Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai discussed their 25-year writing journeys shaped by multicultural roots and migration at the 2026 Kolkata Literary Meet.
Lahiri's move to Italy inspired her Italian-language writing and Roman Stories, embracing a new "geographical multiverse" for creative freedom.
Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Booker-shortlisted 2025) delves into urban loneliness and fractured identities in a globalized world.
When Jhumpa Lahiri was growing up in the US, she found herself at the crossroads of multicultural identities. Her parents, both Bengalis from Kolkata, had their own parameters of belongingness, always trying to protect their roots in a Western country.
Lahiri, however, grew up on British novels and studied in Western schools and colleges. As she went on to become a celebrated writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, she could feel that she was almost betraying her mother, a passionate Bengali reader, whose world suddenly seemed vastly different.
The complex architecture of their relationship continually found its way into her books. Laden with the anxieties of an NRI experience, Lahiri debated where she truly belonged. Instead of choosing sides, she refused to be the missing link in her family’s fractured identity and carved out her own unique present.
“It is not that all of us are floating nomads,” Lahiri says, adding that people have roots, homes, and families they return to. However, having a fractured cultural experience where there is always this feeling of alienation from oneself, family, or marriage, has deeply impacted the writer she is today—a writer belonging to cultural and geographical multiverses, and one who found a way to understand and express her singular position.
In The Lowland (2013), she explores the inter-generational mystery that sustains families. Instances from her childhood when her mother once forbade her to speak in English before her Bengali family remind her of her parents’ anxiousness not to be misunderstood by their peers. Her mother probably felt dissociated from Lahiri’s world of Indian English writing, and this inspired the writer’s investigations into the ambiguous cultural space that she occupied.
Kolkata, too, has a large part in inspiring Lahiri’s craft. She says that the city has gifted her a childhood steeped in cultural discourses.
The themes of dislocation, migration, and cross-cultural interactions reverberated across the three sessions that Lahiri and 2006 Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai attended at the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet in January 2026.
Speaking of the migrant experience, Desai said, “We are becoming strange creatures… with the head of a lion, and the tail of something else.”
The seeds of this strangeness that Desai feels as a global writer of Indian origin were sown long before she was born. Her mother, author Anita Desai, was born in British-era Delhi to a German mother and a Bengali Indian father. From Anita, Kiran inherited the cultural legacies of German and Bengali, while her father’s life was shaped by partition-era dislocations in North India. Kiran’s own life traverses India, England, and the US.
Since the late 1990s, Desai has split her time between the US, India, and Mexico. After writing her award-winning book, Desai chose to disassociate herself from the noisy world of recognition. Her chosen dislocations often helped her find a new voice. For 20 years, Desai unravelled the enigma surrounding the two generations that came before her.
She was in one of her retreats in Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns, where the deep solitude allowed Desai the time to process her life and family.
As she examined the unique struggles of her migrant family, Desai found the beginnings of her epic on urban loneliness—The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025). She enjoyed sitting in the background and creating “an artistic world within an artistic world”. The time in Mexico allowed her to distance herself from the tensions of her multicultural experience, and propelled her into a future where she understood the migrant experience through the lens of urban loneliness.
Desai stresses that the feeling of otherness that migrants experience settles into the crevices of relationships, as between Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, two writers from her 2025 Booker-shortlisted book, who seem joined at the hip, and yet worlds apart. Even in their closest moments, they remain exiled to each other’s inner lives, sharing language and ambition, but not a true sense of home. As she explains, the book is a romance on the surface, with deep undercurrents of social, geographical, and national identities evolving through time. The refrains of post-colonialism and migration make the book as much for India as it is for the world.
Lahiri too chose to dislocate herself in 2012. She felt that two cycles of her life experiences—India and the US—had ended. She wanted something new, somewhere she could again learn to discover, stumble, and make her way up. She chose to uproot her life and move to Italy. Italy gave her the invisibility that writers should crave—the feeling of not having eyes on her, of not having the implicit demand for the next book breathing down her neck. In Italy, she got the freedom to start again, to etch her future in a parallel universe, and to be just “sitting in a corner and observing the world”.
Today, she stays near a grand Roman staircase, which is like many others in the hilly city. She describes this staircase as accommodating the whole city, reflected by the nonchalance of arguments, and the bursts of graffiti that adorned this cultural hotspot. By starting to write in Italian, she creates her own legacy, refusing as ever to be the link between the influences of her origins and her chosen destinations.
Her book Roman Stories (2023) celebrates her experiences in these travels. Lahiri claims that “there is a poetry to urban life that cannot be replicated.” Throughout her travels, cities continue to bring colour to her understanding of the global human environment.
However complicated the experience, both writers argue that the recognition that their books received has opened doors to unique privileges, such as the chance to travel widely and blend in with multiple worlds, and has made their gaze unique and objective.
Lahiri also confirmed that she is now spending more time on translation projects, one that gave her a chance to record her mother reading Ashapurna Devi’s poems in Bengali. She misses those tapes, which held not only her mother’s voice, but also the shadows of her own roots.
But what about the parts of themselves they had to discard in their journeys through time, generations, languages, and lands? Both writers rue the fact that a large part of their lives has disappeared with their older relatives dying. They are now the silences to be contended with as they continue to craft their literary legacies.
Sreemanti Sengupta is a poet and freelance writer.
This article appeared as 'Geographical Multiverses' in the Magazine issue No More A Gentleman's Game dated February 11, 2026 which explores the rise of women's cricket in India, and the stories of numerous women who defeated all odds to make a mark in what has always been a man's ballgame.
