'I love sitting quietly in a room by myself, imagining things'

For Jhumpa Lahiri, writer, observer and ABCD – "Another Badly Confused Deshi" – there is that place, a place she watches with a certain detached bemusement, the place she arrived at in the midst of all that post-Pulitzer fuss. The place where there are glitzy spreads in Vogue and where paparazzi stake out her wedding, a place where she constantly hops on planes to a seemingly endless array of cities, where someone is always there at the ready, snapping pictures.

And then there is this other place, a quieter place, the place where she is really most comfortable – home. This is but a momentary respite from last week's stint in Los Angeles, and this week's stop in Washington, D.C.

There, she will do something that makes her squirm: Read her own work, specifically excerpts from her first novel, The Namesake, the much-anticipated follow-up to Interpreter of Maladies, her debut collection of short stories, the book that won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 and a whole lot of attention and praise that she's still not quite sure what to do with.

Life after the first big splash has been interesting. "The unexpected can really have the power to unsettle you," says Lahiri, a slender, soft-spoken woman with a caramel complexion, large limpid eyes and a flair for fashion.

Indeed, winning the Pulitzer was discomfiting in that the 36-year-old has yet to figure out why. It came suddenly, a short hard blast of good fortune, shoving her into the literary spotlight and onto the best-seller lists, all thanks to a prize for which she wasn't even aware she was a contender. Did she deem herself unworthy? "I thought Pulitzers were given to authors who were ensconced in their work," she says. "I didn't understand how I could arrive at that, having written just nine stories. But I had to accept that, and accept it graciously."
It is the process that entrances.

"I've always never loved anything more than sitting quietly in a room by myself, imagining things," she says.

Indeed, it grounded her. Even as a little girl, growing up in a university town in Rhode Island, the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants, Lahiri entertained herself with the stories she wrote. Writing was play, something that carried on as she made her way through Barnard College and Boston University.

Writing was also an escape. Growing up brown and "foreign" in a town where white was the predominant theme had its challenges. There was the persistent feeling of other, not American enough, not Indian enough, of constantly straddling fences, stretching identities.

©Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post News Service