When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri
Introduction
The short story “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine” by Jhumpa Lahiri is a ten-year-old girl’s reminiscence of the interactions in a small community of Indian immigrants who lived in a small university town in the United States. The storey takes place in 1971 when Bangladesh gained independence.
Jhumpa Lahiri in her short stories addresses the sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indian immigrants concerning their issues of identity, matrimony and disconnection with the foreign world as well as their homeland. Her short stories try to anthologise the difficulties posited in a diaspora culture on the central characters who find it difficult to flow effortlessly between their home and the world.
Outline
Mr Pirzada was a Bengali-Muslim who was in the United States on a grant from the Pakistani government. Lilia’s family, like Mr Pirzada’s, had immigrated to the United States of America in the hopes of leading a better and more secure life away from the political and religious strife in the Indian subcontinent. Lilia is worried by her father’s insistence on Pirzada being an ‘other’ in a country that is not hers. Every night after dinner, the family watches the news about the political unrest in the east. Lilia becomes concerned about Mr Pirzada’s wife and children’s safety as she gains a better understanding of the events taking place in the east.
Lilia does not realise when Mr Pirzada returns back to Dacca. Her father dropped him off at the airport while she was at school, and they haven’t heard from him in over six months. Mr Pirzada shared Lilia’s sense of loss and longing for Mr Pirzada once he returned to Dacca, as did Mr Pirzada for his wife and family when he was living in America.Summary
Summary
In quest of compatriots, Lilia’s father scoured the columns of the university press for surnames familiar to their region of the world. He eventually discovered Mr Pirzada, called him, and invited him to dinner.
Lilia remembers Mr Pirzada as a guy “carrying confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family.” Mr Pirzada visited Lilia’s family once a week for dinner. The Pakistani government offered him a one-year scholarship to study botany in a university in the United States as a botanic. We lived in Dacca, which was then part of Pakistan. He abandoned his wife and seven daughters in Dacca.
Lilia recalled an incident in which she wished to bring the Indian man a bottle of water and her father told her that “Mr Pirzada is no longer considered Indian… Not since Partition, in fact. Our country was shattered. 1947.” Lilia couldn’t figure it out. She wrote:
