When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine

Content Warning: This section references wartime violence, including genocide and sexual assault.

“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” opens with Lilia narrating as an adult and providing the exposition for the story. These opening paragraphs are detached and frank in tone, reflecting a narrator who is well-informed, experienced, and perhaps even a little jaded. By juxtaposing the mundane normality of Mr. Pirzada’s life (he brings her candy, he has a family, a home, and a job at the university) with the horrors of war and genocide (he doesn’t know if his family is still alive, people are shot in broad daylight, women are sexually assaulted), she concisely introduces Mr. Pirzada while providing a brutal historical context. However, a change occurs at the start of the third paragraph, and the narrative perspective shifts from the knowledgeable, experienced adult to that of the sheltered, innocent, 10-year-old Lilia. Gone is the all-knowing narrator who almost seemed bored by the facts she has read and considered thousands of times, and in her place is the young girl who “[knows] nothing of the reason for [Mr. Pirzada’s] visits” (24). This shift is important because Lilia’s Coming of Age as a Second-Generation Immigrant becomes one of the central themes. What’s more, her arc from innocent to experienced allows the story to explore its themes without coming across as didactic.

Much of Lilia’s naivety relates to her position as a second-generation immigrant. Lahiri establishes this early on when Lilia’s father provides her with an impromptu history and geography lesson to explain why Mr. Pirzada is not considered Indian. Her father is concerned by Lilia’s ignorance on the topic and questions what she is learning in school. The obvious answer is that she learns American history and geography, and her mother defends the choice of curriculum. In her mother’s eyes, Lilia’s alienation from Indian history is a fair trade-off. It is because she lives a safe, sheltered life full of opportunity that she does not have to endure the same dangers and struggles as her parents. This exchange reveals that Lilia’s ignorance of the wider world isn’t entirely her fault. She has no access to the knowledge that would help her understand what is happening in Dacca or what Mr. Pirzada is going through because her parents have purposefully sheltered her. Moreover, her school actively discourages her from researching her own cultural history, instead providing her with a narrow, sanitized version of American history that can be learned through creating dioramas made of colored construction paper and taking field trips to historical monuments.

Ultimately it is the introduction of Mr. Pirzada and the heavy baggage he bears that shatters Lilia’s innocence and catalyzes her coming of age. First among the realizations she makes is that there is a cultural gap between her and her parents. When Mr. Pirzada comes over, Lilia awaits his arrival each night with both “delight” and “dread.” While the delight is easily understood—he is a charming man who brings her candy—the dread is because the “superb ease of his gestures [...] made [her] feel, for an instant, like a stranger in [her] own home” (29). As a second-generation immigrant with secondhand knowledge and experience of her cultural heritage, Lilia cannot interact with her parents with that same grace. Mr. Pirzada’s very presence, welcomed as it is, highlights the ways in which growing up in America has created a cultural gap between her and her parents.

Moreover, after Mr. Pirzada is introduced, Lilia’s parents encourage her to watch the news with them instead of just reading her book. She sees the tanks, the fallen buildings, and the thousands upon thousands of refugees seeking safety and shelter. Lilia is pulled away from the insulated world of childish things she is used to (her book) and forced to confront the fact that children her age are literally fighting for their survival. The realization that there is suffering in the world and that it is directly affecting Mr. Pirzada, whom she has grown closer to, sparks a desire to learn more about what is going on and to try to help. This contributes to her growing awareness of her dual cultural identity and the challenges it presents—for example, the fact that nobody at her school seems to know or care that a war is happening somewhere else in the world. Lilia must learn to navigate the incongruence that exists between her home and school life; at home, there is a constant sense of anxiety and dread about the suffering in Pakistan, while at school she must pretend everything is fine and learn about a centuries-old war. The contrast between the mythologized version of the American Revolution that the school teaches and the brutality of the ongoing war is central to the theme of Revolutionary Violence and American Insularity.

Through all of this, Lilia matures. The coming of age is complete when she learns that she will never see Mr. Pirzada again. In this moment, she can finally empathize with what he was going through while separated from his family. Up until this point she was ritualistically eating the candy—a symbol of her childishness—he gave her each night, but upon learning that he is safe and she will never see him again, she throws it away. The action complicates the theme of Rituals as Connection and Coping Mechanism; as helpful as routines can be in creating as sense of safety and community, the story nevertheless suggests there are times when it is appropriate to cast them aside.