she learn how to drive, Mrs. Sen is not overly enthusiastic about the experience. In India, Mr. and Mrs. Sen retained a personal driver for their needs. In America, Mrs. Sen finds herself overwhelmed with the fast pace of life.

She has to step outside her comfort zone; the multitude of cars on the road distresses her almost beyond endurance. Mrs. Sen regresses to an almost child-like dependence on Eliot. She confides to him her frustrations, fears, and many struggles to assimilate into American culture. In the end, out of an equal combination of desperation and rebellion, she decides to take the car to the fish store, beyond the route boundaries Mr. Sen had set for her. Mrs. Sen sustains a small injury in an accident when she briefly loses control of the car. Her desperate act is indicative of her need to maintain some sort of autonomy and control over her life despite the overwhelming onslaught of foreign cultural expectations foisted upon her.

2) Mr. Sen

He is portrayed as a college professor who is so busy with his teaching career that he is mostly oblivious to his wife's private griefs and struggles. It is Mr. Sen who decides that his wife has to learn how to drive. Faced with western cultural mores, he has to encourage his wife to embrace a feminine independence foreign to both of them. One suspects that Mr. Sen's almost religious reverence for work may well be a coping mechanism.

Despite Mrs. Sen's fondness for fish, Mr. Sen tells his wife that she must stop cooking so much fish for a while. He suggests that she cook chicken instead, as he has to start holding office hours for his students. In India, many families eat fish daily, unlike in America. Later, after the car accident, Mr. Sen steps in to resolve matters for his distraught wife; he finds himself apologizing on behalf of Mrs. Sen and writing out a check reimbursing Eliot's mother for November's child-care payment. In this respect, he finds his husbandly duties just as relevant in America as in India.

Hope this helps. Thanks for the question.

Cultural displacement means being plucked out from “my” place and dropped into an alien environment. What makes a place “mine”? The food we love, friends and family, the weather, shared experiences? For some people, migrating from the cozy small town they grew up in to study at a large university can also be a form of cultural dislocation. Add to this issues of race, language, and geographical distance, and you begin to get some idea of the displacement the eponymous protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Mrs. Sen” (1999) feels. Mrs. Sen is in a New England university town, far from her native Calcutta in India. The chilly New England weather, the habitually reserved nature of its inhabitants, and its vast, windswept empty stretches may as well be Jupiter for Mrs. Sen, who is used to warm, crowded, festive Calcutta. While her Bengali husband goes to work at the university, Mrs. Sen decides to offer her services as a babysitter to fill her days, taking in eleven-year-old Eliot.

Mrs. Sen’s homesickness is so acute as to rival a sort of soul-sickness. To understand her migrant grief, it is useful to consider her displacement as a loss. According to the Kubler-Ross model of dealing with grief, a person goes through five stages to process a profound loss, such as the death of a loved one or the diagnosis of a terminal illness. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For Mrs. Sen, dislocation from India is like a fracture of her psyche, and she is still stuck between denial and anger in processing the devastating break—so much so that even points of commonalities between the two cultures she is caught between become points of departure, as we see through her attempts to procure fish.

Eliot tells us that apart from the letters she gets from home, the only “other thing that made Mrs. Sen happy was fish from the seaside.” Both New England and Bengal have a thriving tradition of eating fish and shellfish, so we assume that a shared love of seafood will bring Mrs. Sen respite from the homesickness that envelops her like a fog. Yet, as winter approaches, the seaside fish markets wind up the year’s business, and Mrs. Sen feels bereft again. As she explains to Eliot’s mother, she is unable to find the sort of fish she likes in supermarkets.

In the supermarket I can feed a cat thirty-two dinners from one of thirty-two tins, but I can never find a single fish I like, never a single.

When she does manage to locate a fish store she likes, another aspect of her displacement kicks in. As she and Eliot take the bus home from the shop, they are happily eating clam cakes in their seats, when the “bloody” fish bag secure between Mrs. Sen’s knees attracts the attention of an older American woman in “an overcoat.” She speaks to the driver about something before stepping off the bus.

The driver turned his head and glanced back at Mrs. Sen. “What’s in the bag?”
Mrs. Sen looked up, startled.
“Speak English?” The bus began to move again, causing the driver to look at Mrs. Sen and Eliot in his enormous rearview mirror.
“Yes, I can speak.”
“Then what’s in the bag?”
“A fish,” Mrs. Sen replied.
“The smell seems to be bothering the other passengers. Kid, maybe you should open her window or something.”

Mrs. Sen’s foreignness, how she appears to other people, and their assumption that she does not understand English converge in this tense little exchange. Earlier, we have seen Eliot’s mother behaving overtly stiffly around Mrs. Sen, taking only a bite or two of the “bright pink yogurt with rose syrup, breaded mincemeat with raisins, [and] a bowl of semolina halvah” that Mrs. Sen routinely offers her when she comes over to pick up Eliot. Privately, his mother has told Eliot she doesn’t care much for the taste. Mrs Sen’s sense of alienation is exacerbated by what she perceives as lack of acceptance of her food, her culture, and, as we see in the bus, her presence. However, she makes no effort to “tone down” the foreignness of her appearance, like many immigrants do. She still wears bright, floral saris, even on the coldest of days. Why does Mrs. Sen not try harder to “fit in,” we might ask here? In wearing India as a badge on her person, Mrs. Sen is performing an act which Salman Rushdie describes as the risky urge to reclaim.

