The America envisioned by many of these immigrants is often drastically different from the one they discover. In “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” the narrator arrives in Chicago to live with her aunt and uncle as she starts college, hoping that her childhood fantasy of marrying a “prince from a far-off magic land, where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold” will come true. As she says “America” full of hope, the word “opens inside me like a folded paper flower placed in water, filling me until there is no room to breathe” (p. 46).
But her uncle’s apartment is shabby and smells like stale curry and the neighborhood is rundown with chain-link fences and garbage rotting on the pavement—sights and smells she thought she had left behind in Calcutta. During a walk with her aunt, four boys assault the women with fistfuls of slush, chanting, “Nigger, nigger.” Maybe this new country is, as her uncle accuses, one that hates dark-skinned foreigners, a land that “pretends to give and then snatches everything back.” (p. 54)
But that night it snows, covering the dirt and softening the “rough, noisy edges of things.” Holding out her hands, the narrator at first feels a stinging chill that gradually fades. She watches as the snow covers her hands:
"When I finally look down, I notice the snow has covered my own hands so they are no longer brown but white, white, white. And now it makes sense that the beauty and the pain should be part of each other. I continue holding them out in front of me, gazing at them, until their covered. Until they do not hurt at all." (p. 56)
In “Clothes” a newly married Indian bride fantasizes about her husband at work in the store he co-owns in the United States. From what he has told her, Mita envisions a store with soft American music playing in the background as she moves “between shelves stocked high with brightly colored cans and elegant-necked bottles, turning their labels carefully to the front, polishing them until they shone” (p. 23). She fantasizes working in the store, standing behind the counter in a cream and brown skirt set, ringing up purchases, dusting “jars of gilt-wrapped chocolates on the counter.” Although she has never visited the store, its name—7 Eleven—sounds “exotic” to a woman who is accustomed to stores in India named after gods and goddesses for good luck.
The clash between American and Indian values is especially apparent in “Ultrasound,” the story of two Indian friends—one in American and one in India—who are pregnant at the same time. While the American woman anticipates the birth of her child, her Indian friend faces the agonizing decision of whether or not to abort her child because an ultrasound indicates it is a female, and it is “not fitting that the eldest child of the Bhattacharjee household should be female.” (p. 224).
Conflicting viewpoints toward marriage contribute to the end of a relationship of a young Indian woman and her American lover in “The Word Love.” The story begins with the narrator practicing how she will break the news to her traditional Indian mother:
“You practice the out loud for days in front of the bathroom mirror, the words with which you’ll tell your mother you’re living with a man. Sometimes they are words of confession and repentance. Sometimes they are angry, defiant. Sometimes they melt into a single, sighing sound, Love.” (p. 57)
The mother completely severs ties with her daughter when she learns the news—changing her will, changing her phone number, returning letters. The stress of the mother-daughter estrangement eventually erodes the narrator’s relationship, who finds she must revise the word “love” and its meaning in her new life.
Although the struggles of many of the Indian-American protagonists are daunting in these stories, their experiences navigating a new country are often empowering. Although it is not without fear and anxiety, these women are learning choice, independence, and self-reliance, often for the first time, as they transform their lives in a strange but enticing land.
Although the newly married wife in “Clothes” becomes a widow shortly after her arrival in the United States, she chooses to stay rather than return to her Indian homeland. Mita decides:
“I don’t know yet how I’ll manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only know I must. Because all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings…
I straighten my shoulders and stand taller, take a deep breath. Air fills me—the same air that traveled through Somesh’s lungs a little while ago. The thought is like an unexpected, intimate gift. I tilt my chin, readying myself for the arguments of the coming weeks, the remonstrations. In the mirror a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds.” (p. 33)
Women in “Affair,” “Disappearance,” and “Doors” all choose to leave relationships that prove unsatisfying, two of them arranged marriages, and begin independent lives. The wife in “Affair” knows her new single life will be difficult. She will have to face “pity in the eyes of Indian women when they hear. The gossip in India. My parents’ anger. Family dishonor.” She pictures herself living in a one-room apartment above a garage, warming soup over a burner instead of cooking in her spacious kitchen. But “it’s better this way,” she concludes, “each of us freeing the other before it’s too late. . .” (p. 271). Only in “Bats” does a woman flee and then return to an abusive relationship, but it is only one of two stories in the collection set in India.
Although the majority of stories in this collection focus on male-female relationships, the ties between mothers and children are also explored. A divorced mother and her adolescent who have become distant are reunited in “Meeting Mrinal” after the mother’s near-suicide act. The single woman in “A Perfect Life” is content to be single and childless until a young child unexpectedly enters her life and turns all of her former beliefs upside down. In “The Maid Servant’s Story” a young bride-to-be learns why her mother was always emotionally distant as she was growing up. And in “The Word Love” a young woman suffers the emotionally crippling rejection of a traditional mother who cannot accept that her daughter would want to marry an American.
But there is a hint of hopefulness that ends the story in the form of snow, disguising the ugliness of the surrounding neighborhood and turning the narrator’s hands white as she holds them out and feels the stinging chill. She begins to realize that beauty and pain are both parts of each other and the fabric of life. We know the adjustment for this young student who fantasized going to a “far-off magic land, where the pavements are silver and the roofs all gold” will not be an easy one. But with her epiphany, we are given hope that she will not fail crumble in despair. Despite her homesickness, she will not flee back to India. She will rewrite her fairy tale with different expectations that reflect both the beauty and pain of her life.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Writing Style
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s writing style is simple and transparent, her prose frequently spiced with poetic phrases that give her stories a lyrical lift. Widows are “doves with cut-off wings,” a childless woman feels “the emptiness swirl around me,” a husband’s hair smells “of mint leaves and dried rain,” an unhappy wife feels her husband’s resentment “growing around me, thick and red and suffocating.”
Although some of Divakaruni’s plots are predictable (the abandoned child in “A Perfect Life” will undoubtedly change the narrator’s beliefs about motherhood) and unrealistic (bringing the Indian woman facing an abortion in “Ultrasound” to the United States to give birth is improbable), these stories provide great insight into what it is like to be a woman standing precariously at the “volatile confluence of two conflicting pressures: the obligation to please traditional husbands and families, and the desire to live modern, independent lives.” Not surprisingly, the majority of stories are told in first person, drawing readers into the intimacy of the protagonists’ lives and giving their experiences a very personal relevance.
About Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Indian American writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, activist and teacher. Her books have been translated into 29 languages. She was born in India and lived there until 1976, at which point she left Calcutta and came to the United States. She continued her education in the field of English, receiving a Master’s degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Divakaruni teaches Creative Writing at the University of Houston and writes for both adults and children. She continues to work to help educate children and help women who are victims of abuse in south Asia.
Selected Arranged Marriage Reviews