Semiotics of Clothes in Postcolonial Literature

3.1 “Once in a Lifetime”

The motif of clothing recurs in every story Lahiri has ever written, yet it turns into a dominant one only in “Hema and Kaushik.” “Hema and Kaushik” apparently follows the structure of the Cinderella line: a second-generation immigrant woman, Hema, begins with an ethnic identity, sheds her ethnicity on the way to the American dream, and eventually metamorphoses into a Western woman. Yet the story line deviates from the romance genre by substituting the happy ending of the fairy tale with a realistic one. Hema is ironically dumped by the American Prince Charming and resigns herself to marrying an ethnic man she meets on a blind date. Throughout this narrative, Lahiri uses clothing as a way to articulate not only the cultural differences between Hema and her mother (gender) but also the contrast between the two immigrant families (class). Clothing, then, serves in these narratives as a signifier of ethnicity, gender, and class and as a vehicle for the metamorphosis of Hema.

The first sequel, “Once in a Lifetime,” is the story of the first immigration, or what Victoria Abboud (2008) metaphorically terms “transplanting cedars.” Set in the mid-twentieth century, it attempts to reconstruct the life of an Indian-American woman, Hema, and her first experience of cultural dislocation. In so doing, it reexamines the binary of East–West cultural codes each immigrant receives in the course of her life. The story opens with the announcement of a farewell party in Inman Square in Cambridge Massachusetts. The description that follows, however, is not what the reader expects from a typical American setting:

I was dressed that evening in an outfit that my grandmother had sent from Calcutta: white pajamas with tapered legs and a waist wide enough to gird two of me side by side, a turquoise kurta, and a black velvet vest embroidered with plastic pearls. The three pieces had been arrayed on my parents’ bed while I was in the bath, and I stood shivering, my fingertips puckered and white, as my mother threaded a length of thick drawstring through the giant waist of the pajamas with a safety pin, gathering up the stiff material bit by bit and then knotting the drawstring tightly at my stomach. The inseam of the pajamas was stamped with purple letters within a circle, the seal of the textile company. (Lahiri 2008: 224)

These minute descriptions of Indian clothing items are in contrast with the Western context. We expect to read about suits, skirts, and blouses but the narrator mentions “pajamas,” “kurta,” and “velvet vest” instead. Moreover, the narrator’s mother does not mind that the white pajamas are too loose-fitting for her daughter. Despite Hema’s protests, her mother insists on dressing her child in the outfit “sent from Calcutta.” Hema’s mother believes that by doing so she would preserve her ethnic customs in that threatening Western context. The use of such adjectives as “shivering” and “fingertips puckered and white” by the narrator conveys the sense of resistance against the ethnic mother. The narrator gives us more instances of this cultural resistance throughout the story. Later in this story, Hema relates that although her mother finds Western fashion appealing, she never considers changing her Indian style:

The cinema of a certain period was the one thing my mother loved wholeheartedly about the West. She never wore a skirt – she considered it indecent – but she could recall, scene by scene, Audrey Hepburn’s outfits in any given movie. (p. 231)

As the story progresses, Lahiri introduces another immigrant family, Kaushik’s family, who are migrating to the West for the second time. We gather that they first migrated in 1967 but left the host nation in the seventies because the father was offered an exceptional position in Bombay. Lahiri has this family stay at Hema’s place for a while, as the family needs time to procure a house of their own. She does this not so much to give her two protagonists a chance to fall in love as to create a cultural dialogue in a home which in this narrative seems to symbolize a homeland too. Both Hema’s and Kaushik’s parents are Indian immigrants, yet they choose to adopt different cultural identities. Whereas Hema’s parents struggle to preserve their ethnicity, Kaushik’s parents willingly assimilate into the dominant culture:

