This story begins with the promise of a typical English sitcom plot, a white woman and a brown man. And though obviously, as we are already down with four stories and the air is melancholy, we some how know, and Mr. Dev is not going to do anything to lighten the spirits.
The narrator is non-Indian, though nothing in the style of narration tells us so, except that we know a non-Indian woman, Miranda is telling her story, short-story.Maybe after writing four really slow Indian short stories, with most of them focused on the Indian experience of the Occident, Lahiri had a brain wave and decided to do this piece where a white female, who hardly knows anything about Indian culture, decides to explore it for the sake of an affair that she is having with an Indian man.
"Sexy" is titled so, because that is the word Dev whispers in her ear during a very intimate moment in the Christian Science Center's Mapparium. The affair goes on for quite sometime, but then one fine day, Miranda's Indian friend, Laxmi's cousin's(the cousin, whose husband has left her for a younger woman) son is left with her for baby-sitting.
After Dev's wife had come back from a holiday, Miranda and him would meet on weekends, and this would be the high point of the week for Miranda. And when these weekends didn't work out, she would feel extremely low. Yes, she was clearly in love with him. It was during one of these weekends that she was baby-sitting for her friend, that she realizes the trauma the "other" woman, namely the wife has to go through.
Probably by writing about failed relationships, Lahiri, writes real-life stories. No fairy-tales, no happy endings for her. But what she does wonderfully is craft the character so well, that at the end of the day, even if we do not have our happy ending, we are made aware of the immense strength it requires to take failure of relationships and move on with life.
So all in all, in this short story, we have a non-Indian narrator, very less Indian food, a failed affair, and a woman who was so fascinated by the entire idea of having an affair with an exotic man, that in some parts of the story she actually takes a lot of effort to learn about India. Lahiri could have painted a beautiful picture of India and the Indian culture, but she always get lost in the turmoil that relationships and emotions create in life.
The narrator is non-Indian, though nothing in the style of narration tells us so, except that we know a non-Indian woman, Miranda is telling her story, short-story.Maybe after writing four really slow Indian short stories, with most of them focused on the Indian experience of the Occident, Lahiri had a brain wave and decided to do this piece where a white female, who hardly knows anything about Indian culture, decides to explore it for the sake of an affair that she is having with an Indian man."Sexy" is titled so, because that is the word Dev whispers in her ear during a very intimate moment in the Christian Science Center's Mapparium. The affair goes on for quite sometime, but then one fine day, Miranda's Indian friend, Laxmi's cousin's(the cousin, whose husband has left her for a younger woman) son is left with her for baby-sitting.
After Dev's wife had come back from a holiday, Miranda and him would meet on weekends, and this would be the high point of the week for Miranda. And when these weekends didn't work out, she would feel extremely low. Yes, she was clearly in love with him. It was during one of these weekends that she was baby-sitting for her friend, that she realizes the trauma the "other" woman, namely the wife has to go through.
Probably by writing about failed relationships, Lahiri, writes real-life stories. No fairy-tales, no happy endings for her. But what she does wonderfully is craft the character so well, that at the end of the day, even if we do not have our happy ending, we are made aware of the immense strength it requires to take failure of relationships and move on with life.
So all in all, in this short story, we have a non-Indian narrator, very less Indian food, a failed affair, and a woman who was so fascinated by the entire idea of having an affair with an exotic man, that in some parts of the story she actually takes a lot of effort to learn about India. Lahiri could have painted a beautiful picture of India and the Indian culture, but she always get lost in the turmoil that relationships and emotions create in life.
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