I have less sympathy with the objection that Lahiri writes about the same kind of people all the time: NRI Bongs, as you say. These problems are all sorted out in the new book, which also has the other merits that I have pointed out. I thought there was a kind of tension there between the subject matter, which was about the lives of immigrant Indians, and the first audience of the stories, who were American, which expressed itself in bits of the language and vocabulary: the refusal to name the Indian gods the characters are thinking of, or the foods they are eating. You are also right in sensing a disquiet with Lahiri's first collection of stories (I haven't read *The Namesake*). Although I tease Lahiri's work gently in this piece, it is not at that point, but at the place where I say her stories are Very Serious. You are correct to query my comment saying "This is very subtle of Lahiri", which was implied by my point in the previous sentence anyway, and was something I added this afternoon to the piece that appeared in the newspaper. Rohit - As always, I feel from reading your comments that you are one of the most perceptive readers of my work, and you catch things that I have left unsaid (although I hope that in future comments you will avoid saying "u", which I consider the ugliest and laziest word in the 21st-century English lexicon).
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