Poetic perceptions

These stories, where the expatriate experience is foregrounded, resonate with the paradoxes inherent in all relationships, says PADMINI DEVARAJAN.

NOTHING could be more pertinent to the present times than the expatriate experience that once again forms the basic theme of The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, the latest creative venture of Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni. Woven in exquisite colours and designs, these short stories evoke a sense of poetry, where emotions and complex human relationships fuse with images and textures to find an unerring connection in the readers. "This had always been her problem, the inability to explain to those back home the texture of an alien life...", is as much the unvoiced agony of the mother who comes to Calcutta (The Names of Stars in Bengali) and finds it difficult to explain the intricate lifestyle of America and the Indians living there as that of the author herself.

But, like Shakespeare's Hotspur, who had wondered at the powerlessness of words to capture the essence of experience, Divakaruni's diffidence is proved unwarranted in these short stories.

The visitors asked many questions about America. Usually they were the same ones. Is it true you have machines that do all your housework? Is it true that a pound of mangoes can cost as much as a watch from Taiwan? Is it true everyone drives a car, even the old people? Is it true that when the old people can't drive their cars anymore, their children put them into nursing homes? The mother didn't know what to say. A simple yes or not wrenched out of context would give them such a wrong impression of America. How could she tell them about her blender, and vacuum cleaner and clothes dryer without explaining how at the end of the day she rushed home from work, (her computer with its psychedelic screen- saver at which she sometimes stared, zombie-eyed for chunks of time), picking up the children on the way, stopping at the grocery if they were out of milk. So now she told the visitors. Yes, there were two cars in her family, one for her husband, and one for herself. They nodded. We knew it, we knew it, they said to her mother. Land of gold. Your khuku is living like a queen. They looked so happily envious, so vindicated in their rightness, that she didn't have the heart to say about the high insurance rates, or the drivers who cut her off during rush hour, or honked and yelled, you Dothead go home.

Chitra Bannerjee splashes the paradoxes inherent in human relationships in her stories. It is the search for love, in the sense of caring and sharing, involvement and detachment, that makes life interesting and burdensome at one stroke. Add to this money and its lack, its impact on our lives, youth and aging, health and sickness, the trials of making a home in a foreign land, to delve deeper for a richer mix. Her writing paves an easy path to share the intense moments of the characters. The stories are peopled with characters who unfold their lives and their consciousness, - their hopes and longings, their married lives and their disappointments, their private and shared loneliness, and their frailties and foibles. Mr. Dutta's private loneliness, and her son's dilemma, seem very natural and known to all of us. It is like the neighbour's story and it may very well be our own. In "The Love of a good man", the tragedy and dilemma of human relationships in warmth and separation, anger and forgiveness, is explored in the family context with father, daughter and mother as the players. Half-hidden in these stories are haunting images of parental influences and childhood memories in the consciousness of the characters. In "The Blooming Desert of Cacti", the cultures of California and Mumbai duel with eternal questions even as the young women who recovers from the Mumbai riots in a shell-shocked state, finds herself in the California desert. The title story "The Unknown Errors of Our Life" is a moving tale that is well layered and structured. Divakaruni is sensitive to the flexibilities of the interior monologue and adopts the stance of a narrator, well distanced and yet very much into the very depths of the characters whom she creates. It does not matter whether it is Mrs. Dutta or Aparna, Radhika or Ruchira, mother, father or Tarun. It is always Divakaruni's grasp of their essential vulnerability, enveloped as it were in the time-milieu frame, that labours to come to terms with the same. The tales of the different characters interweave seamlessly like circular logic, even as different cultures and homelands quest for links.

The statement in "The Intelligence of Wild Things", "Some illusions are necessary. We need them to live by," is very true if one has to perceive the divide between idealism and reality. The India that emerges from these stories is as authentic as the U.S. with Kolkata, Mumbai, the snowy Himalayas, the Californian desert, breathing their peculiar symptomatic air. The timeless evocative descriptions of the cities, the use of picture books, maps, drawings, portraits, family heirlooms, smells, sights, sounds and the like complete the mosaic. What words cannot perform, images and poetry can, it is said. There is poetry in the author's heart, in her perception of life and people, that eschews jargon and goes for images and word pictures that articulate with vigour. The author's language maintains a standard level of polish and balance that resonates beyond the pages, and beyond the reading span.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Abacus, price not mentioned.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Advocating a pragmatic policy
Next     : Who speaks for Mohamana?