63 pages • 2 hours read
Jhumpa LahiriInterpreter of Maladies
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 8 Summary: “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”
Bibi Haldar is a 29-year-old woman in India suffering from a mysterious illness that causes seizures. The townspeople and her family have tried many different branches of medicine and religious practice to cure her to no avail, leaving her to live her life in the care of a cousin, Haldar, and his wife, who run a cosmetic shop. Bibi keeps inventory in exchange for room and board.
Bibi spends her time complaining to the townspeople, and they realize that she wants a man in her life. The townspeople tell her she should take better care of her appearance if she wants to marry, and after she has another attack, a doctor prescribes marriage as a cure. This prospect excites Bibi, and the townspeople begin to try to find a match, but Bibi’s cousin and wife are convinced the effort is futile, saying that Bibi is unsuited for marriage; the wife believes she is cursed by the devil, and Bibi’s cousin has kept her from learning to cook or even watching television.
Bibi wants to be photographed for potential in-laws, but Haldar refuses; Bibi retaliates by shrugging off her work in favor of telling stories about Haldar and his wife. Haldar relents and places an ad: “GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETERS, SEEKS HUSBAND” (160). The ad is unsuccessful, and the parents in the village all know who it is about and are unwilling to take a risk on such a poor match. Nevertheless, the town begins teaching her how to be pleasing to a man.
No proposal comes, and the townspeople reflect on Bibi’s father, who had to give up a career as a teacher to watch over Bibi. He spent his life trying to figure out her illness. The townspeople keep humoring and consoling her but are secretly glad that she is not their responsibility.
Haldar’s wife gets pregnant, and she insists that Bibi’s illness is contagious; Bibi is isolated from the family, and when she has another attack in public, Haldar and his wife force her to sleep in the storage room of their cosmetics shop. When the baby comes, Bibi is let back in the house, but is still isolated from the family, and she spends her time alone. She continues to have attacks, and Haldar and his wife are uncaring. In autumn, the baby gets sick, and Bibi is again forced to live in the storeroom. She seems to be at peace with the matter and sets up a household for herself in the room.
In response to the poor treatment of Bibi, the townspeople stop shopping at Haldar’s store; he is driven out of business and moves away, leaving Bibi a small envelope of money. The townspeople donate things to her and feed her, and they have the children play nearby in case she has an attack. Despite this attention, she begins to isolate herself, and when the neighbors find that someone has vomited outside her house, they discover that she’s pregnant.
She never reveals who the father is, and she has the baby without incident. She then uses the money from Haldar, along with his unsold inventory, to improve the storeroom and begin running a successful business out of the space. The truth about the baby’s father is never revealed, but it doesn’t matter, because Bibi Haldar is cured.
Story 8 Analysis
The collective “we” that narrates this story positions it as part of a literary tradition in which a community watches the life of someone who is somehow strange or outcast (the most notable example being William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”); the difference here is that the collective has a sense of ownership of Bibi, encouraging her in her goals and providing her with the perspective and agency she needs to ultimately have a child of her own, which was not their intent. This premise serves as an interesting counterpoint to the earlier story, “A Real Durwan,” because it presents the collective as invested in the plight of those beneath them. When Haldar leaves, the townspeople take it upon themselves to look after Bibi, albeit in a passive way, and their earlier relief that she was not their problem does not prevent them from helping her when she needs it.
The title of the story refers to both Bibi’s medical care and the way other people treat her. What the townspeople offer Bibi without realizing it is a sense of agency. When she is diagnosed as needing a husband, the doctor is giving her a sense of purpose that she has lacked, and it’s also giving the community a chance to invest in her in a way that goes beyond thinking of her as someone who is ill. The central tension of the story is rooted in her illness and the way people treat her because of it, most notably her cousin Haldar, who thinks she will never be fit for marriage and makes only the most basic efforts to secure her a husband. Though having a child out of wedlock is frowned upon in their culture, the townspeople have inadvertently paved the way for this to happen, as they spent their time teaching her how to be pleasing to a man.
Indian culture has a complicated view of illness, and it’s unsurprising that Bibi’s bouts of seizures would make her an outcast in her own family. She has lived her life in the shadow of that illness, and it has come to define her. When it becomes clear to her that she will not be a wife because of that, she retreats to the rooftop storeroom, living an isolated life that echoes a fairy tale. This is the role that the community expects of her—a tragic figure defined by her condition.
By having a child out of wedlock, she defines a new role for herself. Her “cure” is not medical in nature; it’s social. She has traded in one narrative about herself for another.
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