This contribution means to analyse Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hema and Kaushik” as a narrative that engages both thematically as well as formally with the poetics of liminality. This story explores the inability of the two eponymous protagonists to feel truly attached to a single place or community, highlighting their liminality as transnational beings who drift emotionally and geographically in between their parents’ homeland, India, and America, where they have been raised. As for its formal generic features, the work, composed of three interrelated stories, is also an odd specimen somewhere in between a novella and a short story sequence.
There is also evidence of the fact that secrecy plays an essential role in “Hema and Kaushik,” contributing to enhancing its liminality which is recognizable at several levels. First of all, secrecy becomes a central concern for the characters when the sharing of secrets builds up strong bonds and their hiding causes the severing of ties. Secondly, from a ...