There was your mother, her slippery dark hair cut to her shoulders, wearing slacks and a tunic, a silk scarf knotted at her neck, looking only vaguely like the woman I’d seen in the pictures. With her bright lipstick and frosted eyelids, she looked less exhausted than my mother did […] your father looked more or less the same, still handsome, still wearing a jacket and tie, a different style of glasses his concession to the new decade. (p. 232)

We do not intend to suggest here that cultural assimilation is just a matter of physical appearance. Most studies on Lahiri’s fiction have focused on the semiotics of food in each story. Garg and Khushu (2012), for example, examine the significance of food in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. They argue “that food not only acts as an identity marker but also negotiates personal, racial, sexual and social identities of the immigrant subjects” (Garg and Khushu 73). In Lahiri’s fiction, they suggest, food and its multiple significances expose her narratives to myriad interpretative possibilities, the most important of which is the space in between home and abroad (75). In “Once in a Lifetime,” too, Kaushik’s parents exhibit a Western mentality in their taste of food: “having mysteriously acquired a taste for things like steak and baked potatoes, while my parents had not” (Lahiri 2008: 246). They also develop a drinking habit: “the bottle of Johnnie Walker was on the coffee table, as it would be every night that you stayed with us” (p. 236). The present study, however, wants to argue that clothing is the most evident marker of the characters’ cultural identity in Lahiri’s fiction. The reason is that, unlike food, which is cooked and consumed in the private domain, clothes are worn in public and are therefore more visible. Moreover, while food is eaten by both sexes, clothes are gender-specific, hence subject to gender politics. In addition to gender, the discourse of garments is also class-oriented in the sense that it could contribute to the cultural mobility of immigrant characters. In “Once in a Lifetime,” Hema tells us that, unlike Kaushik’s affluent mother, hers comes from a humble background:

Your mother’s beautiful home in Jodhpur Park, with hibiscus and rosebushes blooming on the rooftop, and my mother’s modest flat in Maniktala, above a grimy Punjabi restaurant, where seven people existed in three small rooms […] your mother went to a convent school and was the daughter of one of Calcutta’s most prominent lawyers, a pipe-smoking Anglophile and a member of the Saturday club. My mother’s father was a clerk in the General Post Office, and she had neither eaten at a table nor sat on a commode before coming to America. (p. 225)

This difference in class intersects with gender and ethnicity throughout the narrative to result in the choice of different cultural identities:

I accompanied our mothers to the lingerie department in Jordan Marsh. Your mother led us there, with the credit card your father had handed to her before they parted. Normally we went to Sears. On her way to the bras, she bought black leather gloves and a pair of boots that zipped to the knee, never looking at the price before taking something off the shelf […] on the way out, at the makeup counter, she bought a lipstick, a bottle of perfume, and an assortment of expensive creams […] she was uninterested in the Avon products my mother used. (239)

3.2 “Year’s End”

Kaushik’s mother’s affluence, however, could not save her from breast cancer, and she is replaced in the second sequel, “Year’s End,” with another Indian woman whom Kaushik’s father marries and brings along to the USA. Kaushik’s stepmother differs from his mother in many ways, and the rest of the story revolves around these cultural differences. The narrator tells us that his stepmother is a widow with two small daughters, and her English, unlike his mother’s, is not good:

“She will pick it up, of course.”

I didn’t say what came to my lips, that my mother had learned English as a girl, that she’d had no need to pick it up in America. (p. 255)

But it is mainly her physical appearance that strikes the narrator as being in sharp contrast with his deceased mother. Kaushik describes his stepmother’s looks when they first meet in the following words:

Her hair was long and dark […] she wore vermillion in her hair, a traditional practice my mother had shunned, the powdery red stain the strongest element of her appearance […] how strange it was, seeing Chitra carefully descending the floating staircase, dressed up in a dark green sari and a garnet necklace. (260–283)

This study does not imply that one’s cultural identity is entirely a matter of force and that agency plays no role in this process. Every immigrant is free to choose the melting-pot option. What we intend to suggest is that Kaushik’s mother’s affluence seems to have afforded her the privilege of cultural mobility which is denied to less-privileged immigrants like Hema’s mother and Kaushik’s stepmother. As Conrey (2009: 166) observes, although living between two cultures has increasingly become a standard feature of contemporary living, it is limited to a more affluent class who has the financial means to straddle the cultures. Lahiri’s stories show that the intersection of class, gender, and ethnicity must not be underestimated, least of all in feminist discussions of colored women.

