Illustration by Sonia Pulido.
The protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” the title story in her 1999 debut short story collection, is a multilingual tour guide named Mr. Kapasi who speaks, to varying degrees, English, French, Russian, Portuguese, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Gujarati, and Italian. One day, he drives a young Indian American couple and their children to visit a temple on the coast of the Bay of Bengal devoted to the Hindu sun god Surya. On the long drive there, he tells them about his other job as an interpreter in a doctor’s office. The wife, Mrs. Das, becomes fascinated by this, telling him she finds the idea of translating for sick and frightened patients “romantic.” Mr. Kapasi revels in this attention and starts seducing Mrs. Das with stories about “the young woman who had complained of a sensation of raindrops in her spine” and “the gentleman whose birthmark had begun to sprout hairs.” He is thrilled by the notion of a love affair with her, and his head spins with hope: It is a feeling “he used to experience long ago when, after months of translating with the aid of a dictionary, he would finally read a passage from a French novel, or an Italian sonnet, and understand the words, one after another, unencumbered.”