File this among the things that will surprise you about Jhumpa Lahiri: Sometimes when she places an order at Starbucks she adopts a simple alias. Is it to protect herself from an overzealous barista with a copy of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in his backpack? Or from the reader lurking nearby with her nose in Lahiri's best-selling first novel, The Namesake? Or what about the people in line who might recognize her from her elegant book jacket photos—a stunning exception in the beauty-starved book industry? "It's just easier," the author explains over green tea and a single Italian biscotto in the living room of her Brooklyn home. Lahiri's children, Octavio, four, and Noor, two, have been raiding the cookie supply. I am offered the last remaining one on a plate with an amused apology—the kind of small, gracious gesture that appears so often in Lahiri's fiction.
The identity game is easier in that it avoids the drama of spelling and pronunciation that has been an unwelcome part of her life since she entered nursery school in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. "I always felt so embarrassed by my name," Lahiri reflects without bitterness. "You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are. I remember going to school and watching my teachers as they called out the names on the roster. When they came to mine, you could tell they felt like they had to split the atom." She leans forward on the couch, flanked by a playhouse made from an empty cardboard box and a dishtowel. "Watching them, I used to think, 'God, I wish I could just be Beth Jones.'"
Names—where they come from, why they're chosen, how imperfectly they travel between cultures––play an animating role in Mira Nair's lush and spirited film adaptation of Lahiri's 2003 novel, The Namesake, released this month by Fox Searchlight. It tells the story of Gogol Ganguli (played by Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar fame), who feels cursed by his name, chosen by his father as a tribute to the great Russian satirist; he's torn between the America of his birth and the Bengali traditions of his parents, Ashima and Ashoke (in a masterstroke of casting, played by the Bollywood actors Tabu and Irrfan Khan). Lahiri's own name is more of a pet name than the real thing that Bengalis use for the outside world. "My story is too confusing even to put in a book," she says.
Nair has been lauded for the emotional heft and visual brilliance of her movies ever since her first feature, Salaam Bombay!, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988. The author and the auteur had met once in passing and were fans of each other's work, but it wasn't until a fateful plane ride in 2004 that Nair thought seriously about a creative collaboration. "It was like a fever," Nair told me over the phone from her production office in New York. She boarded a flight to London with a copy of The Namesake and by the time the plane landed it was settled. "I dropped everything. I just knew I had to make this film." This marriage between cool (Lahiri's prose is a model of restraint) and heat (Nair envelops her actors in a warm embrace) gives The Namesake a temperature range that feels a lot like Fellini. The film even has a scene of the goddess Durga being lowered from the rooftops of Calcutta—an homage to the Christ statue flying over Rome at the opening of La Dolce Vita.
"People ask me if it was strange or scary to hand my book over to someone else," Lahiri tells me when our conversation turns to the film. The equipoise she inhabits in her author photos seems an organic part of her. It's all the more impressive given that the brownstone she shares with her husband, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush (the editor of El Diario), in historic Fort Greene, is in the middle of a lengthy renovation. The phone has been ringing steadily with calls from the contractor, and a new bathtub is marooned on its side in the dining room. "The honest answer is no. Not Mira. I trusted her completely. I had an instinctive feeling that she would do amazing things."
This comfort level made shooting The Namesake more of a family affair than a major film production—and it shows on-screen. Lahiri's daughter, Noor, then five months old, plays baby Sonia—Gogol's sister—in a scene depicting her rice ceremony, a Bengali rite of passage. The crowd gathered in the Ganguli living room includes Lahiri, her parents, and close family friends. A month after shooting wrapped, many of the same people gathered in Brooklyn for Noor's actual rice ceremony. Lahiri—now at work on a new book of short stories—laughs as she recalls it: "For some bizarre reason, the video camera wouldn't work. I felt terrible." But all was not lost: There is the film version to watch, after all, preserved forever on DVD. "It was a strange coincidence," she tells me with quiet wonder. "But it felt sort of meant to meant to be."
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