3.3 “Going Ashore”

Unlike their predecessors, the second-generation immigrants come to realize that adopting an American identity is the most convenient way toward prosperity in the host nation, the process Luptan (2008) terms the Cinderella line. Hema is one such character. We can hear her dismissive tone as an ethnic narrator and sense her Western-approving attitude as an ethnic protagonist from the opening lines of the narrative: “I remember fretting about this fact, wanting to wear something else” (p. 224). Hema sets out to shed her Bengali skin from an early age: “I never got used to looking so different from the other girls in my class with their puffy pink and purple jackets. When I asked my parents if I could have a new coat they said no. A coat was a coat, they said. I wanted desperately to get rid of it” (p. 226). When we meet her again in “Going Ashore” she has already achieved her American dream of success: “It had earned her a Ph.D. and a tenure-track job, that was the important thing” (p. 294). But more importantly, she has transformed into a Cinderella par excellence to the point that Kaushik mistakes her for a Western woman:

“Signorina, dove deve andare?” He asked.

The woman looked up, confused, and he realized, in spite of her dark hair and fitted leather coat, that she was not Italian. (p. 310).

As the narrative unfolds, however, it turns out that Hema’s story is only a parody of the Cinderella tale, for her white Prince Charming is not willing to walk down the aisle. We read that Hema has been dating an American man named Julian for nearly a decade, but after years of “uncertainty with Julian” (p. 298) and her unwillingness to approach middle age without a husband and children, she resolves to go through with an arranged marriage: “‘I’m engaged to be married,’ she told Julian the last time he wanted to arrange a weekend away, and he accused her of deceiving him, called her heartless, and then he did not call again” (p. 298).

Lahiri mentions a gold bangle worn by Hema throughout the sequels. We gather through Hema’s dialogue with Kaushik that she has had it since she was a child:

It was a gift from her grandmother, something she’d had since she was ten. It was the only piece of jewelry she never bothered to remove. She had always loved the design, small four-petaled flowers threaded along a vine, and when her wrist grew thick she’d had the bangle cut off and enlarged. (p. 312)

For all her Western airs and taste, Hema does not want to part with the Indian token. She clings to this item throughout her transformation. Hema’s bangle could be seen as reminiscent of Cinderella’s glass shoes: just as in the fairy tale in which the glass shoes remain unaffected after the spell is broken, Hema’s Indian bangle remains unaffected after her transformation into a Western woman. It is only on her way to India at the end of the story that she leaves the bangle behind in a tray before passing through the airport security gate:

She fastened her seat belt, her right arm feeling foreign, missing the sound the bangle would have made coming into contact with the metal buckle. It would be replaced tenfold in the course of her wedding. And yet she felt she had left a piece of her body behind. She had grown up hearing from her mother that losing gold was inauspicious. (p. 324)

Hema’s bangle signifies her liminality, her inability to go through a total transformation and the impossibility of leaving her past behind. As if the bangles were meant to keep her connected to her roots. We agree with Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridization that views postcolonial identities as forming in the “Third Space,” a place in between. Hema’s identity is, in a sense, oscillating between two cultures and could not settle in one, never totally Indian or entirely American, always in between. Throughout the narrative, she struggles to align herself with her Western peers but in the end, her marriage takes place in her motherland and in a Bengali outfit:

We had spent hours on a thin futon, drinking Cokes and eating mutton rolls, as men in a sari shop unfolded the greater part of their inventory. I went along with all of it, chose a red Benarasi to wear […] we were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of his, and the ends of our clothing were knotted together (331–332).