Back in 1999 just when the ambers were dying out after the mega-success of Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things, another young Indian woman stepped in to keep the creative flame burning bright.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies made the literary world sit up in excitement as critic upon critic began showering her 'Stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond' with some of the finest comments and reviews of the year. But nothing had prepared the 32 year old for the all-important Pulitzer Prize.'There is elegance in her plots and clarity in her prose,' gushed a reviewer. Another critic said her stories bore 'the stamp of the same painstaking craftsmanship as Buddhist sages apply to the making of a mandala.

Now 36, Lahiri is back, not with short stories but with a novel titled The Namesake [Flamingo, Rs. 395], which once again promises to surprise the literary world with its clever weaving of fact and fiction and smart use of the language.

It is the story of Gogol Ganguli a child of Bengali immigrants to America who hates his first name and doesn’t know what it means. Neither does anyone else. It is later explained that his father named him after a nineteenth century Russian poet. The entire book is based on Gogol’s various failed attempts to change his name.

Like her character Gogol, Jhumpa herself is a child of Indian immigrants to America. She was born to Bengali parents in London from where her parents went to Rhode Island even before she was old enough to sit up.

Her writing career began when she was all of seven. That's the time she started "co-authoring books" with a classmate during lunch break. Like many others of the Indian diaspora, Lahiri felt she did not belong to America and writing allowed the shy girl child to observe and make sense of things around her without having to participate.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri told Newsweek, " We were always looking back so I never felt fully at home here. There's nobody in this whole country that we're related to. India was different---our extended family offered real connections. To see my parents as children, as siblings, was rare.

After graduating from Barnard, Lahiri took up a Creative Writing course in the Boston University that helped to enhance her skills.

With time, money and a good amount of encouragement at hand, she set about writing her first novel Interpreter of Maladies, an anthology of short stories. Unlike some people she never felt restricted writing short stories and in fact enjoyed paring things down. But The Namesake, her latest literary outpouring, is set in the novel form.

Like in her new novel, most of her stories are based on immigrant experiences using India and the United States as a backdrop. Her characters are semi-real, based on people she knew and the people she met while visiting India but the situations are invented giving her stories a universal appeal.

Her earlier stories talked about the problems faced by immigrants in an alien land, people who find it tough, even after decades to feel that home is no longer India. She wrote about the brides who have to cope simultaneously with being foreign and married, of men agonising over the families they left behind in order to earn a better living, of epilepsy fits and of people clutching desperately at an alien world which is never fully theirs.

The Interpretor of Maladies was based on her own experiences. Being an immigrant herself, she realised the importance of family bonds which tied people to their homelands.

Even her new book The Namesake is somewhat based on her own experiences. In a world where she looked different and was labeled an outsider, Lahiri felt as if she did not belong. India with its vibrant colours and versatility gave life to her starving existence and as a child, she loved visiting the country that stimulated her very being.

As a child, Lahiri spent much time in Kolkata with her grandmother, reading, writing and recording things. Ironically this is what helped her find solitude in life despite there being so many people around her. It was a place where she began to think imaginatively.

Reminisces she, " Kolkata nourished my mind, my eye as a writer and my interest in seeing things from a different point of view."

The last holds true for her latest novel because each situation is elaborated cogently with rhythmic sentences, drugging the readers with a style that makes them eager for more.

Gogol Ganguli in The Namesake talks of a young man being tormented by an unusual first name. The story lulls readers with its smoothness, and the Western audience is taken in by the Indian setting.

Lahiri chronicles her characters' lives with both objectivity and compassion, being a writer of uncommon elegance and poise. Her new book though thin in appearance hides a highly polished package.

Apart from receiving the Pulitzer Prize, one of the three most sought after literary awards in the world, many of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories have already been published in the New Yorker and other literary publications.

With her new novel Lahiri seems to have sharpened her steadfast gaze into the human heart. In the words of distinguished novelist, Amy Tan," Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who wants to make you grab the next person you see and say, 'Read this!'"

A dazzling storyteller, Lahiri has an eye for a nuance and an ear for irony. Which explains the ease with which she has taken her seat among the best story writers of the world.

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