Exiles...are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt (Imaginary Homelands, 1991).

I also think Mrs. Sen’s refusal to assimilate is a means of protesting her displacement. This quiet protest is tied up with her powerlessness and issues of gender inequality. It was not Mrs Sen’s decision to come to America; she has followed her husband to America, as is expected of a dutiful Bengali wife. However, the well-meaning Mr. Sen is too caught up with his work as a professor of mathematics to spend much time with his wife and ease her transition into a new life. Mrs. Sen feels powerless, feels robbed of agency, and is rendered child-like, which is also why she bonds with Eliot. In this powerless state, she clings to her nostalgia like a safety blanket and actively rejects her new environment, refusing to do American things, like learning how to drive. (In India, she informs Eliot’s mother, she did not need to drive, as they had a chauffeur.)

Mrs. Sen’s reluctance to drive, spurred by her sense of cultural dislocation, ultimately affects Eliot and his relationship with her. After the incident in the bus, Mrs. Sen cannot afford to carry fish home on public transport. So when the store calls her about some “very tasty halibut” that has just come in, she decides to drive to the store in her car—with Eliot in it. This leads to unfortunate consequences. Since Mrs. Sen has not practiced driving much and is an anxious driver, she has a small accident.

After about a mile Mrs. Sen took a left before she should have, and though the oncoming car managed to swerve out of her way, she was so startled by the horn that she lost control of the wheel and hit a telephone pole on the opposite corner.

Although Mrs. Sen and Eliot make it through with minor injuries, the psychological and emotional cost to both of them is far deeper. Mr. Sen ends the baby-sitting arrangement, much to the relief of Eliot's mother, and the last Eliot hears of Mrs. Sen before he heads home is the sound of her crying in the bedroom. The incident foreshadows a rite of passage for Eliot.

It was the last afternoon Eliot spent with Mrs. Sen, or with any baby-sitter. From then on his mother gave him a key, which he wore on a string around his neck. He was to call the neighbors in case of an emergency, and to let himself into the beach house after school.

In the story’s final image, we consider for the first time the full import of Eliot’s loss. Although the narrative ostensibly has been about Mrs. Sen’s displacement, with Eliot a mostly objective narrator, we now sense that Eliot too has been dislocated, away from Mrs. Sen. Left to his own resources at home, his loneliness is as keen as Mrs. Sen’s.

The first day, just as he was taking off his coat, the phone rang. It was his mother calling from her office. “You’re a big boy now, Eliot,” she told him. “You okay?” Eliot looked out the kitchen window, at gray waves receding from the shore, and said that he was fine.

Contrast the “gray waves” with the colorful clutter of Mrs. Sen’s kitchen, earlier described in great detail by Eliot, and we understand that the cultural difference which drew Eliot to Mrs. Sen is what the world of adults, represented by his mother and Mr. Sen, has used to separate the American child from the Indian woman.

He especially enjoyed watching Mrs. Sen as she chopped things, seated on newspapers on the living room floor. Instead of a knife she used a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship, sailing to battle in distant seas....Facing the sharp edge without ever touching it, she took whole vegetables between her hands and hacked them apart: cauliflower, cabbage, butternut squash. She split things in half, then quarters, speedily producing florets, cubes, slices, and shreds.

In Interpreter of Maladies, the story of Mrs. Sen highlights the effects of cultural displacement on the characters.

In the story, Elliot is an eleven year old boy whose mother has hired Mrs. Sen to watch Eliot after school. Eliot soon notices that Mrs. Sen is often distracted; more often than not, her thoughts seem to take her back to her beloved, native India.

Cultural displacement is made apparent through Lahiri's major themes: marital difficulties exacerbated by the immigrant experience, cultural shock which augments the torment of loneliness, refusal to assimilate to a foreign culture, self-imposed confinement as a means to endure grief, and regression of attitudes as a tool for self-comfort.

Marital difficulties: Mrs. Sen experiences discord in her marriage due to her reluctance to learn how to drive. She experiences great suffering in stepping beyond her comfort zone; in India, she would not have had to learn how to drive. She relates to Eliot's mother that they (Mr. Sen and herself) had a driver in India.

Cultural Shock: Mrs. Sen is shocked by the individualism inherent in American society, especially in the hardy New England culture. She tells Eliot that in India, all anyone would have to do to get neighbors to show up at one's doorstep would be to shout, or express grief or joy of any kind. Neighbors would invariably show up in droves to help, or to make arrangements to assuage any grief or pain. Eliot tells her that in America, screaming would just bring neighborly complaints about noise level. In many respects, Eliot is just as lonely as Mrs. Sen. His mother must work and his father does not live with the family.

