Blog #2: Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" and Story Beginings

--->I doubt it matters, but WARNING: SPOILERS TO LAHIRI'S "A TEMPORARY MATTER<---

The past few times my Fiction Writing class has met, we've discussed how stories begin. We've looked at Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", Russell Bank' "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story" and Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't" and discussed how they began their stories and the impact it gave. We also analyzed our own story beginnings. This week, we were told to read Jumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" and blog about the beginning of the story and then compare it to the beginning of another story.

"A Temporary Matter"'s Story Beginning

 First, I'd like to say that "A Temporary Matter" (from here on referred to as ATM) is a phenomenally written piece that shows human nature and human interaction at it's purest. It shows how tragedy changes our relationships and our feelings. It demonstrates how our own self worth and opinion can affect how others see us. It let's the reader see and feel not only the sweetness of a love, but also the cruelty of resentment and reciprocation. It shows the demons we face when we face each other.

The beginning of the story, however, shows us human nature in a much different way; a way that I feel truly pushes this story to what makes it great.  Pasted below is the beginning of ATM and the full story is linked in the first paragraph of this post:

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years. 

 “It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar’s. She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble. 

She’d come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her other hand. “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.” 

“When I’m here, you mean,” Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since January he’d been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in India. “When do the repairs start?”

 
“It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?” Shoba walked over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn’t celebrated Christmas that year. 

“Today then,” Shoba announced. “You have a dentist appointment next Friday, by the way.”  He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he’d forgotten to brush them that morning. It wasn’t the first time. He hadn’t left the house at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop.

Six months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference in Baltimore when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due date. He hadn’t wanted to go to the conference, but she had insisted; it was important to make contacts, and he would be entering the job market next year. She told him that she had his number at the hotel, and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers, and she had arranged with her friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the event of an emergency. When the cab pulled away that morning for the airport, Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with one arm resting on the mound of her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her body.  Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba pregnant, it was the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted red with blue lettering. It was cavernous compared to their own car. Although Shukumar was six feet tall, with hands too big ever to rest comfortably in the pockets of his jeans, he felt dwarfed in the back seat. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist ppointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was still a student at thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the first time.  A member of the staff had found him somehow among the identical convention rooms and handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was only a telephone number, but Shukumar knew it was the hospital. When he returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead. Shoba was lying on a bed, asleep, in a private room so small there was barely enough space to stand beside her, in a wing of the hospital they hadn’t been to on the tour for expectant parents. Her placenta had weakened and she’d had a cesarean, though not quickly enough. The doctor explained that these things happen. He smiled in the kindest way it was possible to smile at people known only professionally. Shoba would be back on her feet in a few weeks. There was nothing to indicate that she would not be able to have children in the future. 

These days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up. He would open his eyes and see the long black hairs she shed on her pillow and think of her, dressed, sipping her third cup of coffee already, in her office downtown, where she searched for typographical errors in textbooks and marked them, in a code she had once explained to him, with an assortment of colored pencils. She would do the same for his dissertation, she promised, when it was ready. He envied her the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his. He was a mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details without curiosity. Until September he had been diligent if not dedicated, summarizing chapters, outlining arguments on pads of yellow lined paper. But now he would lie in their bed until he grew bored, gazing at his side of the closet which Shoba always left partly open, at the row of the tweed jackets and corduroy trousers he would not have to choose from to teach his classes that semester. After the baby died it was too late to withdraw from his teaching duties. But his adviser had arranged things so that he had the spring semester to himself. Shukumar was in his sixth year of graduate school. “That and the summer should give you a good push,” his adviser had said. “You should be able to wrap things up by next September.”  But nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and Shoba had become experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible. He thought of how he no longer looked forward to weekends, when she sat for hours on the sofa with her colored pencils and her files, so that he feared that putting on a record in his own house might be rude. He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they still reached for each other’s bodies before sleeping.  In the beginning he had believed that it would pass, that he and Shoba would get through it all somehow. She was only thirty-three. She was strong, on her feet again. But it wasn’t a consolation. It was often nearly lunchtime when Shukumar would finally pull himself out of bed and head downstairs to the coffeepot, pouring out the extra bit Shoba left for him, along with an empty mug, on the countertop. 

Through the start of ATM, Lahiri gives us a picture of a couple torn apart by the death of a child. It shows a marriage falling apart and two people who are not happy together. This sets us up with the idea that this story is going to either fix their marriage, or show it deteriorating further. By setting things up this way, Lahiri gives us, the readers, a unique experience. Or, it gave me a unique experience. By setting the story up the way she did, Lahiri led me to feeling as if I was experiencing the same situation. She gave me a real enough, a tangible enough, situation that I was able to connect and put myself into the dining room with Shoba and Shukumar. I put myself in their shoes and felt as distant and repelled and alone as both of the characters did throughout the story. In my opinion, that is how a story like this should start. It should start in such a way that you are not only introduced to the characters and the conflict, but that you are pulled into the conflict as if it involved you as well. If the story doesn't hook the reader like this, I don't know if a story showing such harsh reality would really be able to anchor a reader's attention.

Comparison To Another Story Beginning

The second aspect of this blog is comparing the beginning of ATM to the beginning of another piece of fiction. The comparative piece I chose is one of my favorite books, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". I chose this book because, despite seeming completely different from the beginning of ATM, the beginning has an abundance of similarities. The beginning of Gatsby is below:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

 

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

 

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

 

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

The start of Gatsby, like ATM, shows quite a bit of human nature. ATM had two characters, allowing them to play off each other to develop that sense of closeness and the abundance of human nature-y content. With Gatsby, what we have is a single person and an internal dialogue that introduces the story and that character, as well as that of the story's namesake, Gatsby. Nick, the narrator, is what many would consider an unreliable narrator. Here he explains a bit about his past and his own personal observations about himself. Because of this, he shows a darker side of human nature, much like Shoba and Shukumar, however with a different twist. In ATM, they showed a relationship and the ups and downs and lights and darks of human interactions. With Gatsby, the beginning showcases the human nature of our relationships with ourselves.

Nick, in this beginning, shows that people lie to themselves. He shows an ignorance to his own human nature. Of course, directly from the beginning of the story, we can't entirely see this. It isn't until you learn more about the story and about the narrator that you truly see Nick's nature. However, when one truly looks at it, you still get a sort of bitter sweet feeling from these few paragraphs. You get the feeling that something isn't quite right about Nick and his own self description. Because of this, I feel that this beginning accurately shows the demons one can face when facing themselves. It shows that a person will go as far as they can to up hold an opinion of themselves, even if it means warping a view of an entire book (or life, you get the point).

ATM showcases the demons we face when we face each other. Gatsby showcases the demons we face when we face ourselves. In both story beginnings, you get pulled into the conflict and into the characters, albeit in different ways. In the end, both stories are similar not because they are based off the same motifs or because they are based around the same sort of story or symbolism, but because both are successfully written story beginnings.

You should go read both of these as they are both amazing stories!