NRI Histories

Bharati Mukherjee is an old hand at chronicling immigrant fiction in America today. In Desirable Daughters, her latest novel, Mukherjee endeavours to telescope entire life times as she weaves a masterful story that moves effortlessly between generations.

The novel begins in 1879 in an East Bengal village when the five year old Tara Lata is married to a tree, as her twelve year old child groom has been killed by a snake bite on their wedding day. The Tree Bride, as she comes to be known, is the grand aunt of Tara Bhattacharjee, the protagonist of Desirable Daughters. Tara feels a definite connection with her aunt and like her, Tara also has two sisters, as does Mukherjee in real life.

Mukherjee resurrects her alter ego Tara Banerjee of her first novel The Tiger8217;s Daughter, to create Tara Bhattacharjee. The rest of the events unfold more than a century later, when Tara marries the brilliant computer engineer Bishwapriya Chatterjee and moves with him to Silicon Valley in California. However, in due course she begins to feel the outsider and thinks that 8216;8216;she did not belong in India or in the Silicon Smug Indian wives group anymore.8217;8217; She soon divorces her husband and moves to Cole Valley in San Francisco with her teenage son Rabi. She takes on a teaching job and leads the life of a gay divorcee, complete with a live-in hippie lover. Her charmed life is soon shaken when a young man enters their life claiming to be Chris Dey, the illegitimate son of her older sister Padma, who has been living in New Jersey for the past twenty years. The shocked Tara8217;s efforts at getting a confirmation of this news are thwarted, as her middle sister Parvati, who lives in Bombay, refuses to shed any light on this matter.

Using the reader as a crutch, Mukherjee seems to be working out issues of identity, family and belonging, to try and reach some semblance of a catharsis. She also needs to comment on concerns of migration and immigrants, as these are close to her heart. In doing so, she spins a multi-layered tale, which is also a telling commentary on the lives of the Indian-American community today. Tara finally manages to track down Padma, and goes to visit her in New Jersey, but she returns none the wiser.

Tara is constantly rethinking her familial ties because of a generous supply of new revelations, for example she discovers that her son Rabi is gay. There is also an undercurrent of danger, and to this end the Bombay underworld is also brought in for staging a near fatal bomb explosion and a murder. Somehow, post- September 11, 2001, the world seems to have shrunk and it is possible for criminal tentacles to be spread far and wide.

At times, the reader feels a bit cheated, as the story line of this new Mukherjee novel is very thin. However in the ultimate analysis, the author more than makes up by giving the novel a certain intensity, as she makes the text resonate with several themes of class, a sense of history, philosophy, the Hindu religion, and the complexities of Indian society. Remarkably polyphonic, this book is definitely worth a read.