Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the article "Trading Stories" by Jhumpa Lahiri {©2011 by Conde Nast).

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, I had almost no books to call my own.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant. There were books about China and Russia. My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called Desh but they were in Bengali. I craved a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and cheerfully lining the walls.

What I really sought was a better-marked trail of my parents’ intellectual lives: bound and printed evidence of what had inspired and shaped their minds. A connection, via books, between them and me. But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down.

Bengali was my first language, what I spoke and heard at home. But the books of my childhood were in English, and their subjects, for the most part, were either English or American lives. I was aware of a feeling of trespassing; I was aware that I did not belong to the worlds I was reading about: that different food graced our table, that different holidays were cele­brated. And yet when a book was in my possession, this didn't matter.

As a young girl, I was afraid to participate in social activities. I was worried about what others might make of me. But when I read I was free of this worry. I learned what my fictional companions ate and wore, about the toys scattered in their rooms, the vacations they took, the jams their mothers stirred on the stove. For me, the act of reading was one of discovery in the most basic sense一the discovery of a culture that was foreign to my parents.

When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. I did not write alone but with another student in my class. We would sit together, dreaming up charac­ters and plots, taking turns writing sections of the story. The stories were transparent riffs on what I was reading at the time: families living on prairies, orphaned girls sent off to boarding schools, children with supernatural powers.

As I grew into adolescence and beyond, however, my writing shrank. Though the compulsion to invent stories remained, self-doubt began to undermine it. What I loved at seven became, by seventeen, the form of self-expression that most intimidated me. At twenty-one, the writer in me was like a fly in the room一alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it.

After I graduated from college, I moved to Boston and formed a close friendship with a young woman whose father is a poet named Bill Corbett. I began to visit the Corbetts’ home, which was filled with books and art. I saw the desk where Bill wrote, obscured by manuscripts, letters, and proofs. I saw that the work taking place on this desk was obliged to no one, connected to no institution; that this desk was an island. I spent a summer pecking out sketches and fragments on a typewriter.

I began to want to be a writer. Secretly at first, exchanging pages with one other person, our presched­uled meetings forcing me to sit down and produce something.

I worked up the nerve to apply for a formal spot in a creative-writing program. When I told my parents that I'd been accepted, with a fellowship, they neither encouraged nor discouraged me. Like so many aspects of my American life, the idea that one could get a degree in creative writing, that it could be a legitimate course of study, seemed perhaps frivolous to them.

As a child, I had written to connect with my peers. But when I started writing stories again, in my twenties, my parents were the people I was struggling to reach. In 1992, just before starting the writing program, l went so to Calcutta with my family. I remember coming back at the end of summer and almost immediately writing the first of the stories I submitted that year in workshop. It was set in the building where my mother had grown up, and where I spent much of my time when I was in India. l see now that my impulse to write this story was to prove something to my parents: that I understood, in a limited but precise way, the world they came from.

For much of my life, I wanted to belong to a place, either the one my parents came from or to America. When I became a writer my desk became home; there was no need for another. I belong to my work, to my characters.