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“A Choice of Accommodations” is collected in Lahiri’s second short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. The story takes place at Langford College in the United States and follows the protagonists, Amit and Megan, on a short vacation for their friend Pam’s wedding. Their marriage is an interethnic affair—Amit is Indian, while Megan is American. They meet and fall in love with each other while studying medicine at Columbia University. However, Amit fails to finish his studies and instead applies to journalism school, becoming a freelance journalist at last; while Megan has followed the medical path and works in a private clinic. Looking back to their marriage, their union is not blessed by their parents because Amit’s parents want him to marry a Bangladeshi girl from the same background of upbringing and education as him. Fortunately, the couple overcome the obstacles from their parents and finally get married and have raised two lovely daughters.

Chapter Two Causes of Trauma in Lahiri’s Short Stories

2.1 Marginalized Plight: Trauma of the War

In the macrocosm of post-colonialism, exile is not always about black or Asian people who migrate from the former British colonies to Britain or North America. Anyone who is in a situation where different cultures intersect and converge will drop into the mire of “exile”. Likewise, the separation brought about by war is a kind of “geographical exile”. Accordingly, “homelessness” is what the diaspora in exile mourns for. Based on the elaboration in the last chapter, both the protagonists in “A Real Durwan” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” get involved in the third India-Pakistan war. Consequently, the effects of which are not limited to the defeated countries and cannot be measured, which are far from geographical and spatial sense but more on the political and cultural level. Therefore, the analysis of the causes of the characters’ trauma in these two short stories focuses on the underlying factors beneath the war, mainly in terms of the situation of the minorities after the war and the factors involving political power between history and histories.

2.1.1 The Suffering of Minorities after War

In “A Real Durwan”, Boori Ma is forced to flee from East Pakistan to Calcutta under the influence of the war. Acting as a “janitor” on an upper floor of a residential building, she sleeps on newspapers and lives in a precarious environment. Under this circumstance, Boori Ma exhibits symptoms of hypervigilance and is constantly on alert for potential terror. Incubated by multiple dangers, the source of her trauma can be divided into two aspects. One of these is the psychological exile that follows the pain of geographical exile. According to an anthropologist George Spindler, psychological exile is an inevitable result of hellish, cultural, and blood exile, which can be understood as a feeling of “rootlessness”. He brings out the fact that the eternal human self is a continuation of the past, a continuation of one’s life experiences, life meaning, and social identity. These can help people to identify themselves (36).

2.2 Motley Identity: Trauma of the Culture

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