Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Rereading pages so they last forever.

I think that is how I would encapsulate my thoughts on Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. Another notable feeling: “ow”.

I am mostly affected by the theme that strangely both haunts and liberates me the most: connectivity. The feeling that each of us are connected with the other and the constant thought that someone else has access to our private contemplations. I sometimes wish my human existence would go untraceable, but I guess the other side of that is knowing that it truly cannot, and that so long as we breathe, we leave an imprint.

Our soul passes through body to body, and in the midst of it, we try and make sense of our human experience. We are lucky to be born human, lucky to fathom our existence, ponder what truths this world carries and moreover, read about others’ lives. We learn so much from each other and only when it is too late, express our appreciation.

I am not sure exactly what to say about Unaccustomed Earth, but I couldn’t just leave this book unnoted. The novel takes us through (what feels like more than 8) people’s lives, each leaving an aforementioned imprinted larger than the last. I feel whole yet raw reading the last page of the book (strangely the book being 333 pages which feels like a mockery to everything I thought I knew). I longed for a book like this one without even knowing it and Lahiri has inspired me in more ways than I can count. I feel a new sense of belonging in the world she created through words, reminding me that we as people, do no different in the world we create for ourselves. We tell ourselves stories, ridicule and praise our own existence with every breath and make judgements with a cutting, yet forlonging tone. We love hard and leave behind those who dared not to love us back the way we felt we deserved. We crave home yet feel imprisoned by it. We hate and hate that we hate. Lahiri challenged me in this book with triggering motifs surrounding marriage and the coming of age of a brown girl in our society. She showed me multiple pathways to life with and without apparent love, each exemplifying our fatal flaw as human beings: longing. As a 25-year-old woman, she made me feel the same way as I felt when I fell in love with reading when I was a single-digit little girl. I feel like a child again in a way that is confused and hopeful about the world. Looking around with bright eyes noticing that nothing and everything has changed. She inspired me to take stock of the life I chose to live and made me wonder, if I even had a choice to begin with…

This piece is a true testament of the human experience, with fleeting pain, freedom, happiness, and loneliness, we come to understand that we are somehow all connected. That our paths are bound to cross and that our souls are as permanent as the air we breathe.