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Literary Review
The familiar as exotic
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With its gorgeous and evocative prose and rising crescendo of a spy thriller, Desirable Daughters reads with an absorption bordering on compulsion, says M.S. NAGARAJAN.
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Even more than other writers, I must learn to astonish, to shock.
Bharati Mukherjee, Days and Nights in Calcutta
FOR more than 30 years, Bharati Mukherjee (b1940), who declares herself an American writer of Bengali-Indian origin, has exhibited a rare dedication to literature and a rarer dedication to a writing life. She is the first naturalised American citizen to win the much-coveted National Book Critics Circle Award for her The Middlemen and Other Stories (1988). Best known for this work, her sixth and the most recent work in fiction, Desirable Daughters takes up all over again the theme that has been her favourite (obsession rather) for 30 years — issues of identity and collision of cultures that exiles and immigrants face, familial loyalty and the question of belonging. As we are aware of the prevailing situation now, quite a few of the immigrants become rootless and get dislocated while others readjust and relocate themselves in the changed environment.
Desirable Daughters lays out the lives of three sisters, Padma, Parvati and Tara, all brought up in strict conformity to domestic customs and social conventions of a conservative and traditional life and its values followed and preserved by the educated upper-middle class Bengalis. Padma is married to Harish Mehta, a non-Bengali businessperson, previously married, and with grown children. She is settled in Montclair, New Jersey. Parvati, the pliable middle daughter, lives in one of the those posh, expensive flats in Nariman Point, Mumbai, with her rich husband Aurobindo Banerji, a top executive in one of the companies with a business boom. Tara's doting father chooses a perfect match for her, one Bishwapriya Chatterjee hailing from an outstanding family. All the three are arranged marriages. Tara and Bish settle down in Atherton, one of the earliest settlements of what later has come to be called the Silicon Valley. Bish with his Bill Gates-like penchant for invention in computer technology, grows very soon into a multimillionaire Mogul. He develops a system, a patented one, called "Chatty" that heralds a major breakthrough in information technology. It is a process that enables computers to route instantaneously urgent information to the least congested lines. The irony of it all is that what was once thought to be "a very predictable, very successful marriage negotiation" turns out be a disastrous misbegotten marriage. Fed up with overflowing superfluity in her life of opulence, Tara breaks all taboos and walks out of the wedlock with her son Rabi choosing a live-in relationship with a Hungarian Buddhist retrofitter, and doing volunteer work in a preschool in San Francisco, all for her self-fulfilment. For her,
`Love' is a slippery word when both partners bring their own definition. Love, to Bish, is the residue of providing for parents and family, contributing to good causes and community charities, earning professional respect, and being recognised for hard work and honesty. Love is indistinguishable from status and honours. I can't imagine my carpenter, Andy, bringing anything more complicated to it than, say, `fun'. Love is having fun with someone, more fun with that person than with anyone else, over a longer haul (p.27).
It is said that accidents do occur in the best-regulated families. Lives that are thought to be privileged can and do become precarious. Into this apparently familiar world of domesticity, there enters a dragon in the form of a skeleton in the cupboard. An insolent stranger makes an unexpected appearance in Tara's house claiming to be her illegitimate nephew (the bastard son of Padma). This claim opens up new dimensions in the story line leading to new revelations: the plot thickens and becomes more complex. The Bengali impostor turns out to be a member of a cyber terrorist gang intent on destroying Tara's ex-husband's worldwide communication network. Tara's search for truth through phone calls and internet searches, in her attempt to bring the impostor to book, leads her into a desperate journey into the past filled with mysterious twists and turns, leading finally to the uncovering of a murder and ending melodramatically with a miraculous escape when her house is bombed by unknown persons with powerful explosives. Bish rescues Tara from the enveloping flames and in the process gets so much hurt that after reconstructive plastic surgery he is only capable of a slow walk like an old man. All that Bish says, with a philosophic resignation, of that eventful night of house-bombing is, "it is a sign," meaning thereby that it was nothing but "a confirmation from the gods of cosmic order that a segment of his life, his walking phase was over." The novel ends where it opens. In the year 1879, one of the ancestors of Tara, a five-year-old girl, also named Tara, is offered in marriage to a tree immediately after the bridegroom, a 13-year-old boy, dies of snakebite in Mishtigunj, a remote village in East Bengal. To this self-same village Tara, the 36-year-old narrator returns, 120 years later, sadder if not wiser, with her son Rabi to pay a visit to the Tree-bride's home.
Despite all the pressure the relationship among the three sisters takes on, it also helps in strengthening and thus confirming their bond of trust in one another and loyalty to their families. The complex plot of the novel explores many things. It takes up the history of the two continents and examines the values they stand for by juxtaposing them — the old world virtues of the upbringing of the "desirable daughters" is contrasted with the changing values of the new world they have come to embrace. Exposed to violence physical and psychic, Tara's quest for identity throws up new revelations. And in this process she realises how little she knows about her own self. Much to her dismay, she discovers that Rabi, her darling son whom she thought was an artistic child born for achieving great things like his father, is gay.
Bharati Mukherjee desires not to be classified as a postcolonial or expatriate writer. "The mission of postcolonial studies," according to her, "is to level off all of us to our skin colour and ethnic origin." Rather than mythologise on Indian national identity, she would create individuals caught up in personal problems that confront them and the lives of those around them. No wonder she admired R.K. Narayan and wished a Nobel award for him. Such an attitude is quite in line with the recent thinking of Indian critics who express their resentment at the appropriation of what might be called the "Indianality" in postcolonial studies. This reductionism or what Aijaz Ahmed terms this "internationalising the periphery" destroys the endless variety of the vibrant Indian diaspora. Bharati Mukherjee is fond of raising, time and again, the problem of the primary aesthetic in narratology — creating an authentic narrative voice. The authorial voice of Mukherjee, the creator, oftentimes muffles the voice of Tara, the narrator, especially during those countless moments when she recalls (with nostalgia?) the brahminic culture of her childhood memories.
Fascinating and richly textured, Desirable Daughters is a superbly realised novel. With its gorgeous and evocative prose and with its rising crescendo of a spy thriller, it reads with an absorption bordering on compulsion.
Desirable Daughters, Bharati Mukherjee, New York: Hyperion, 2002, p. 310, $24.95.
The writer is former Head, Department of English, University of Madras.
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