Making Room: Place and Placelessness in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik” in Unaccustomed Earth
Résumé
“Hema and Kaushik,” the second part of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2008 collection Unaccustomed Earth, foregrounds a complex tension between embodiment of place and resistance to traditional forms of belonging. It exposes non-representational placelessness, both from the point of view of praxis and ethics. In this trilogy of stories, death is central, placing the destinies of the characters in a dynamics of becoming.