by Anita George

Created on: July 30, 2008

Juggling Apple Pies and Samosas

For the average Indian-American there is a personal disconnect when it comes to the idea of home. For where is home? It cannot be America, for as Indians we don't always feel accepted; there will always be something about us that makes us different, that sets us apart from the peers we grew up with. And it won't be India for as Americans we have not lived authentically Indian lives. Always juggling apple pies and samosas, we straddle and mix two different cultures, effectively diluting both of them, never having a strong presence in either. The Americans look at you differently because you have brown skin, different customs. The Indians wonder about your outward appearance, an incongruous amalgam of brown skin and an American accent. So where do we belong? Are we always doomed to live in the uncertainty of hyphenated ethnicities?

Our immigrant parents hope not and strive to give us a home to call our own, two homes even, whether America or India cares to accept us or not. Yes, as they drag us through the bustling streets of Thrissur or New Delhi from one auntie's house to the next, as they point out the cows and temples along the way, carefully trying to teach us the proper way to speak in their native language, our parents are making every effort to connect us to our heritage because they know this feeling of estrangement all too well. As immigrants, they are fully aware of the dire consequences of such cultural isolation. And so it is in the face of assimilation, as they try to hold on to what little of their culture remains, it is then they ask how one can function at all without a sense of identity, let alone be happy.

Raising a family is hard enough when you're just trying instill the values of one culture. But two? That's the trademark challenge of all immigrant families, especially the ones featured in Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. But it's one story in particular, the final one of her debut oeuvre, which, after all of the collection's previous depictions of broken families, finally provides one shining example that raising a family with two different sets of cultural values can work; and that creating a single, cohesive identity out of the duality is the key to such success . And Lahiri would know. Drawing on her own personal experience and that of her parents, Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" is a partially fictionalized account of her parents' lives in

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