Second Post: Unaccustomed Earth

Examine the cover of the novel. What is it expressing about the story?

It is so easy to judge a book by its cover, hence the cliché phrase. When this book first arrived from Amazon.com, I thought it was going to be a boring book. The cover seemed terribly Photoshop-ed. I am an extremely visual learner and somewhat artistic, so I like to use the cover to try to guess what the book will be about.  I also like to examine the cover art to see how it plays into the story.

At first glance, I believed the gold circle was a crown of some sort. It looked like the ‘gold crown’ had just fallen in the water, which is why it appeared to be floating. My next idea was that maybe the main character had fallen off a boat and drowned. As he or she fell off, his or her crown did as well and they both toppled into the ocean.

Throughout the book, I was looking for water imagery or crown imagery, something to allude me to the cover. I found nothing that seemed to resemble the cover in any of part one.

Between the pages of 312-313, I found my first clue. The narrator is referring to a bangle that Hema owns, “She had always loved the design, small four-petaled flowers threaded along a vine” (Lahiri 312-313). Finally, I realized that what I thought was the crown on the front page was actually Hema’s bangle.

The bangle represents her past because it was her grandmother’s and she had always worn it. Hema’s past is very important because in the third chapter of part two, she reunites with Kaushik, a male from her childhood. Kaushik even remembers that Hema wore the bracelet when she was growing up.

When I finished the book, I was still unsure as to why the bracelet was in the water.

I was confused with the very ending of the book, but I believe that Kaushik drowned in the tsunami. The way it was written, I was unsure if that is how he passed away but I am inferring he did.

Throughout part two, water was a motif throughout Kaushik’s life. His mom loved water and wanted a house with a pool or a waterfront view. Also, in the end of the book before Kaushik moved to Hong Kong, he spends his days on a beach.

Then, he drowns in a tsunami.

So, on the cover of the book, the bangle is getting ‘washed away’ in the tsunami water. This representation shows that any evidence of the past is gone. She had forgotten the bangle at the airport and Kaushik is now dead. Her past is literally washed away, and she is forced to start anew and move into the present and the future with her new husband Navin.