57 pages • 1 hour read
Jhumpa LahiriWhen Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Foreshadowing
When helping Lilia carve the pumpkin, Mr. Pirzada hears of the potential war between India and Pakistan. All attempts he has made to ignore the news that night are rendered futile, and the knife slips in his hand, leaving a large gash in the pumpkin. Efforts to fix the pumpkin result in it having a large O-shaped mouth instead of the teeth Lilia planned, and this initial slip signals the beginning of the end: The war is going to happen, Mr. Pirzada will soon depart forever, and Lilia will finally gain an understanding of true loss, as well as the difficulties of being both Indian and American. When she returns home from trick or treating, she realizes her pumpkin has been smashed, and Mr. Pirzada’s stoic facade is cracked as he sits with his head in his hands. The botched pumpkin foreshadows the events of Halloween night, which themselves symbolize Lilia’s relationship to American culture.
Juxtaposition
“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” uses juxtaposition to highlight some of the daily tensions Lilia experiences in navigating two different cultural spheres. When Lilia visits Dora’s home after their night of trick or treating, she calls home to let her mother know she has arrived safely, and she hears the news in the background. This makes her realize that they don’t have the news on at Dora’s. Instead, Dora’s father is relaxing on the couch with a glass of wine, listening to music and reading a magazine. This contrast brings into focus the often conflicting worlds Lilia inhabits. At home, life revolves around the TV because the news can literally herald the life or death of their friends and families; everywhere else, Lilia must carry on as if nothing is wrong because everyone seems completely unaware of the conflict. A similar contrast is evident when Mr. Pirzada worries about Lilia going out for Halloween without an adult. His concern that it might rain or that they could get lost in the neighborhood starkly contrasts with the young refugee children they have seen on the news, who are fighting for their survival.
Allusion
Lilia is always sent to bed early, while the adults stay up playing Scrabble and talking until the eleven o’clock news. She explains, “Each night as I drifted off to sleep I would hear them, anticipating the birth of a nation on the other side of the world” (34). The phrase “birth of a nation” is an allusion to the racist but incredibly influential American silent film of the same name. The film draws on a combination of fiction and historical fact as it chronicles two families on opposite sides of the American Civil War, spanning the conflict’s outbreak to the period of Reconstruction. Its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan contributed to the group’s revival a few months after the film’s release; in this sense, the film’s name was a self-fulfilling prophecy, contributing to the “birth” of the nation it portrayed.
Lilia’s use of this phrase to refer to the ongoing conflict (and its eventual result—the nation of Bangladesh) from her position in America raises a couple of ideas. It calls attention to the darker aspects of American history that conflict with the sanitized version Lilia has been learning at school. It also serves as a reminder of the pervasive racism at the core of American society—racism that Lilia herself experiences as she attempts to assimilate into American culture. Lastly, it evokes the often brutal ways in which nations are “born,” harkening to the theme of Revolutionary Violence and American Insularity.
Setting
The story is set primarily in the home of Lilia’s family, but it also has scenes that take place elsewhere—Lilia’s school, Dora’s house, the surrounding neighborhood, etc. There is a clear distinction between the home and everywhere else. The home is where Lilia is exposed to and participates in Indian culture; the world outside of it is where she participates in American culture. There is very little crossover between the two spheres. Lilia’s mother does bring home a pumpkin for Halloween, and her father drives Mr. Pirzada to the airport, but Lilia’s interactions with her parents (and Mr. Pirzada) take place entirely at home. As Lilia is the only character seen navigating both sides of this partition, each setting reflects one half of Lilia’s dual cultural identity, and their ongoing separation reflects the challenge she has in Coming of Age as a Second-Generation Immigrant and arriving at a unified sense of self. Both cultures contribute to her identity, but it is not always easy or even possible to cleanly reconcile the two.
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