Woman of Two Worlds

When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni came to the United States from India 23 years ago, she brought with her the books she read as a child, old Bengali folk tales filled with gods and demons, and fantastic fairy-tale adventures.

She’s still reading those books, but this time aloud--translating from Bengali as she goes--to her sons, Anand, 7, and Abhay, 4, as well as other kids from her Houston neighborhood who stop by to listen.

“They love stories, my children--genetically, I guess!” Divakaruni chuckles richly (as she often does), on a recent visit to Los Angeles to promote her latest novel, “Sister of My Heart” (Doubleday), the highly praised successor to her bestselling first novel, “The Mistress of Spices” (Anchor Books, 1997).

What’s remarkable is that her American-born sons and their friends are so spellbound they’ll forgo pizza and hamburgers for Indian dishes of lentils and rice, which they eagerly eat while listening to the old tales.

“Texas will never be the same!” Divakaruni says.

Yet the ease with which American children are captivated by a seemingly alien mythology is not really surprising, says the 42-year-old author, who recently moved to Houston from the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Murthy Divakaruni, a Shell Oil engineer, to teach in the University of Houston’s creative writing program. The old tales are not only exciting, “there’s a whole lot going on underneath. Little actions often end up having big symbolic meanings” that resonate with people in every culture.

Clash of Ancient and Modern Conflicts

That symbolic undertow clearly has pulled in readers to Divakaruni’s own stories, which are often a synthesis of modern and traditional themes, fact and fairy tale, social protest and the sensual pleasures of poetic language. Thus Divakaruni’s first collection of short stories, “Arranged Marriage” (Anchor Books, 1995), is composed of traditional narratives that focus largely on the confusing tug and pull between old ways and modern society experienced by Indian women living in the U.S., while “The Mistress of Spices” is a magical realist work about a centuries-old sorceress who sets up shop in present-day Oakland to administer aid through the magic of her spices to suffering Indian immigrants.

“Sister of My Heart” interweaves these ancient-modern, plain-lyrical strands even more tightly. On the surface, the story is an ironic social commentary on the status of women, featuring cousins, Anju and Sudha, who are being brought up by their mothers and an aunt in a crumbling mansion in contemporary Calcutta. Both go through arranged marriages. But Anju, the more modern-minded girl, ultimately emigrates to the U.S. and goes to college, while Sudha adheres more closely to tradition, until her mother-in-law demands she have an abortion--an ultrasound reveals Sudha is carrying a baby girl, rather than a more prestigious boy--and her longing for a baby pushes her into some most untraditional behavior.

Yet as event piles on event, and the story takes some breathtaking, suspense-filled turns--including repeated references to the two girls’ fathers’ fateful jaunt to a ruby-filled cave--the reader comes to realize that this is a modern fairy tale, filled nevertheless with very real truths. The book explores how the past can both limit and sustain us; the tension between individual need and family responsibility; and, above all, the enduring power of friendship.

Also laced through the seemingly simple narrative are two metaphorical tales, “The Princess in the Palace of Snakes” and “The Queen of Swords,” which not only mirror the girls’ development into strong, independent women, but also work as symbols for the power of storytelling, giving Sudha the strength to change her life and calling Anju out of a deep depression following a miscarriage.

This combination of ancient and modern themes comes from her own life, says Divakaruni, who grew up in Calcutta amid relatives who lived in crumbling mansions like the one in the book. Her parents were liberal-minded, however--her mother was a schoolteacher, her father an accountant for Esso--encouraging her education (just as the mothers encourage Anju in the novel), even allowing Divakaruni to go to college in Dayton, Ohio, in 1976, and then to UC Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in English literature. But cultures clashed when she told her parents she wanted to marry Murthy, whom she had met in Ohio. The problem? Murthy was from a different part of India.

“He speaks Telagu, a South Indian language, and in an arranged marriage you wouldn’t marry someone who speaks a different language.” Her parents, broad-minded in most respects, were strict about marriage, partly because of their own experience, she says. They came from two different Indian castes. Her father--who died two years ago--was from a Brahmin family, her mother from lower down the social scale. So they eloped to the city from their ancestral village.

“You’d think, having done that, they would be more liberal with their own children,” Divakaruni says, with a laugh. “But I think they realized how difficult it was for them because for years they were cut off from their families, though they later reconciled. They didn’t want that for their own children.

“But they came around. We finally said to them, ‘What would you do if we married someone who wasn’t Indian?’ And they said, ‘Get married!’ ”

Choice Is Key Both in Life and Her Novels

Yet if she had stayed in India, Divakaruni says, she would have gone through an arranged marriage--to which she isn’t necessarily opposed.

“I know so many that have worked well. It just depends on the people involved. . . . Look at Western marriages--they’re just as chancy!” she laughs. What’s important, and this is a key theme in her novel, is that people get to choose, she says. These days, arranged marriages often are much more democratic, with women being allowed to reject proposed partners.

“I’m very strongly for women’s choice,” she adds, noting that she has long been involved in activist organizations to improve the lot of South Asian women. At the same time, she also chooses to dress traditionally--for the interview she wears a striking red salwar-kameez, a long tunic and loose pants typically worn by young women in India. She also cooks Indian food and follows the rituals of the Hindu religion.

As a writer, she is influenced by both Indian and Western traditions of literature. But her literary thinking was perhaps most deeply shaped by her grandfather, who was “a great storyteller,” she says. “He lived in a village, Gurap, about three hours outside of Calcutta. So I was very fortunate that all my holidays I’d spend with my grandfather, experiencing a much more traditional way of life and listening to these wonderful stories, which I now feel are such an important part of Indian thinking.”

Part of her intention in “Sister of My Heart,” she says, was to reflect the strange coexistence in India of old and new ways, between people who might live in a village with their extended family, “with animals in the barn next door,” but who commute to the city where they’re working in “very technical jobs on computers, or as travel agents calling across the world.” The shifts and changes in Anju’s and Sudha’s lives also reflect the work of “a huge women’s movement” in India that has been influential in the passing of laws banning dowries as well as abortions based on gender selection, such as the one Sudha is pressured by her in-laws to have.

Likewise, the constant retelling of the two fairy tales in the book, each time with a slightly different twist, reflects not only the old oral tradition, but also a very up-to-date, postmodern look at “the truth, which is a very complex thing and often very different from what it appears.”

Not all readers will penetrate all the layers of her work, but that’s fine, Divakaruni says.

“I think it’s a real pity in our literary canon today that we have this so-called high literature, and then there’s popular literature and this great gap in between. But if you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate. That’s how I would like to think of my own books. I want them to be the kind that invite people in.”