Sudha has not seen her alcoholic younger brother Rahul for over a year and a half, a time during which she has begun her married life in London, had a baby and gone back to work. 'Only Goodness' uses similar chronological distortion. And at the very end of the story, the narrator reveals a shocking fact about this man's impact on her family that explains why her narrative has been so selective. To make this a short story, everything that happens, except in relation to Pranab, is radically abbreviated. The narrator and her parents encounter Pranab and his new family a couple more times, and these meetings are carefully described, while all other important events of their lives are only mentioned in passing. Pranab meets and marries an American girl called Deborah, to his own family's horror. The female narrator tells us the history of her family's involvement with Pranab, a fellow Bengali immigrant to Boston whom they befriend and with whom her mother, silently and secretly, seems to fall in love. 'Hell-Heaven' works in just the opposite way: the events of the story span some 25 years. Ruma's father leaves for a different future from the solitariness and the dependence on her that Ruma had imagined, and the story ends when she has been made to recognise that 'her mother no longer existed'. The narrative alternates between the points of view of Ruma, newly arrived in a bleakly affluent Seattle suburb because of her husband Adam's well-paid job, and her father, apparently isolated after her mother's death, but in fact already embarked on a relationship with a widow he met on holiday. The title story here begins with a father coming to stay with his daughter and grandson, and ends with his departure. Beginnings and endings often come more naturally in a short story than in a novel. Yet, like all good short stories, even the longest rely on stopping short. A s short stories go, the eight stories that comprise Unaccustomed Earth are lengthy: you will need more than an hour to read some of them.

Unaccustomed earth by jhumpa lahiri