In my second post about this collection of short stories, I will be answering the following prompt: Are there any generational conflicts in your novel?
The short answer is yes. In several of the short stories there is a rift between two generations, often a parent and child and their relationships with others (often non-Bengali people). However, I will focus on one example from the book. The second chapter, entitled "Hell-Heaven", tells of the narrator's relationship with her mother, especially with their family's interaction with another immigrant referred to as Pranab Kaku. Pranab Kaku is a much younger Bengali immigrant who the narrator and her family semi-adopts. Their family loves Pranab Kaku just as he does them. Eventually Pranab Kaku brings a girl to dinner with the family. Not a Bengali girl like the family is expecting, but an American. Her name is Deborah. The narrator loves Deborah, her mother does not. Her mother is not only against Deborah's American culture, but as the narrator looks back on this, she discovers that her mother was jealous of Deborah's relationship with Pranab Kaku. Deborah represents the "evils" of American culture that the narrator's parents and many other immigrants like them try to avoid at all costs. As the narrator grows up in American culture, she feels that the things that her parents, particularly her mother, fear and thus despise to be normal. Things such as being forbidden to go to school dances, to date, to wear a bra , and many other things that her peers were allowed to do and were normal for them to do made the narrator resent her mother. Deborah and the narrator became close while Deborah and Pranab Kaku were dating, but the couple became more distant once married. The narrator's mother blamed Deborah, but personally I suspect it was the fact that Pranab Kaku's family did not approve of the marriage as well as the difficulty that Deborah and their children later would have faced in an attempt to fit in with the very selective Bengali immigrant community that drove them away. This is another generational conflict inside of this story. However, When the narrator was a teenager, Deborah and Pranab Kaku (who had married several years earlier) invited them over to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, something that the narrator's family had never celebrated before. The dinner is very tense for the narrator's family, as they are the only Bengali family there. The narrator somewhat enjoys the dinner (partially because there is a cute boy her age there and she is snuck a drink of alcohol in the kitchen), but her mother is clearly tense and is as polite as she has to be while not enjoying herself and being appalled by the differences in culture (drinking for example). At this dinner, her mother kind of accepts defeat in the generational conflict by letting the narrator go for a walk with the boy her age (in which they stay out so late that her parents leave without her).
Defiance is a hallmark of both of these generational conflicts between Pranab Kaku and the narrator and their parents. Pranab Kaku defies his parents by rejecting the marriage that he was supposed to be arranged into back in India by marrying Debroah, even at the cost of his relationship with his parents -- though he does not know that they threatened to disowned him and blame the narrator's parents for his betrayal. The narrator defies her parents in a more secretive way since hers are not across the globe from her. She sneaks out to parties with her friends and is much freer with her choices about drinking and sexuality and even drugs than she probably would have been had anything of that sort not been so strictly forbidden. These generational conflicts in this short story, "Hell-Heaven", mirror many others throughout this collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.
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