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.
Themes
Coming of Age as a Second-Generation Immigrant
Content Warning: The story contains references to wartime violence, including genocide and sexual assault.
Most of story’s conflict arises from the fact that Lilia is a second-generation immigrant (her parents were born and raised in India, but she was born in America). As a result, she has dual cultural knowledge and must navigate two very different cultural spheres while she attempts to form her own sense of identity. At home, her parents want to preserve Indian culture as much as they can: They search for other Indian friends, they complain about many aspects of America, and her father wants Lilia to know Indian history. However, in Lilia’s day-to-day experience outside of the home, it is American culture and history she is supposed to know. Her teachers literally test her on it while steering her away from learning about Pakistan. To further complicate matters, Lilia’s parents are divided about which culture should take precedence. Unlike Lilia’s father, her mother is happy that she has the opportunity to learn an American curriculum, which she sees as representing a life free of the struggles she and her husband experienced growing up.
The result is that Lilia has one foot in each cultural sphere and a sense of not fully belonging in either. When she sees how easily Mr. Pirzada interacts with her parents, she “[feels] like a stranger in her own home” (29). When the adults are grieving the start of the war, she comments that it was like they became a single entity—one that Lilia is not part of because she doesn’t share the same deep cultural connection and understanding. However, when she participates in American culture, she is reminded that she doesn’t quite fit in there either—e.g., the remarks about her Halloween costume. At Dora’s house, she realizes how different life could be without the news constantly on in the background and without having to worry about what is going on somewhere else in the world. The contrast between Lilia’s home and Dora’s illustrates another key point: The two cultural spheres Dora inhabits are not only fundamentally different but often contradictory. At home there is a sense of grief, anxiety, fear, and loss. At school and at Dora’s, everyone seems completely unaware that the war is happening.
Growing up always entails certain challenges, such as learning about the world and personal responsibility, developing a sense of identity, and finding one’s place in the world. For Lila, these challenges are compounded by the need to navigate very different cultural spheres, neither of which provides a real sense of belonging.
Revolutionary Violence and American Insularity
Revolutionary violence underpins almost everything that is happening in the narrative, but the way that violence is presented and the people who care about it depend on where the violence occurs. The story is set in 1971 during the Bangladesh Liberation War, a civil conflict in which what was then East Pakistan fought for its independence. The story does not linger on specifics but does detail some of the suffering that occurred: Teachers were persecuted and shot, women were raped, houses were destroyed, a famine ensued, and by the end, an estimated 300,000 were killed. This suffering forms the backdrop for Lilia’s homelife after she meets Mr. Pirzada, who habitually visits to grieve with her parents and view the evening news. While Lilia at first doesn’t fully understand everything that is happening, she does recognize the suffering. Her father points out that even children her age must fight for survival, she sees the anguish in Mr. Pirzada’s face as he learns that war is going to happen, and she notices the change in her parents and Pirzada once the war has begun (no more candy, very basic meals, etc.). This violence, normally abstracted into something that is happening far away and to strangers, is personalized and made real because of Lilia’s direct connection to it through her parents and Mr. Pirzada.
However, once Lilia steps foot outside of her home, it is as if the war doesn’t exist. No one seems to care. No one even seems to be aware it is happening. Instead, she spends her school days relearning the same things about a mythologized American Revolution. The students learn about the Mayflower, the battle of Yorktown, and the Declaration of Independence—all things that are considered American victories—and take quizzes that require filling out blank maps and regurgitating names, dates, and capitals. The material is dry and lifeless—Lilia can do the tests “with her eyes closed” (27)—and it completely ignores the human cost of war. The tone of the curriculum is clear in the childish nature of the lessons (e.g., building dioramas out of colorful construction paper) and the fact that the boys in her class play at war during recess. To the boys the American Revolution is a game, and to her teacher it is a symbol of American exceptionalism.
By contrasting the brutal, devastating realities of the Bangladesh Liberation War with the sanitized version of the American Revolution that Lilia learns in school, the text criticizes both American insularity and the romanticization of violent conflict (often for political purposes). It is one thing to read the dates, names, and numbers associated with a war, but it is another thing altogether to see people you know suffer. Lahiri suggests that it is ridiculous for the school to spend so much time focusing on an incomplete version of a centuries-old war while ignoring (and even discouraging students from learning about) a war that is currently impacting real people.
Rituals as Connection and Coping Mechanism
For Lilia, her parents, and Mr. Pirzada, living away from their ancestral home means living with a sense of loss and absence. They miss the people, place, and culture they are separated from, and they live with a sense of not quite belonging in America. The outbreak of the war only heightens these feelings, bringing with it a sense of powerlessness. Mr. Pirzada desperately wants to hear news of his family’s safety, Lilia wants to comfort him but doesn’t know how, and her parents worry about their relatives and everyone who is suffering. To cope with these feelings, they participate in a variety of rituals that help them feel connected with each other and with those they’re separated from.
Mr. Pirzada brings Lilia candy every night, which becomes a ritual for them. For Mr. Pirzada, it demonstrates gratitude for the kindness Lilia’s family shows him. It also allows him to build a bond with Lilia, who serves as a kind of surrogate daughter, allowing him to feel closer to the real ones he misses and is worrying about in Dacca. Lilia feels the importance of the gesture and cannot consume the candy she receives in a “casual manner.” Instead, she “[covets] each evening’s treasure as [she] would a jewel, or a coin from a buried kingdom” and creates her own ritual (29): She stores the candy in a keepsake box that is the only memento of a grandmother she never knew, and she eats just one piece before bed each night. Lilia wants to feel closer to both Mr. Pirzada and her cultural heritage. By using the box from her grandmother—which she previously never had a use for—to store the candy, she creates a ritual that reinforces her bond with Mr. Pirzada and extends that bond to her cultural heritage.
Another ritual is Lilia’s family and Mr. Pirzada’s habit of eating dinner in front of the TV each night so that they can watch the evening news. This ritual has an obvious function: They want information. However, the chances are low that Mr. Pirzada will hear something specific enough to relieve his anxiety about his family. Instead, they eat food that reminds them of home—“lentils with fried onions, green beans with coconut, fish cooked with raisins in a yogurt sauce” (30)—in the company of people who understand what it is they are all going through. They try to carry on as normally as they can because there is nothing else that can be done. In this way, the ritual provides an artificial sense of predictability and control when both things are out of reach.
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