Time & Perspective Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

Chance encounter, immigrant geography, and the odd intimacy of other people’s pain: Lahiri packs all three into a few plainspoken sentences, then lets the real story happen offstage. Brookline is doing quiet work here. It’s not just a place; it’s a shorthand for a certain kind of American stability, the kind you can live inside and still feel linguistically homeless. Into that setting steps an interpreter in a doctor’s office, a job that sounds mundane until you notice what it actually entails: translating bodies, symptoms, fear, authority. The interpreter is a conduit between a professional power structure (medicine) and a vulnerable population (Russian patients), and Lahiri is tuned to how language becomes triage.

The line “he was translating for a doctor” is deliberately lopsided. The doctor owns the room; the interpreter owns the bridge. Lahiri’s interest is in that asymmetry: the interpreter is essential and yet peripheral, present and invisible. That’s a familiar immigrant role, and she frames it with the casualness of overheard reality rather than thesis-writing.

Then comes the pivot: “On my way home… I just heard this phrase in my head.” The encounter becomes catalytic. Lahiri is showing how fiction often begins not with plot but with residue, a sentence that lodges itself like a splinter. The subtext is almost mischievous: language isn’t only a tool of communication; it’s an infestation. It follows you home. It claims you. And for a writer obsessed with moving between tongues, the “phrase” is both gift and symptom - evidence that translation doesn’t end at the clinic door.