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Analysis of The Treatment of Bibi Haldar by Jhumpa lahiri

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Bibi Haldar is a 29-year-old woman who suffers from a disease that no doctor, priest or therapist could quite understand and therefore each of them offered differing 'cures'. Bibi was infamous for her illness, and everyone knew of her suffering. ''She was not pretty. Her upper lip was thin, her teeth too small. Her gums protruded when she spoke.” All Bibi wants is to live life like any other normal girl: get married, have children and be loved. Unfortunately, her illness precludes her from achieving the desired normalcy. As the story unfolds, Bibi eventually finds her 'cure', not through any medical prescription but in a way anyone could ever have imagined.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age.

Lahiri graduated from South Kingstown High School and later received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989. She then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997-1998).

In 2001, she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America Lahiri currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. She has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center since 2005.

Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Much of her short fiction concerns the lives of Indian-Americans, particularly Bengalis.

She received the following awards, among others:

1999 - PEN/Hemingway Award (Best Fiction Debut of the Year) for Interprete of Maladies;
2000 - The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year for Interpreter of Maladies;
2000 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut Interpreter of Maladies.





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