Literature and the city.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Perhaps America’s 250th independence anniversary does matter to us in India. The United States has shaped global cultural life, giving the world jazz, Hollywood, and generations of influential writers. American literature, in particular, has been moulded by a staggeringly diverse range of voices and lived experiences, from writers as distinct as Toni Morrison and Ocean Vuong.

One such writer is Jhumpa Lahiri, whose work spans lands, languages, and pehchan, reflecting many of the idiosyncratic qualities that define American writing. Born in London to Bengali immigrants, raised in the United States, and now a resident of Rome, she visited Delhi earlier this year. One slice from that visit provides a fitting way to mark this historic anniversary.

In February, Jhumpa Lahiri spent an afternoon in Old Delhi, wandering without a fixed route. At one point, chance brought together what she saw with what she once wrote. That occasion came when she climbed to the rooftop of a heritage hotel near Dariba Kalan.

From that height, the picturesque Jama Masjid dominated the skyline. Yet it was the daily life unfolding across an array of rooftops that drew the eye. A bare-chested man in a towel was struggling to pull his pants over his legs. Saris hung from washing lines. Mangoris were spread out to dry in the winter sun. Two women were chatting across a gap between buildings. A monkey was inspecting a bundle of clothes resting on a cot. A boy was flying a green-and-red kite. Staircases, landings, banister poles, parapets, and old buildings formed this collage of ordinary life.

Now comes the surreal part. As Jhumpa Lahiri stood watching these scenes, the view evoked a short story from her Pulitzer Prize winning collection Interpreter of Maladies. Set in Calcutta, A Real Durwan unfolds through the shared spaces of an old apartment building. Staircases, corridors, terraces, and the rooftop shape the daily life of its residents. Salted lemon peels dry on the rooftop. While all day long, Boori Ma, the building’s elderly caretaker and the story’s protagonist, moves through these spaces on her aching legs, carrying memories of another home. She being a Partition refugee from what became Bangladesh.

Incidentally, Old Delhi carries the same heavy sense of existence. Like the story’s Boori Ma, it has endured the Partition, migration, and the pressures of change while preserving fragments of an earlier world. Whatever, these rooftops of Purani Dilli could easily have belonged to the pages of Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, though the story is rooted in Calcutta. Salted lemon peels drying on the chhat become mangoris here, and distant arches of Howrah Bridge give way to the distant walls of the Red Fort.

That said, Jhumpa Lahiri herself, standing above Old Delhi, did not remark on the resemblance. After some time, the writer descended down to the street level, and turned into a gali leading to Dariba.