Interpreter of Maladies
Characters in Interpreter of Maladies
9 characters, main characters first.Main characters
Shoba
A Boston lawyer whose marriage to Shukumar frays after the stillbirth of their child; she proposes the nightly game of confessions during the blackouts.
Mr. Kapasi
A part-time tour guide and hospital interpreter who imagines a connection with an American client during a day trip to the Konarak Sun Temple.
Boori Ma
An elderly stairwell sweeper who guards a Calcutta apartment building with tales of a lost affluent past, and is wrongly blamed when a resident's belongings go missing.
Shukumar
Shoba's husband, a doctoral student adrift in grief after their baby's stillbirth, drawn back into intimacy with her during nightly power outages.
Lilia (Interpreter of Maladies)
The ten-year-old American narrator of "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," whose family hosts a Bengali visitor cut off from his family during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
Miranda (Interpreter of Maladies)
A young Bostonian having an affair with Dev, a married Bengali man, until her friend's young nephew asks her what being "sexy" really means.
Supporting characters
Mr. Pirzada
A Dacca botanist stranded in America on a research grant, anxious for his wife and seven daughters in East Pakistan during the 1971 war.
Mrs. Das
An Indian-American tourist on a family trip to India who confides a long-held secret to her guide, Mr. Kapasi, during the drive to the Sun Temple.
Rohin
A precocious seven-year-old visiting Boston with his mother, whose blunt question about a word he overheard ends Miranda's affair with Dev.