Blog 28: Interpreter of Maladies

The difficulty of communication is a major theme in the story Interpreter of Maladies. Communication appears repeatedly in Interpreter of Maladies, often with negative or painful consequences. Mr. Kapasi, who is the interpreter of maladies, has lost his ability to communicate with his wife. He also lost his ability to communicate in some of the languages he learned as a younger man, leaving him with only the English language. He realizes that his kids speak better English than him. Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das are unable to reach a level of friendship that they both may have had at one point. I wish they could speak with one another openly. When Mrs. Das loses Mr. Kapasi's address at the end of the story, it marks the end of the possibility that they could reach out to each other.

"The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors" (Lahiri pg. 13) . This quotation explains the difficulty of communication between the Indians and Indian Americans. The author describes the Das family and explains ways in which they do not display Indian behaviors. To me, the family seems both Indian and American, which fools Mr. Kapasi into thinking that he can communicate closely with Mrs. Das. With his other tourists, who are foreign but not Indian, Mrs. Kapasi keeps a distance. He feels he does not feel any sort of connection. The similarities between Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi leads him to mistakenly think they will find something significant in common. Their idea that the cultural gap between Indian immigrants and those they leave behind in India can be huge. This gap between the second generation Indians and Indians they leave behind in India gets even bigger. She includes this theme in her work because she does not really adapt herself to either culture, and she admits that she feels neither Indian or American.