This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treesman,

fiction editor at The New Yorker. On this episode of The writer's voice, we'll hear Jumpa

Lahiri read her story, Casting Shadows, from the February 15th and 22nd 2021 issue of the magazine.

Lahiri is the author of two novels and two short story collections. Her first book,

Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and she was a recipient of the National

Humanities Medal in 2014. Her new novel, Whereabouts, from which this story was adapted,

was published in Italian in 2018,

and will come out in Lahiri's English translation in April.

Now here's Jumpa Lahiri. Casting Shadows

Now and then, on the streets of my neighborhood, I bump into a man I might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with.

He always looks happy to see me.

He lives with a friend of mine, and they have two children. Our relationship never goes beyond

a longish chat on the sidewalk, a quick coffee together, perhaps a brief stroll in the same direction.

He talks excitedly about his projects. He gesticulates, and at times as we're

walking, our synchronized bodies, already quite close, discreetly overlap. Once he accompanied

me into a lingerie shop, because I had to choose a pair of tights to wear under a new skirt.

I just bought the skirt, and I needed the tights for that evening. Our fingers grazed the textures

splayed out on the counter as we sorted through the various colors. The binder of samples was

like a book full of flimsy transparent pages. He was totally calm among the bras,

the nightgowns, as if he were in a hardware store and not surrounded by intimate apparel.

I was torn between the green and the purple. He was the one who convinced me to choose the purple,

and the sales lady, putting the tights into a bag, said,

...