Family Values

The first time I mustered the patience to sit through an entire Indian film--not the artful cinema of a Satyajit Ray but rather that brainless sort of song-and-dance Hindi movie mass-produced by Bombay studios--I was struck foremost by its utter improbability. Such films possess time-honored ingredients: predictable plots, happy endings and characters who burst out in song without the slightest provocation. The bad guys always lose, and the hero always gets his girl.

I have often thought that the reason these ridiculous movies are devoured by so many Indians is that they are essentially modern fairy tales. There is something timeless about a fairy tale and about a grown-up wanting to believe in one, to view the world again with the wonderment of a child--something not ridiculous at all.

This enduring faith in fairy tales lies at the center of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s beguiling and cleverly plotted second novel, “Sister of My Heart.” It is the story of two girls, Anju and Sudha, cousins born minutes apart, who grow up together in an old, stately mansion in Calcutta. The day of their births is marked fortuitously by the deaths of their fathers, who had embarked on an ill-fated adventure together, hunting for rubies in the jungles of Bengal. And so, in the absence of men, the girls grow up in a world governed by three mothers: Anju’s mother, Gouri, the matriarch of the Chatterjee family; Sudha’s mother, Nalini; and the widowed sister of Gouri’s husband.

Nalini sits on the family’s periphery. Her husband was the Chatterjees’ black sheep, a distant cousin who brought her to Calcutta to live with his wealthy relatives. Perhaps to compensate for her marginal status, Nalini is especially strict with Sudha, expecting her to live up to the family’s virtuous name. That means limiting her contacts with the outside world, particularly with men. “Wrong, wrong,” Sudha muses, “this society that says just because I was born to her, she can be my jailer.” Eventually, Sudha comes to think of her mother as a kind of usurper of the Chatterjee name. But if Nalini has little right to live as one of the family, what right has Sudha?

The girls spend their idle childhood hours acting out the fairy tales they have heard since birth. Sudha is also an accomplished storyteller. “She can take the old tales,” Anju says, “and make them new by putting us in them. Us, Anju and Sudha, right in there among the demon queens and fairy princes and talking beasts.” How appropriate that the girls engage in this kind of escapism, for their world is rigidly constrained. And as Sudha and Anju grow up, they become disillusioned with the limitations of their lives. No matter that Anju wants to attend college, study English literature, travel abroad. Or that Sudha dreams of romantic love and a life of leisure. The mothers have other ideas; they plan to marry the girls off to suitable boys.

But in many joint Indian families, marriage can be a perplexing experience for a new daughter-in-law, who is treated little better than a glorified servant, someone who belongs to both her husband and her mother-in-law. (It is apparently a truth universally acknowledged on the subcontinent that a single man in want of good fortune must be in possession of a wife.) Aside from cooking and attending to her new family, the daughter-in-law is expected to produce children--male, of course. Such is Sudha’s fate when she is married off to the Sanyal family and forced to abandon the one love of her life--the handsome and tender Ashok, who approaches her one day at the cinema.

The Sanyals are a backward, barbaric clan, especially when Sudha has difficulty bearing a male heir. The longer she remains without child, the crueler her in-laws become. When Sudha does finally become pregnant--with a girl--her mother-in-law demands that she have an abortion; if the eldest child of the Sanyal family were to be female, she claims, family shame and bad luck would surely descend upon them all. Sudha’s husband, Ramesh, says nothing.

The episode dramatizes a very real tension in urban India between the antiquated, superstitious values of the village and the progressive attitudes of the modern city. Calcutta may be an advanced city technologically, but it is in many ways an insular village. These days, all the best doctors’ offices in the city, including the one Sudha goes to, conduct sonograms and amniocentesis and provide the best in prenatal care. But I am told that rarely these days will a doctor reveal the sex of a child to an expecting mother because of the alarming rate of female fetus abortion. A practice we may associate with primitive villages forces physicians into a vow of silence.

Anju’s married life is equally trying. Her husband, Sunil, takes her to California, where she struggles to assimilate into an alien land, away from the person she loves most: the sister of her heart. To make matters worse, Sunil turns out to be a self-absorbed and uncaring husband, flinging Anju into fits of lonely depression. All of which reminds me of an old lament from my father’s ancestral land in east Bengal: “How I cherished to be married to Krishna! My husband turned out to be neither Krishna nor Vishnu, but the grandson of Faringa the buffoon weaver.”

Ultimately, “Sister of My Heart” is about Sudha and Anju attempting to break free from societal convention. Like a haunting leitmotif, the experience of their fathers--their ability to get up and leave, abandoning all familial obligation simply to pursue an adventure--perpetually reminds the Chatterjee daughters of the freedom they, as women, do not possess.

Divakaruni has a penchant for making India sound exotic. Scarves shimmer like a peacock’s throat. Everyone’s skin smells of sandalwood; every breeze carries the smell of jasmine. Coconut trees rustle with pleasure, and assorted flowers--bel, jui and gandharaj--make one drunk with their sweet aroma. I suppose that one purpose of a teller of fairy tales is to imagine a magical, far-off place, but modern India isn’t such a far-off place any more, and too many over-exotic literary portraits are making the land less magical too.