Hell Heaven Jhumpa Lahiri

Theme

This story is about the association between Pranab Chakraborty and the narrator Usha's family. Pranab Chakraborty was not, severely speaking, the younger brother of my father. It was one more Bengali from Calcutta who had gone to the arid coast of the community life of my parents in the early seventies, when they lived in a borrowed apartment in Central Square and friends could count on the fingers of one hand. But I had no real guy in America, so I was taught to call Pranab Kaku. Therefore, he called my father Shyamal Da, always addressing him with the polite formula, and called my mother Boudier, which is how the Bengalis should be addressed to the wife of an older brother, instead of using your name stack, Aparna.

Character and identity

Hell-Heaven is presented from the point of view of an Indian woman, Usha, in her later years, as she recounts the relationship of her mother and an Indian man she loved named Pranab Kaku.Pranab, who Usha comes to call Pranab Kaku (uncle) is essentially adopted by Usha's family because he is so alone in Boston when he moves there for graduate school. They take him in, feeding him daily, and Usha's mother falls in love with Pranab.

Imagery

After Pranab Kaku befriend my parents, confessed that the day we met we had followed my mother and me for most of an afternoon through the streets of Cambridge, where she and I used to wander outside the school . We had followed the steps on Massachusetts Avenue and then when we went in and came back to leave the Harvard Coop, where my mother was like watching household goods sales.

Discussion about the Story

Prowled us by Harvard Yard, where my mother used to sit on the lawn on nice days and see the flood of students and teachers busily plying the trails, until, after all, when we climbed the stairs of Widener Library so that I could go to the bathroom, gave my mother a touch on the shoulder and asked, in English, if maybe it was Bengali. The answer to that question was clear because my mother wore red and white bracelets characteristic of married Bengali women, and a typical Tangail sari, and a thick stripe of vermilion powder in the parting of the hair, and had full and round face and big dark eyes so common among Bangladeshi women. ...