By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 8, 2003; Page C01

NEW YORK -- For Jhumpa Lahiri, writer, observer and ABCD -- "another badly confused Deshi" -- there is that place, a place she watches with a certain detached bemusement, the place she arrived at in the midst of all that post-Pulitzer fuss. The place where there are glitzy spreads in Vogue and where paparazzi stake out her wedding, a place where she constantly hops on planes to a seemingly endless array of cities, where someone is always there at the ready, snapping pictures.

And then there is this other place, a quieter place, the place where she is really most comfortable. Home.

Toys are scattered about, a shirt lies forgotten on the bathroom floor, testimony to lives given over completely to the care and feeding of the very, very young. The teakettle is humming on the stove in the galley, where her husband, Alberto, a man lean of face and frame, is futzing about, making lunch for the baby. Throughout their Park Slope co-op in Brooklyn, there are talismans of love: photos of weddings and other gatherings, of friends and first birthdays, abstract art painted by her mother-in-law, shelves crammed tight with much-read tomes. She sits in the living room, snuggling with the big-eyed moppet on her lap, tired and more than a little jet-lagged, cooing in Bengali as ferocious masks from Guatemala and Mexico gaze down on them.

This is but a momentary respite in the latest crush of publicity, a pit stop on the way from there to there, from last week's stint in Los Angeles, and this week's stop in Washington, where tonight Lahiri will appear at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 4900 Connecticut Ave. NW, at 7.

There, she will do something that makes her squirm: Read her own work, specifically excerpts from her first novel, "The Namesake," the much-anticipated follow-up to "Interpreter of Maladies," her debut collection of short stories, the book that won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 and a whole lot of attention and praise that she's still not quite sure what to do with.

Here in the United States, reviewers laid on the praise, as did one critic who enthused, "There is nothing accidental about her success; her plots are as elegantly constructed as a fine proof in mathematics."

In her parents' native India, where the book was also a bestseller, the commotion reached an accelerated pitch, with journalists alternately praising her work and then slamming her for not painting Indians in a more positive light. When she married her beau, Guatemalan Greek journalist Alberto Vourvoulias, the Times of India breathlessly covered their 2001 nuptials, a two-hour Hindu ceremony that took place in Calcutta: "Press photographers and TV crews were, however, kept at bay in deference to Jhumpa's wishes to keep the wedding a private affair. Desperate photographers and TV cameramen had positioned themselves on a neighboring building to capture the event on film. They even had dogs set on them."

Life after the first big splash has been interesting.

"The unexpected can really have the power to unsettle you," says Lahiri, a slender, soft-spoken woman with a caramel complexion, large limpid eyes and a flair for fashion.

"Even if it's good."

Indeed, winning the Pulitzer was discomfiting in that the 36-year-old has yet to figure out why. It came suddenly, a short hard blast of good fortune, shoving her into the literary spotlight and onto the bestseller lists, all thanks to a prize for which she wasn't even aware she was a contender.

Did she deem herself unworthy?

She hesitates before answering, parsing her remarks with the precision of a woman for whom words matter much.

"I thought Pulitzers were given to authors who were ensconced in their work," she says. "I didn't understand how I could arrive at that, having written just nine stories. But I had to accept that, and accept it graciously.

"I don't think it's wise for a writer to question why a book is praised or dismissed. It's just my job to write the books."

So don't ask her if she considers herself a good writer, because she doesn't know how to answer that. It's not like she reads her work for pleasure, you know? She'd prefer to not read it at all, frankly. That's not what matters. Rather, writing is a puzzle, something to ponder and figure out, a way to toy with ideas and experiences. It's something that is never, ever easy, is always, always difficult, but she does it because that is what she most loves to do. Once it's out of her hands, though, her relationship to it is done. That's it. None of her business if her work is loved or loathed.

"I've never written for anyone other than myself," she says. "No matter what people say or expect, at the end of the day, they're not the one in the room with me, writing."

It is the process that entrances.

"I've always never loved anything more than sitting quietly in a room by myself, imagining things," she says.

Indeed, it grounded her. Even as a little girl, growing up in a university town in Rhode Island, the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants, Lahiri entertained herself with the stories she wrote. Writing was play, something that carried on as she made her way through Barnard College and Boston University, where she received master's degrees in English, creative writing, and comparative studies in literature and the arts, and a doctorate in Renaissance studies.

Writing was also an escape. Growing up brown and "foreign" in a town where white was the predominant theme had its challenges. There was the persistent feeling of other, not American enough, not Indian enough, of constantly straddling fences, stretching identities. She is amused, and slightly annoyed, by Indians who immigrate to the United States and eagerly embrace a Caucasian identity, excitedly reporting to their Indian friends that they'd moved into an all-white neighborhood, where there were no blacks. Thanks to her parents -- her mother would often retort to these friends, "What do you think you are?" -- she said, "I was never into any sort of denial."

From "The Namesake":

For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

She knew who she was: Indian American. London-born Deshi. And yet, the American part was hard to claim. "I really felt it would be a betrayal of my parents to call myself American," she says. But on visits to India, she was the American.

It is the complications of being a hyphenated American that informs her work, the same challenges that face Gogol, the American-born protagonist in "The Namesake":

"Teleologically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question, 'Where are you from?' " the sociologist on the panel declares. Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for "American-born confused deshi." In other words, him. He learns that the C could also stand for "conflicted." He knows that deshi, a generic word for "countryman," means "Indian," knows that his parents and all their friends always refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India.

"The Namesake" is told from several points of view: Those of Ashima, the Bengali bride who weds Ashoke in an arranged marriage and moves with him to Cambridge, Mass.; Ashoke, the MIT professor who years earlier escaped a disastrous train wreck and decides to christen his son after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol in honor of his own survival; the British-born and American-raised Moushima, sleek and sophisticated, fluent in French and more than a little flattered when she is mistaken for anything other than Indian.

Although these other voices compel, the story is ultimately a coming-of-age tale about Gogol, "the namesake," a confused and ambivalent young architect who spends much of his time running from all things Indian. First of all, he hates his name, a name that was meant to be a family name, a pet name, nothing more. But it sticks when his great-grandmother's letter, the airmail letter announcing his "good name," is lost in the mail and U.S. bureaucrats demand that a name, any name, be put on his birth certificate.

But Gogol doesn't understand its significance, and as soon as he graduates from high school, he changes his name to Nikhil.

But now that he's Nikhil it's easier to ignore his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas. . . . It is as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights at parties and . . . discovers Brian Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker. . . . It is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party at Ezra Stiles, with a girl wearing a plaid woolen skirt and combat boots and mustard tights.

Naming is everything, a way to claim identity, to pass on notions of love, tradition and hope. And so it is, perhaps, that Lahiri dedicates her book to the two men in her life, her husband and son, "For Alberto and Octavio, whom I call by other names."

For Octavio, she knows, life as a second-generation American-born Guatemalan Greek Deshi will be very different, a different kind of navigating between cultures, but navigating nonetheless.

Witness lunchtime:

Alberto comes to claim the 17-month-old Octavio, and the discourse between parent and child takes on a different hue.

He holds out his hands to the toddler, issuing a command in Spanish:

Let's go.

And Octavio, who is just now learning to speak, in English and Bengali and, yes, Spanish, leaps into his father's arms.