This article examines Jhumpa Lahiri’s use of ‘driving’ in her short story, “Mrs. Sen’s”, as one of the strategies of acculturation and posits it against the notion of ‘diaspora space’, a concept theorized by Avtar Brah, to see how a skill like driving can be extremely crucial in the diaspora space in developing mutual understanding between the diasporian and the natives. In so doing, the article also shows how challenging sometimes the process of acculturation becomes to an immigrant and how fatal it could be to someone whose response to it is slow and dominated by the back pull of memory.

Of late critics have started questioning both the quality and integrity of the literature produced by contemporary writers of Indian diaspora.1 While there are reasons to suspect whether much of the Indian diasporic writings of the present-day can compete with the all-time classics of the world, there is perhaps little doubt that these writings are very good culture sites that record different forms of cultural transformations and their results in some of the multicultural countries in particular and the world in general. Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, “Mrs. Sen’s”, for instance, shows how challenging sometimes the process of acculturation becomes to an immigrant and how fatal it could be to someone whose response to it is slow and dominated by the back pull of memory. This article attempts to examine Lahiri’s use of ‘driving’ in this story as one of the strategies of acculturation and posit it against the notion of ‘diaspora space’, a concept theorized by Avtar Brah, to see how a skill like driving can be extremely crucial in the diaspora space in developing mutual understanding between the diasporian and the natives.

Commonwealth Literature Journal, Aravind Adiga, Cultural Production, Commercial Mediations, Indian Fictional Writing, South-Asian Cultural Commodities, Contemporary Corruption, Social Responsibility, Postcolonial Literatures, Foreign Cultures, Commercial Implications, Postcolonial Production.