Bharati Mukherjee's DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS is a brilliantly woven, thoughtful and intelligent story of three Calcutta, India-born Brahmin upper-class sisters, renowned for their beauty, brains, wealth, and privileged position in society. Mukherjee follows their lives as they leave their conservative, sheltered childhood home, where they are inundated with culture, tradition, and values and inculcated with education by the Catholic nuns in their convent structured school and college. Two sisters emigrate to America and the other relocates to Bombay, India.
The three sisters, Padma, Parvati, and Tara, are born exactly three years apart from each other and share the same birthday. Their mother names them after goddesses, hoping they will survive and prosper, which they all do.
"We are sisters three/as alike as three blossoms on one flowering tree. (But we are not)," says Tara, the protagonist, quoting a poem.
Padma lives in New Jersey but is completely Indian in her attire, her cuisine, and her profession as the television anchor of an Indian television program set in Jackson Heights, Queens, run by her Indian lover, while she stays married to a man once successful, now merely living off her fame.
Parvati is totally Indian to the point of allowing her husband's relatives to be houseguests for weeks at their luxurious apartment with its breathtaking view of the city. And her easy life with servants, drivers, and other amenities at her disposal is funnily described by Tara, as she relates her sister's "very stressed out life."
Tara is the most 'un-Indian' of the three. She lives in San Francisco and is divorced from an Indian Silicon Valley dotcom millionaire Bishwapriya Chatterjee, who is an ideal to all Indian immigrants, a sort of 'ethnic' Bill Gates, for his contribution to creating a network of communication via the Internet; his friend Chester Yee and he invent a computer-routing system that makes them rich.
Tara is almost a Valley woman --- a volunteer at a pre-school, a single mother of a teenage son who reveals he is gay and has a live-in lover Andy, a balding, red-bearded former biker, former bad-boy, Hungarian Buddhist contractor/yoga instructor. If that isn't scandalous enough for an Indian woman, Tara is also caught up in the mystery of a stranger who claims to be the bastard son of a secret alliance between her elder sister Padma and a Bengali Christian, Ron Dey.
Discovering his connection to her family, the stranger becomes both Tara's catharsis and nemesis. By complaining to the police (here she draws a hilarious sketch of an 'ethnic' policeman --- a Sikh --- Jasbir 'Jack' Sidhu), she calls the so-called nephew's bluff. He retaliates by bombing her house, where her ex-husband and son are at the time.
Tara looks back at her family's past and their future and comes to terms with her history and legacy, from which she is almost separated. And yet it is a part of her psyche. As she grows and matures as a character, we are drawn to her humor, her honesty, and her blunt assessment of the two worlds between which she travels, back and forth, between being American and Indian, travels both psychological and physical.
Multiculturalism is a theme that echoes throughout the book. Of her life in San Francisco, Tara says, "All the neighborhood services, except the laundries and the Japanese restaurant, are owned and staffed by crack-of-dawn rising, late-night closing Palestinians, whose shifting roster of uncles and cousins seems uniformly gifted in providing our needs and anticipating our desires."
Continuing this theme, Mukherjee draws a portrait of an ethnic area Jackson Heights, to where all Indian immigrants must make their pilgrimage:
"Jackson Heights is not a Chinatown or even a Japantown on the San Francisco model…Indian people shop collectively, but they don't live together in tight little communities…they travel from distant suburbs…or from neighboring states. We're a billion people, but divided into so many thousands or millions of classifications that we have trouble behaving as monolith."
In the novel's Foreword, Mukherjee quotes a small verse from an ancient Sanskrit poem, which lays out Tara's mission: "No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way. "
But against the story of the three sisters, Mukherjee's novel is also a love letter to the city of her birth --- Calcutta –-- of which she is fiercely protective, staunchly defending its reputation of being one of the most densely populated, most polluted and one of --– if not the most --- poorest cities in the entire world, "made famous by Mother Theresa," she says tongue in cheek.
The novel, however, begins with the most American of all searches: the desire to trace one's ancestry. Tara is fascinated by an ancestor, her almost namesake, Tara Lata, a five-year-old girl who was a victim of the archaic custom of child marriage –-- a tradition even her father, a university graduate and lawyer, willingly follows.
It is 1879 and Tara Lata's wedding party is traveling in a dark jungle to rendezvous with the bridegroom's family, who instead of greeting them hurls curses at the 'bride,' calling her 'unlucky' because the boy bridegroom has been bitten fatally by a snake. To save her from a life of degradation, widowhood, and shame, Tara Lata's father 'marries' her to the God of the forest, and she becomes the legendary Tree Bride.
The young girl retreats to her father's house and makes it a refuge for the poor, the sick, and finally the fighters for Indian independence; she is dragged from her home in 1944 by colonial authorities, who announce her death six days later.
With this novel, Bharati Mukherjee, already a critically acclaimed author and winner of the National Book Critics Award, has established herself as a formidable writer whose works combines her pride in her Indian heritage and her gratitude at the opportunities in America.
--- Reviewed by Sonia Chopra (soniajkcchopra@hotmail.com)
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