Short story writing and garden making: Topia and heterotopia in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ (Unaccustomed Earth)

Abstract

‘Unaccustomed Earth’ presents us with an instance of dis-location that is not just connected with geographical displacement but with a melancholy that runs deep in Lahiri’s fiction. Somewhat unexpectedly, dis-location also works as a force that challenges fixity and inertia and becomes part and parcel of a process of mourning. This article proposes to approach Lahiri’s story through the notion of heterotopia, which Foucault defines as a paradoxical place, a place which is real, unlike utopia, yet ‘outside all places’. In the opening story of the collection, it is a garden created from scratch by a child and his grandfather which offers a beautiful example of how place itself may be displaced and efface itself behind place-making. Lahiri’s story challenges the too obvious association of the garden with rootedness and disturbs the binary opposition between place and placelessness: as it is, the garden that is being shaped means something different and works differently for everyone, opening a space not just for expectations but for the indeterminate and the unexpected. Just like the small patch of earth it contains, the limited space of the short story turns out to encompass far more than what appeared at first. Firmly inscribed in a part of the world that can be placed on a map, Lahiri’s story also detaches itself from that particular location as its metafictional and intertextual dimensions assert themselves with greater clarity.