It was a read into both the narrator and the author's thoughts about cultural history, family roots and cities lived in. This is 'Jubilee' by Jhumpa Lahiri, published in The New Yorker on June 30, 2025.
The year is 1977, in London, during Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. The 10-year-old narrator had came over to London from New England. London was where she was born before her parents took her to America. The narrator also took a family trip to visit Kolkata when her maternal grandmother passed away. Kolkata is the country where her parents were born.
The author's childhood friend Joya still lived in London and was glad to have her visit. The narrator had her tenth birthday party in London. There were many descriptions about the sights and sounds, and the conversations between the narrator and Joya, and what she saw in London as well as Kolkata.
Before we knew it, many years have passed. We see the narrator and Joya as mothers with children of their own. Their own mothers have grown much older and frail. The childhood friends couldn't even attend each other's weddings although invitations were sent. As adults, they lived in different countries and continents. Then Joya unexpectedly died from a fall.
Joya and I were both mothers when she fell on the sidewalk one afternoon in a suburb of London not far from where she grew up. She was walking quickly to pick up her younger child from school. Our vow to write to each other after 1977 was short-lived, and many years had passed since our families were in touch, though the ersatz-silver salt and pepper shakers still sat in my mother’s china cabinet—her most prized piece of furniture—and were pulled out for special occasions. Wedding invitations were sent, but none of us had the time or energy to attend our respective ceremonies and receptions overseas. Even the cursory holiday cards had tapered off. I had married a man I was devoted to, I had an infant daughter, the silver double-decker bus I’d handed down with quiet ceremony to my son lived in a plastic tub in the jumble of his other toys. Joya had given birth to two girls. Her parents called mine when it was all over. An inoperable mass in her brain—she’d survived six months. Her daughters were already teen-agers. She’d married at eighteen, like her mother, less than ten years after we’d played two balls and sat in a bathtub together. I pictured her on the same sidewalk where we’d posed in matching green tops, thinking she’d merely tripped, before getting up and continuing on her way, putting it out of her mind until the day the headaches became too much to bear and she’d called the doctor.
The narrator's mother didn't do well with the news of her mother's death. She crumbled, and had to be sustained by pills. She didn't like to deal with death, and even with Joya's death, as much as she would like to go to support Joya's mother, her long-time friend, she couldn't bear to. The narrator encouraged her mother to go grieve with her old friend, but the mother found many excuses not to, and claimed poor health. A bit of confidence and independence was lost since the grandmother's passing. The narrator said,
She had always been afraid to look death in the face. It was among the many things I held against her, and have let go of now that she’s gone.
There're the themes of childhood memories and emotions that carry over to adulthood, cultural displacement and the idea of one's roots. Between the lines lie regrets, and a wistfulness for the past. But the current realities and life's situations often restrict what we would like to do for old friends and loved ones.
The author said that this story is inspired by Mavis Gallant's 'Voices Lost in Snow' (1976). The author is in her fifties now, and feels that there's a similarity between her and Mavis Gallant, as fifty-something authors looking back on their childhood. Jhumpa Lahiri said that,
I suppose a fundamental difference between my story and Gallant’s is that mine includes a friendship between two girls, whereas Linnet is utterly alone in a world of adults. The godparent tradition is absent in Bengali culture; all the same, like Linnet, I was raised not only by my mother and father but by other adults, members of their social circle, who exerted their influences on me. The final paragraph of Gallant’s story refers to a spiderweb. Mine mentions a lace curtain. Both images are planted earlier in our stories, and are tied to the workings of memory. Spiderwebs and lace curtains have something in common: seemingly insubstantial, even ghostly, they are in fact sturdy, carefully wrought. I did not set out to replicate the gesture, but I am old enough to know that children sometimes mimic parental figures in unconscious, mysterious ways.
