
Lahiri’s collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, sheds light on South Asian
immigrants’ sense of alienation and isolation in adapting to American society. Of these
stories, “Mrs. Sen’s” represents South Asian female immigrants in their early years of
struggling to survive in geographic displacement. In a way, “Mrs. Sen’s” speaks for most
isolated women immigrants of Indian descent, as well as other origins, through its portrayal
of the poignant ambivalence of female immigrants intending to adapt to a new culture, but
simultaneously feeling a strong attachment to most aspects of their previous lifestyle, which,
however, are considered inappropriate in their new environment. In this story, Mrs. Sen, the
wife of an Indian professor who teaches mathematics at an American college, is portrayed as
a desperate first generation Bengali immigrant woman who ghettoizes herself in nostalgia for
her Indian life. She babysits Eliot, a young boy from a broken American family, and
Lahiri’s narrative pays great attention to Mrs. Sen’s meticulous preparation of food, quite
unlike Eliot’s mother, a career woman. 3 Based on Eliot’s observations, readers learn that
there are only two things that can make Mrs. Sen happy, which are letters from her family in
India, and Indian cuisine, which reminds her of home in India. In the detailed descriptions
of everyday foodways and food-related behaviors that appear in the story, fresh fish, which is
difficult to buy in the downtown supermarkets, is shown as being very crucial in her cookery:
“It was always a whole fish she desired, not shellfish, or the fillets that Eliot’s mother had
broiled” (123). In order to get fresh fish, Mrs. Sen has to rely on her increasingly reluctant
husband to drive her to her to a specific store. One day, she overcomes her fear of driving,
taking Eliot along with her to the store. Unfortunately, she has an accident, and although
Eliot and Mrs. Sen are not seriously injured, she is not able to babysit the boy anymore, and
the narrative ends.