She is a magician when it comes to narrate human emotions. The eloquence she has to describe even the minutest feeling and expression in human relationships is something that stays on even months after you finish the stories just like a favorite fragrance. I had explored her capability of touching hearts in her last book 'The Interpreter of Maladies', but I found 'Unaccustomed Earth' even more refined than the previous one. Interpreter of Maladies had stories involving people from varied social strata but the stories of Unaccustomed Earth revolved more or less around the similar cluster of people - the Bengalees settled in America.
But the masterpiece from the magician was three interrelated stories on Hema and Kaushik. These three stories are by far the best work I have read from Jhumpa Lahiri. The deep melancholy I fell into after completing the three stories of Hema and Kaushik that I seriously needed a saline of laughter to come out of it. The story 'Once in a lifetime' seemed to be the prequel of the story 'The interpreter of Maladies'. But it was not. By these three stories she not only established her writing skill but also introduced a new concept of writing - three independent but interrelated stories.
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