Sen is unable to part with her Indian customs and accept that although “everything is there,” India is no longer her geographical “home”. Sen’s’ addresses isolated immigrants worldwide through the distressing depiction of a woman expected to assimilate to a new culture. By proving that geographical displacement is not the only condition for an exile, Lahiri ultimately enunciates the universal nature of isolation.
Although Calcutta becomes Boori Ma’s new home politically, she is yet again banished, this time for allegedly neglecting her duties as ‘A Real Durwan’.
“Knowing not to sit on the furniture, she crouche, instead in doorways and hallways, and observe gestures and manners is the same way a person tends to watch traffic in a foreign city.” This despondent state exacerbates when Boori Ma is censured for the theft of the building’s new water basin and “tossed” out, homeless and alone on the streets. Despite her initial reception of appreciation from residents in the lower class building that she unofficially guards and voluntarily sweeps, she is still treated like an outsider. She is consequently “separated from a husband, 4 daughters, a 2-story brick house” and a community of people that make her feel home. Her “deportation to Calcutta after Partition” shapes Boori Ma’s forlorn destiny. By focusing in on Boori Ma, a seemingly insignificant stairwell sweeper, Lahiri contends that feelings of seclusion are universal, irrespective of social status, ethnicity or age. Holistically, the anthology voices grave repercussions of India’s diaspora. The ‘migrant experience’ responsible for evoking feelings of isolation worldwide, personally or indirectly affects all of Lahiri’s characters.
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