Sisters Straddle 2 Worlds in a Saga of an Indian Family

DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS

A Novel

By Bharati Mukherjee

Theia

310 pages, $24.95

*

Bharati Mukherjee’s sixth novel follows a contemporary Brahmin Bengali family’s efforts to maintain the traditions of its homeland while accepting the cultural changes sweeping through India. “Desirable Daughters” portrays the divergent lives of three sisters raised in upper-class Calcutta society: Padma, Parvati and Tara Bhattacharjee, who deal with the demands of family and society in their own ways. Mukherjee examines the consequences of abandoning one’s cultural heritage and of remaining absolutely faithful to it. To what extent is assimilation acceptable, and to what extent is it a betrayal of one’s past?

“We’re a billion people,” she writes, “but divided into so many thousands or millions of classifications that we have trouble behaving as a monolith. Yet each Indian is so densely packed with family that he or she seems to contain hundreds of competing personalities.” Indeed, the Bhattacharjees are so steeped in high society that images of Mother Teresa and a squalid Calcutta are as foreign to them as to those in the Western world.

The three sisters, while expected to marry into the right caste and to do so by a certain age, are raised with an immersion in art and literature. They lead carefree lives, and because of their wealth and beauty, every opportunity awaits them. “We have genes to die for,” Tara, the novel’s narrator, explains: “natural emollients, soft, black hair, and white teeth that have never known cavities or the need for straightening.” The novel opens with a Bhattacharjee family legend about Tara Lata the Tree-Bride, a distant 19th century relative for whom Tara was named, and whose ghost haunts Tara. As a child, the legend goes, Tara Lata was preparing for her wedding when the bridegroom died suddenly of snakebite, putting her family under a curse. “She was now not quite a widow,” Mukherjee writes, “which for a Bengali Hindu woman would be the most cursed state, but a woman who brings her family misfortune and death. She was a person to be avoided.”

Ironically, the Tree-Bride’s doomed fate freed her to lead an entirely independent life in a society that shunned unmarried women. Free from the burdens of a husband and children, Tara Lata lived the rest of her life alone in her father’s house. As a modern woman, Tara Bhattacharjee seems to have little in common with her namesake, yet she feels a strong connection, as she too has ended up without a husband. Tara realizes that Tara Lata “had turned the tragedy of her husband’s death and a lifetime’s virginity into a model of selfless saintliness,” while she had simply ended her marriage because she felt like it.

Understandably, Tara can’t help wondering if her bold decision to move to California with her husband (and divorce him 12 years later) has somehow brought shame to her family and perhaps thwarted her happiness. At 36, living in San Francisco with her teenage son Rabi and her American boyfriend, she isn’t as fulfilled as she’d like to be. The promises of American life have failed her. And considering that her ex-husband, Bish, is a Bill Gates-like billionaire, she isn’t entirely sure that leaving him was the right thing to do.

Mukherjee offers an insightful portrayal of a family dynamic frustrating and comic. Bish was a good Indian husband, fulfilling his duties honorably, yet he did not satisfy his Americanized wife. Tara views Bish as dull and almost too Indian, while her family regards her as not Indian enough; they think she has bought into shallow American values. Tara is caught between remaining loyal to her family and satisfying her desires.

The novel is most interesting when it reads as a family saga: Tara’s amicable, unresolved relationship with Bish; her distant relationship with her disapproving elder sister, Padma; and her closeness with Parvati, who is her only confidante. Tara also has a close but challenging relationship with Rabi, who is wrestling with his sexual orientation.

Mukherjee is an astute observer of Indian culture and tradition, and the guilt and ambivalence that such a rich history often engenders. Each of the daughters feels a pull toward home, and each handles it in a different way: Tara feels the most ambivalence about meeting her family’s expectations yet is ultimately drawn back home. Padma has also left India for America, and she leads an insular, private life in New Jersey. Parvati is a dutiful daughter who lives in Bombay and visits her ailing parents regularly; yet she upset them years ago by choosing her husband and “jumping the marriage queue.”

“Desirable Daughters” gets off track with some busy subplots, including one about a man who shows up at Tara’s door claiming to be a family member and who turns out to be a stalker. It’s almost as if Mukherjee was attempting to find a balance between a literary novel and a commercial one, and decided to write both. Yet Mukherjee is at her best when she zooms in on her characters’ interior lives and relationships; she ought to leave the melodrama to lesser writers.