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" She was an unusual intern. Too old, for one thing, a ripened twenty-nine, which was obvious less in her looks than in her presence. Jhumpa was more poised, more calm, than the postpubescent underlings working at Boston magazine in the summer of 1997. At the time, she was completing her doctoral thesis at Boston University on--hand to God, this is true--representations of Italian architecture in early-seventeenth-century English theater. She was, in fact, a professional student, having already earned three master&amp;#039;s degrees, which made her far better educated than any of the inky hacks for whom she labored those long months. But Jhumpa was burned out on academia and considering a career as a writer. Hence the internship. Despite her credentials, however, we (I was a senior editor at Boston) treated her like the other interns, which is to say not terribly well. She was unpaid, of course, and surreptitiously ogled, the curse of any tall and tawny woman with bright, moist eyes and the grace of a cattail in a September breeze. Oh, she was given a bit more latitude, allowed to type precious blurbs about designer handbags and chromy gewgaws and, once, even dispatched to Kennebunkport to report a travel story. But she certainly wasn&amp;#039;t trusted to be a real writer, one capable of waxing eloquent on anything more substantial than &amp;quot;the prettiest back-to-school notebooks,&amp;quot; for instance, or chunky-soled shoes. &amp;quot;Okay, kiddo,&amp;quot; one of the editors lectured Jhumpa when she turned in a scant two hundred words about a Casablanca revival at a local theater. &amp;quot;What we need here is what we call a lead.&amp;quot; She might have written the best damned two hundred words on Casablanca ever put to a page, but that hardly would have mattered; interns are cursed to be rewritten reflexively, their own words ground away by the delete key.  Jhumpa giggles about this now, though not with any hubris. She is sitting in a small office on Park Avenue South, where her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, rents a suite. On a shelf beneath the window, a copy of her short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, is propped upright, freshly rereleased in hardcover and festooned with a raft of awards. &amp;quot;See, there&amp;#039;s the PEN/Hemingway,&amp;quot; she says, running a slender finger across the top line. She blinks hard and looks startled, especially when she notices the big silver star just right of center that announces that her collection won the Pulitzer prize. &amp;quot;Oh,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It has them all.&amp;quot; She blushes. &amp;quot;How embarrassing.&amp;quot;  We are both embarrassed. I&amp;#039;m crushing a gut-level desire to claim a small piece of her success, to attribute at least part of her stunning arrival to my patient and thoughtful mentoring. It is a tortured and tenuous path of cause and effect. I might have asked her to photocopy something once, or perhaps to send a fax. The best I can say is, I knew her when, and even that is a reach; to say I was aware of her presence would be more accurate. How could we editors have missed such a staggering talent? By 1997, Jhumpa already had written several of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies. One, the painful story of a half-crazed woman who sweeps the stairwell of a Calcutta apartment, had been crafted a full five years earlier. When the book was released last year, Amy Tan provided a flattering blurb: &amp;quot;Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person you see and say, &amp;#039;Read this!&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Which is both true and a far better use of her talent than grabbing her and yelling, &amp;quot;Fax this!&amp;quot; Interpreter of Maladies is one of those happy little successes, a small book (198 pages in hardcover) with a short print run that bubbled into the mainstream solely because it is so wonderfully written, nuanced and supple and wise beyond its author&amp;#039;s young years. The accolades began to accumulate almost immediately, including, in April, the PEN/Hemingway award, which goes to the best fiction debut of the year. When she returned to Boston to accept the award--she was then living in New York--she was deeply honored but not overwhelmed. &amp;quot;It made sense to me,&amp;quot; she says, though again without a trace of hubris. &amp;quot;The first-book award. Okay, yeah. That&amp;#039;s me--I accomplished this.&amp;quot; The next day, back in Manhattan, Jhumpa answered a call from an assistant publicist at Houghton Mifflin, who explained that a number of reporters were trying reach her. Jhumpa was perplexed. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t know what I&amp;#039;m talking about, do you?&amp;quot; the flack asked. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; Jhumpa said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve been awarded the Pulitzer prize.&amp;quot; Okay, that was a little overwhelming. Jhumpa replied with the first words that formed in her brain: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t even know who you are.&amp;quot; In the months since, during which she has been working on a novel, moving into a new apartment, and planning her wedding, Jhumpa has become a minor celebrity. She has appeared on television and in a sheaf of newspapers. She has received letters from prison inmates. Her book was run through the presses again, and twenty thousand hardcovers were shipped out. Former editors of Boston magazine (we&amp;#039;ve all since moved on) took a sheepish pride. India was more boisterous about it: Though she has never lived there--she was born in London to immigrant parents who later moved to Rhode Island--she has been heralded as an &amp;quot;Indian writer.&amp;quot; That is obviously not inaccurate--her stories are either set in India or involve Indians in America--but it is unfairly confining. She is, simply, a writer, sans a defining adjective. And yet she is still poised and graceful and, in some ways, quite shy. &amp;quot;Not to be falsely modest,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but it&amp;#039;s just one book. Nine stories. It&amp;#039;s just such a gargantuan honor for nine little stories.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a486/jhumpa-lahiri-1000/>