Interpreter of Maladies

Miranda’s office colleague Laxmi tells her about her cousin whose husband has run off with an English woman, leaving the cousin and their son, Rohin, behind. Normally Miranda listens in on Laxmi’s phone calls and would have heard all about it already, but today she has been on the phone with Dev, a married Bengali man she’s begun having her own affair with.

Miranda met Dev at a makeup counter a week before; when she saw him, she didn’t want him to walk away, and as she interacted with the woman at the counter, who convinces Miranda to buy an anti-aging cream despite being in her early twenties, Dev lingered. He followed her and confessed that he was purchasing something for his wife, who would be gone for a few weeks.

Now they are together every night, and Miranda feels as though she is being seen by a man for the first time. He compliments her and is kind to her in a way she hasn’t experienced. They go to the Mapparium in the Christian Science center in Boston, which is a stained-glass globe of the world that visitors can go inside. Dev explains parts of the world to her that she’s unfamiliar with, and then, when they’re alone in the globe, he has her stand in one spot while he moves to one far away; because of the acoustics, she can hear him whisper, “You’re sexy” (80).

The day Dev’s wife returns home, Miranda returns to the store where they met to buy things a mistress should own: high heels, a sheer slip and stockings, and a cocktail dress. She imagines they will spend their time being romantic and sexy, but the next time Dev comes over, he is in running clothes, and his excuse to see her is that he drives into the city on Sundays to run along the Charles River. Her new dress hangs in the closet, unworn.

Though it’s not what she expected, she still looks forward to their time together, which falls into a routine—they eat in bed, they have sex, and Dev takes a nap for 12 minutes while Miranda watches him sleep. Then he leaves, and she knows that he will shower immediately when he gets home.

Miranda knew an Indian family when she was young, and she recalls the time she went over to their house and became frightened by a picture of the goddess Kali and stayed away from the family for a time. She begins to eat at an Indian restaurant and study the Bengali alphabet, and she even tries to write the Indian part of her name, Mira, in Bengali. During the week, she spends time with her coworker Laxmi, listening to her talk about the cousin whose husband left, all the while waiting for Sunday to come.

One Sunday Miranda asks Dev what his wife looks like, and he mentions that she resembles a Bollywood actress. Miranda goes to an Indian grocery that rents videos to see the what the woman looks like, but when she sees the beautiful women on the video covers, she decides that she doesn’t want to know. When she tries to buy some hot snack mix that Laxmi likes, the grocery clerk warns it’s too hot for her.

Laxmi convinces her cousin to come to Boston and asks Miranda if she can look after the cousin’s son one Saturday. Miranda agrees, and Rohin arrives for the day. He is precocious and demanding, following her around the apartment and waiting for her when she emerges from the bathroom. He asks about one of the products that she got the day she met Dev, and Miranda tells him it’s for puffiness; he says his mother needs it because she cries for hours at a time. When he finds her cocktail dress in the closet, Rohin is insistent that she put the dress on, and eventually, Miranda relents. She puts the dress on and lets him see her in it, and he says that she looks sexy. She remembers what Dev told her in the Mapparium, and she asks Rohin to tell her what he thinks the word means. He says it’s a secret, but she insists, and he whispers to her, “It means loving someone you don’t know” (105).

The boy goes to sleep, and Miranda changes out of the cocktail dress. She pictures the arguments the boy’s parents had, and she begins to cry. The next day she tells Dev that she has a cold, and when she asks him if he remembers what she whispered to him at the Mapparium, he misremembers. Miranda decides she will see him once or twice more before ending the relationship, but it snows the next weekend, and the weekend after that she goes to the movies with Laxmi, and on the next weekend she gets up early and walks to the Mapparium alone, looking at it on a clear day.