Refusal to assimilate: Mrs. Sen aims to hold on to her Indian identity by not assimilating. She does not relish the idea of driving, she wears saris religiously, and she laments that the New England winter will bring fewer fish to the dining table. She wears the Indian vermillion scarlet powder of a married Indian bride each day. She tells Eliot that it is similar to a western wedding ring.

Self-imposed confinement: Mrs. Sen shutters herself at home in late fall. She does not fix sweets for Eliot's mother when she comes to pick Eliot up, nor does she indulge in any of the normal activities Eliot is used to seeing her participate in. As she listens to a cassette tape of familiar voices, she confides to Eliot that her grandfather has died over the weekend.

Regression of attitudes: Mrs. Sen makes young Eliot her confidant. She senses his loneliness and admits that she is ashamed of her attitudes when she thinks of how a young boy like him must miss his own mother. She realizes that she is not the only one who suffers. Both Mrs. Sen and Eliot suffer the effects of displacement. According to the story, American culture often necessitates the chasm of separation between mother and child, just as immigrants like Mrs. Sen are separated from familiar surroundings and native cultural constructs. Eliot and Mrs. Sen understand each other; both feel like children who are powerless to decide their present happiness and future contentment.

Hope this helps. For further reading, I include resource links below. Thanks for the question.

In the three short stories, Lahiri portrays cultural displacement as a melancholic experience for individuals.  It reminds them of how alone they truly are in a new world.

Cultural displacement lies in Mrs. Sen's heart.  Eliot is perceptive enough to catch on quickly that there is something beneath Mrs. Sen's exterior.  He recognizes that India means the world to Mrs. Sen, and that world's disappearance has impacted her tremendously:

The mention of the word [India] seemed to release something in her.  She neatened the border of her sari where it rose diagonally across her chest.  She, too, looked around the room, as if she noticed in the lampshades, in the teapot, in the shadows frozen on the carpet, something the rest of them could not.  'Everything is there.'

Mrs. Sen experiences cultural displacement in a physical and emotional way.  Physically, all of her belongings are in India. She in a world with few things that remind her of home. Emotionally, "everything is there." Nothing is with her in this new setting.  

Mrs. Sen experiences this displacement on an individual basis, without the support network of other people.  At the same time, Mrs. Sen is melancholy about her experience. Eliot says that the word "India" released "something in her." This detail enables the reader to see how unhappy Mrs. Sen really is.  The word "India" means so much more to Mrs. Sen precisely because she is separated from it.

The narrator in "The Third and Final Continent" replicates Mrs. Sen's individual and melancholy experience of cultural displacement. The narrator himself is used to being displaced as he experienced it in London and now in Boston. Yet, in seeing what an Indian woman experiences in America, the melancholy of cultural displacement is evident: 

A few days after receiving the letter, as I was walking to work in the morning, I saw an Indian woman on Massachusetts Avenue, wearing a sari with its free end nearly dragging on the footpath, and pushing a child in a stroller. An American woman with a small black dog on a leash was walking to one side of her. Suddenly the dog began barking. I watched as the Indian woman, startled, stopped in her path, at which point the dog leaped up and seized the end of the sari between its teeth.

This is a uniquely individual experience. The narrator recognizes that his wife is going to experience a difficult time with her sari being gawked at and seen as "different." If she were in India, a woman wearing a sari would not be so out of place. However, in America, it is. Cultural displacement is an individual experience in the way it directly impacts the narrator. It is so personal that his scope of compassion is jarred as a result; he sees what his wife would experience. There is something melancholy about a woman being subject to a dog's attack because she is wearing something that defies culturally acceptable behavior. It is part of being an "outsider."

Mr. Pirzada represents another instance of how cultural displacement is individual and melancholy in its reach.  Mr. Pirzada is cut off from his family. While he is in America for work, similar to Mrs. Sen and the narrator from "The Third and Final Continent," he finds some of the customs in this new country foreign to him:

One day in October Mr. Pirzada asked upon arrival, “What are these large orange vegetables on people’s doorsteps? A type of squash?” “Pumpkins,” my mother replied. “Lilia, remind me to pick one up at the supermarket.” “And the purpose? It indicates what?” “You make a jack-o’-lantern,” I said, grinning ferociously. “Like this. To scare people away.” “I see,” Mr. Pirzada said, grinning back. “Very useful.”

The "type of squash" that Mr. Pirzada sees is foreign to him.  Mr. Pirzada's cultural displacement is one where he does not understand the contours of the culture in which he is placed. This lack of connection reflects how cultural displacement impacts him. Mr. Pirzada is culturally displaced from his own home, both politically and personally. He is uncertain about his family. The world that makes sense to him is far away. The world in which he is in contains elements that make him feel distant from it. This individualized experience of cultural displacement contains a sense of melancholy to it. Like his counterparts in Lahiri's other two stories, Mr. Pirzada experiences cultural displacement on a sad, personalized level.