One of my favorite stories by Jhumpa Lahiri is “Year’s End”, which appears in Unaccustomed Earth. The story is the middle of three linked narratives. In it we see the protagonist, a college student named Kaushik, struggle to reconcile the memory of his dead mother with the sudden and unwanted addition of a stepmother and two stepsisters. There is a high level of drama maintained through the entire narrative; the interplay between Kaushik and his two much younger, newly immigrated stepsisters is compelling, and it’s one of manifold reasons why I’ve been drawn to “Year’s End” again and again.

But only just now have I bothered to re-read “Once in a Lifetime”, the linked narrative chronologically preceding “Year’s End”. At one level the story is about a younger girl’s attraction to an older boy (Kaushik). At another level its about that same girl - Hema - losing her innocence. Kaushik’s family, newly returned to Boston from India, stay with Hema’s family while they search for a new home. To Hema’s parents, their old friends have changed dramatically since they last saw them, seven years prior. This becomes, on the surface, a source of minor tension for the hosts. But Hema, unlike her parents, doesn’t mind their presence. She develops a certain affinity to Kaushik’s mother. At one point, on a trip to the mall, she and Kaushik’s mother try out bras in the same dressing room. It’s a moment that is charged for two reasons. Hema is trying on bras for the first time - signifying, quite clearly, her “coming-of-age”. She is also seeing Kaushik’s mother in the flesh. To the reader, the scene, vividly drawn, sticks, but it’s significance remains somewhat obscured.

A similar moment occurs toward the end of the story, when we discover who has been responsible, secretly, for smoking in the house. Hema, needing to pee, rushes into the bathroom upstairs, only to uncover Kaushik’s mother smoking. “One cigarette a day can’t kill me, can it?” she asks Hema rhetorically. Before she exits, she adds, “Our little secret, Hema?” It’s a moment of intimacy, of a hidden thing suddenly revealed. It’s also a moment we can’t fully appreciate until we reach the end.

In the final scene of the story, Kaushik - withdrawn, seemingly uninterested in Hema - tells her a devastating secret. His mother has breast cancer. Everything slides into place - his family’s posturing, his mother’s propensity for sleep. The two aforementioned scenes: the changing room and the bathroom, acquire a staggering, heartbreaking weight. This ultimate secret is something only Hema - not her parents - are privy to, and because of it, she’s affected deeply, “feeling at once burdened and betrayed”.

I think what makes this story work so well is the way Lahiri manages to plant scenes like time bombs. At the end, moments that have seemed important and inocuous at the same time are exploded by an important piece of withheld information. Information that informs why certain characters - in this case Kaushik’s family - behave the way they do.

How can one not feel, by the end of this story, utterly heartbroken?