Compared with the first-generation Mrs. Sen who preserves Indian culture within the sphere of U.S. home, Mina Das struggles between two cultures. As the
second-generation Indian American, she receives American culture and education and
―had never been very close to‖ her parents (Lahiri 63). She assimilates American individualism while striving to conform to parents‘ ―overprotectiveness and gender expectations concerning their sexuality‖ in order to maintain the pureness of Indian culture (Toro-Morn and Alicea 195). Her parents befriend another Indian-American married couple from the same ethnic Indian community and pair Mina with the couple‘s son, Raj. To ethnic Indian communities, ―the control of women‘s sexuality is an important part of maintaining authenticity of tradition‖ (Hegde 49). The ―setup‖
(Lahiri 63) leads to Mina‘s early entrance into marital life in college because ethnic Indian ―parents were protective of daughter‘s sexuality and required their daughters to value their virginity, family, motherhood‖ (Toro-Morn and Alicea 203). In other words, when she accepts Raj‘s proposal in high school, she remains too young to experience what the world is really about and what she really wants. In order to conform to Indian patriarchal gender expectation, she forces herself to be an obedient daughter, dutiful wife and mother. Nonetheless, ―born and raised‖ in America, she actually assimilates into American culture. Her westernization shows as she ―looked Indian‖
(Lahiri 44) but dresses as a foreigner with ―her shaved, largely bare legs‖ (43). She does ―not understand‖ (46) Indian local language and shows little attachment to her
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cultural heritage as she ―continued to polish her nails‖ without removing her
sunglasses along the way (49). Although she has children, she ―did not hold the little girl‘s hand as they walked to the rest room‖ (43) and did not ―offer her puffed rice to anyone‖ (47) on their way to the Sun Temple. Instead of a caring and attentive mother, Mina ―behaved like an older sister, not a parent‖ (49). Her self-absorbed behaviors and preoccupation with her own businesses contrasts with Indian family-centered values that underscore the mother‘s self-sacrifice and prioritize family members‘
needs.
Therefore, as soon as she becomes a wife and mother, her American individualist notion clashes with Indian patriarchal gender expectations. To Mina, home does not stand for warmth and shelter, it represents a suffocating gendered space. Indian ethnic communities construct gendered ideology that positions men as the household‘s
―providers‖ and women to be the ―caretakers of the home and children‖ (Toro-Morn and Alicea 202). She can hardly voice her own values influenced by American culture because ―women who do not conform to the ideal of submissive womanhood are deemed un-Indian and are marginalized‖ (Kurien 169). In order to cater to these expectations, she sacrificed her life, entered marital life early, and even ―declined invitations from her one or two college girlfriends‖ (Lahiri 64). Regardless of the hostess‘s aspiration for autonomy and a fresh breath of air, Mina was ―overwhelmed,‖
and constantly felt ―tired‖ about ―having a child so quickly, and nursing, and warming up bottles of milk and testing their temperature against her wrist while Raj was at work, dressed in sweaters and corduroy pants, teaching his students about rocks and dinosaurs‖ (63). Every day, the stifling gendered space exhausts the hostess‘s energy while the husband does not offer any help. Her husband, therefore, partakes in the patriarchal structure as an accomplice to gradually suffocate the anxious and exhausted hostess. Struggling between American individualism and Indian gender
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expectations, the hostess has mixed feelings towards her predicament in the domain of home. On the one hand, she is burdened by Indian traditions and patriarchal values instilled by her parents to be a submissive wife and mother. Therefore, she regards these ―terrible urges . . . to throw things away. . . .‖ including ―the television, the children, everything‖ as ―unhealthy‖ (65). On the other hand, completely assimilating to American individualism, she rejects Indian cultural practices and wants to
emancipate herself from the patriarchal imprisonment.
Consequently, to the first-generation Mrs. Sen and the second-generation Mina Das, the home operates as the site of Indian values and traditions that imprisons their subjectivities. To both of them, the U.S. home serves as a prison to cage them.
Nevertheless, it differs when it comes to the home‘s function as a cage to Mrs. Sen and Mina Das respectively. Mrs. Sen suffers from homesickness and adaptation difficulties, so she actively reconstructs the so-called Indianness within the American home despite the impossibility of cultural replication. Mina Das, on the other hand, as an Americanized individual, passively complies with Indian ethnic values. She is smothered by the Indian patriarchal ideology that labels women within a fixed gender role to be an obedient wife and mother. Accordingly, as the hostess in their own home, their mentalities vary significantly. The former scarcely has the intention to let in otherness and secludes herself from the exposure of the alterity through her
immersion to the reproduction of Indianness. The latter falls victim to what the home represented—Indian patriarchy. While she desperately intends to break free from the suffocating American home, she remains powerless when confronting such Indian ethnic patriarchy.
Lahiri presents the extreme parallaxical differences between the first-and
second-generation female Indian Americans‘ mindsets and their intersecting relations to their own home in ―Mrs. Sen‘s‖ and ―Interpreter of Maladies.‖ While Mrs. Sen
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drastically rejects American culture, Mina Das completely assimilates the American culture. Nonetheless, such a categorization between the first-and second-generation female hostess falls into the pitfall of binary system. Suppose the readers only expose themselves to the scope of these two characters‘ backdrops, they tend to arbitrarily label and render fixed images to the first-and second-generation female Indian American expatriates. This insufficiency results in the simplification of the
identification complexity that these immigrants encounter in the host country. While Mrs. Sen and Mina Das embody certain aspects of the adversities that first-and second-generation female Indian Americans encounter, they do not represent Indian diaspora as a whole. In fact, the issue of cultural identity contains explicit and delicate cultural negotiations between the motherland and the host country. Instead of a fixed state of mind, cultural identity remains fluid and constantly changing during one‘s lifetime expatriation. However, one of the major deadlocks of immigration literature lies in the imposition of preconceived stereotypical images upon female Indian American immigrants. Being aware of such insufficiency, Lahiri offers different perspectives in terms of the first-and second-generation Indian American hostess in another short story ―Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine‖ so as to expand the notion of the fluid cultural identity.
In ―Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,‖ Lahiri portrays the domestic interactions
between the first-generation Indian American mother and her daughter Lilia. Different from the previous stories that focus on the exploration of one hostess‘s mentality, this story provides two hostesses. Literally speaking, as the family‘s devoted caregiver, Lilia‘s mother no doubt is considered the hostess of the home. However, born and raised in the U.S., the Americanized Lilia represents American culture. Thus, she served as the hostess of the American culture in contrast to the first-generation Indian expatriates and the Bengali guest Mr. Pirzada in the domain of home. Lahiri
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juxtaposes their daily lives in American society in the story so as to elucidate the first-and second-generation Indian American‘s psychologies and the meanings of the home to them.