Truth and Memory Theme Analysis

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Real Durwan” captures a snapshot of life in a small Bengali apartment building. Boori Ma, a 64-year-old woman with no other options, works and lives in the building as a housekeeper and unofficial durwan, or “doorkeeper.” She never officially applied for the position, but rather assumed the role years prior. Throughout the story, Boori Ma’s past gradually emerges as she recounts her past life to the building’s residents, detailing the wealth she left behind as a refugee following the partition of India in 1947. Despite Boori Ma’s insistence that she once lived a life of luxury—the details of which seem to change daily—the truth remains vague. Having no faith in Boori Ma’s embellished memories, the residents challenge her, correct her, and try to catch her in a lie, though they are nonetheless fond of her. However, this takes a turn at the end of the story when the building’s skeleton keys disappear from Boori Ma’s sari, and the building’s new community wash basin—a point of pride for the residents—is stolen. At this point, the residents move from mistrusting Boori Ma’s memory to mistrusting her truth, believing her responsible for the theft. With this, Lahiri asks the reader to question where memory and truth intersect, and how people can convolute both for their own purposes. As the story unfolds, Lahiri argues that memories, whether they’re factual or not, can contain a kind of emotional truth, and that on the flip side, truth can be just as flimsy and subjective as memory.

While the building’s residents take Boori Ma’s memories as nothing more than entertaining fictions, to Boori Ma these memories are underpinned with real emotional truth, regardless of the veracity of the details. Every day as she goes about her chores, Boori Ma recites “the details of her plight and losses suffered since her deportation to Calcutta after Partition.” Boori Ma laments being “separated from a husband, four daughters, a two-story brick house, a rosewood almari, and a number of coffer boxes.” While the more granular details of Boori Ma’s past life seem to change from day to day—the narrator notes that “every day, the perimeters of her former estate seemed to double, as did the contents of her almari and coffer boxes”—the details aren’t what Boori Ma is concerned with. When the local children press her to confirm the details of her stories, Boori Ma responds in exasperation, “Why demand specifics?” She also frequently ends her tales with the phrase, “Believe me, don’t believe me, such comforts you cannot even dream them.” With this, Boori Ma suggests that she doesn’t care if anyone believes her stories; instead, what she wants her listeners to glean from her so-called memories is that she lived a better life before Partition. With this in mind, it seems that Boori Ma’s ever-changing list of what she’s lost since Partition does not necessarily mean that she is intentionally lying or changing her story. Rather, it demonstrates the underlying emotional truth of her experiences: she has shouldered deep and painful losses in her life, and with each day passing it seems like she’s lost twice as much as the day before.

However, the story nonetheless suggests that memory is a flimsy thing and can’t always be trusted. As they argue about dismissing Boori Ma from her unofficial post as doorkeeper, Mr. Chatterjee chimes in, “Boori Ma’s mouth is full of ashes. But that is nothing new.” Even the narrator admits early on that “she garbled facts. She contradicted herself.” Yet, “her rants were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not easy to dismiss her.” Plus, her “throaty impostures hurt no one. All agreed that she was a superb entertainer.” With this, the narrator emphasizes that Boori Ma’s eccentric cataloging of her past never hindered her work, nor did it make her unacceptable as a fellow resident. However, in aiming to provide “truth” for her dismissal—wanting to take some sort of action after the theft—the residents collectively remember her as something different, something sinister and morally bankrupt. “For years we put up with your lies,” the residents exclaim, reshaping their own memories to provide justification for firing her.

Ultimately, the residents’ decision to kick Boori Ma out of the building and dismiss her from her post illustrates how truth, like memory, can be subjective and twisted for convenience. In the end, the reality of the situation—whether Boori Ma played no role in the theft or whether she gave her keys to a thief to steal the basin—is as unclear as the veracity of Boori Ma’s memories. Boori Ma remains adamant that someone stole her keys: in the market, she feels a tug on the end of her sari and suddenly her keys and lifesavings are gone. Her final words are, “Believe me. Believe me.” This is quite the departure from the beginning of the narrative, when Boori Ma shakes off the residents’ doubt about the veracity of her memories, flippantly saying, “Believe me, don’t believe me.” Boori Ma’s abrupt change in language suggests that this time she is telling the truth—the real truth. However, reeling from the loss of their beloved basin, the residents use the theft as a reason to send Boori Ma away and find a real durwan for the building. Significantly, the theft happens in the midst of the residents’ growing obsession with making their building appear better and fancier, so it seems that they already were wanting an official doorkeeper—and that it is merely convenient for them to twist Boori Ma into a criminal in order to fire her. The narrator also points out that “none of [the residents] spoke directly to Boori Ma” as they argued about her fate. They never seek the truth and instead come up with their own version of the truth—that Boori Ma “informed the robbers” of the basin and gave them her keys—for their own convenience. Truth, then, proves to be just as unreliable as memory, and the harsh condemnation of Boori Ma suggests that people will use their version of the truth to benefit themselves, even at the expense of others. In the end, it seems that neither truth nor memory can be fully trusted.