Her own parents had an arranged marriage. Lahiri is married to a journalist whose Greek family settled down in Guatemala. "I write about arranged marriages, love marriages and different kind of relationships in my stories and novels," she says. "But the way people ask me the question makes me think they suspect I have an agenda. I don't." The real work of a marriage -- arranged or not -- begins after the ceremony, she has said.
As for the question why she continues to write about Bengalis, she says she has been asked the question so many times that it becomes difficult for her to hide her annoyance.
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"No one asks John Updike why he writers about WASPS all the time," she says referring to the well-known novelist and critic, who, like most of his major characters, is also a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. She might have added that some of her favourite novelists, including Nabokov, wrote about Jewish characters all the time. And so did Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. And another of her favorite writer Thomas Hardy set his books including Far From the Madding Crowd in Essex, England.
"Most novelists tend to write about a certain world they are connected to," she says. Her Bengali characters are "people first," she says. "They happen to be who they are. It is not their ethnicity that is most important in my mind. It is their character."
Another question that annoys her comes from Indians including journalists in America who ask her why some of her characters are negative, why the young desi in The Namesake has an adulterous affair.
"If I have to think if I am going to offend someone or please some one else, I won't be able to write," she says. "It's just my job to write the stories and books."
She often answers the critics by announcing that she has never written for anyone other than herself. She is prone to repeat what she told The Washington Post a few years ago: 'No matter what people say or expect, at the end of the day, they're not the one in the room with me, writing.'
When she wrote the stories that made The Interpreter of Maladies, she says she had no idea that they will be in a book. When she finished writing it, "there was the exhilaration of having finished." When the deal to publish the book was over, the over riding reaction was, "Oh, good, a weight had been lifted."
She completed the work on Unaccustomed Earth six months ago. "I enjoyed living with these stories," she muses. "I felt very connected to all these characters and felt sad when my work was over."
Also read: Why The Namesake made Jhumpa Lahiri cry
