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Analysis. The narrator (whose name is later revealed to be Lilia) recalls the fall of 1971, when she was 10 years old. For a few months, a man named Mr. Pirzada would routinely come to her childhood home for dinner, “bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family.”
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Candy. The candy that Mr. Pirzada gives Lilia represents the...
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Lilia, the narrator of “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,”...
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“See, children your age, what they do to survive,” my father...
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SUMMARY. In the autumn of 1971, Mr. Pirzada comes to Lilia ’s house to dine each night. Mr. Pirzada is from Dacca, then a part of Pakistan. He left behind his wife and seven daughters for a fellowship to study the foliage of New England.
THE AUTUMN OF 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family. His name was Mr. Pirzada, and he came from Dacca, now the capital of Bangladesh, but then a part of Pakistan. That year Pakistan was engaged in civil war.
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Nov 4, 2021 · The short story “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine” by Jhumpa Lahiri is a ten-year-old girl’s reminiscence of the interactions in a small community of Indian immigrants who lived in a small university town in the United States. The storey takes place in 1971 when Bangladesh gained independence.
The violence escalates in Dacca, but Mr. Pirzada continues to share “long, leisurely meals” with Lilia’s parents. Just before Halloween, Mr. Pirzada comes over to help Lilia carve a jack-o’-lantern. As he is cutting out the mouth, he sees on the news that India is threatening to enter the conflict.
When Lilia mistakenly refers to Mr. Pirzada as "Indian" to her parents in private, her father tells her that he is Pakistani, which is puzzling to Lilia because he looks like her parents, eats the same things, and speaks Bengali like them.
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“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” is a story from Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 collection Interpreter of Maladies. The collection won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide.
