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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Lahiri’s spare, technical prose fills the story. Characteristic of her many other works, the author invests Lilia with a flatness of tone that shies away from more overt displays of emotion. Such a style lends itself to her clear-eyed, stiff account that frequently retreats to the passive voice. Lahiri’s sentences are often simple, though some can also take on a snaking complexity:
Each week Mr. Pirzada wrote letters to his wife, and sent comic books to each of his seven daughters, but the postal system, along with most everything else in Dacca, had collapsed, and he ha not heard word of them in over six months. Mr. Pirzada, meanwhile, was in America for the year, for he had been awarded a grant from the government of Pakistan to study the foliage of New England.
Lahiri often weaves these long sentences between short ones, generating a slightly rhythmic feel to the pace of the story. Readers get the impression that Lilia herself is speaking to them. She pauses at points, hesitates in others, and spills out elaborate details that bring the story to life.
By refusing melodrama, “When Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine” creates poignancy through an emphasis on the material world. Things—TVs, suit embroidery, and candy cellophane wrappers—must communicate the difficult, freighted feelings that Lahiri avoids tackling head-on in the narrative. The result is an emotional complexity that often eludes description or words. Despite Lahiri’s journalistic restraint, the story sounds a chord of sadness in Mr. Pirzada’s departure that resonates with the reader long after the final page.
