Unaccustomed Earth 5

Now in the book, Lahiri is telling the story of two very close families. She first tells it of the point of view of the only girl of one family; and how these families' relationships affect her. The next chapter is about the other family's boy all grown up in college, and life after their families grew apart from each other. Hema's family was average class, and lived in Massachusetts. Kaushik's family was best friend's with Hema's family, but moved back to India for awhile. They came back suddenly, asking if they could stay with Hema's family for a little while. Something seemed different about Kaushik's mother. "There were complaints about how your mother did not help clean up after dinner, how she went to bed whenever it suited her and slept close to lunchtime" (245). One day Hema and Kauhshik were in the woods together when Kaushik told Hema that his mother was dying of cancer. Soon after that, Kaushik's family found a new house, and started to grow apart from Hema's family. In Kaushik's story, he is telling it from his point of view grown up about how much he misses his mother. Throughout the book, I have seen common similarities in all of the stories; all of the characters are Bengali and how Lahiri seems to characterize that, "She told me that she had slept in the same bed as her parents until the day she was married and that was perfectly normal" (229). In each of the stories there is some hard ship that the main characters have to overcome, and they all have to deal with trusting other family members. Usually the relationships between parents and children are not the best.