Sister of My Heart.

Nazareth, Peter

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Sister of My Heart. New York/ London. Doubleday. 1999. 322 pages. $23.95/[pound]12.99. ISBN 0-385-48950-1/40923-0.

Sister of My Heart is the second novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who has previously published four collections of verse, receiving the 1994 award in poetry from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation; a volume of short stories, Arranged Marriage (1996), which received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction, and a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award; and a best-selling novel, The Mistress of Spices (1997; see WLT 72:1, p. 207). Her fiction is located in India, usually Calcutta, and/or in the U.S. The protagonists in America get sucked in by MTV, fast food, jeans, et cetera, going deeper, meeting multicultural people, falling in love and living with an American.... The fiction is evocative, poetic, and questing. One story begins with the disappearance of an Indian wife in California and presents what the husband thinks are his feelings, his mother's triumphant visit to help out, and his decision to remarry; we do not see the wife again but realize that, as in D. H. Lawrence's story "The Woman Who Rode Away," she has left for life.

As the Irish writer Kevin Casey said, writers must follow their obsessions. Sister of My Heart extends a story, "The Ultrasound," which begins: "My cousin Arundhati and I are both pregnant with our first babies, a fact which gives me great pleasure. Although she's in India and I'm here in California, we've kept close track of each other's progress." In the novel, two women, cousins who were told they were born after their fathers died in pursuit of rubies, get married and become pregnant, one in India and the other in California. The women complete each other, like Sula and Nel in Toni Morrison's Sula. Sarita Aunty says, "I swear, you're like those twins, what do they call them, born stuck together." Anju says that Sudha "surprised me by saying, 'Didn't you know, Aunty? We are twins'." The twinning is duplicated in the form of the novel too, as chapters by Sudha and Anju alternate; they take on each other's characteristics, like Margaret and Dikeledi in Bessie Head's Maru. Sudha falls in love with Ashok at a movie Anju insisted they see, but accepts an arranged marriage because Anju's marriage would have been broken off at a hint of scandal such as a cousin eloping with a lower-caste man. When Sudha's mother-in-law discovers she is expecting not a boy but a girl and wants her to get an abortion, Sudha refuses and is divorced; she can now marry Ashok, but turns him down because he says he does not want the daughter. She comes to America at the invitation of Anju, who has miscarried, delivering a boy blue like Lord Krishna. Anju discovers her husband may be carrying a torch for Sudha. Will her soulmate be her rival, or will she fulfill an early wish? "If only Anju and I, like the wives of the heroes in the old tales, could marry the same man, our Arjun, our Krishna, who would love and treasure us both, and keep us both together."

Divakaruni's protagonists are asleep to the heart's intelligence. One of her instruments for awakening is twinning with other texts. Thanks to her mother's bookstore, Anju loves Virginia Woolf, knowledge of which Sunil uses to woo her; she discovers in America he had only faked knowledge of Woolf. "The Maid's Servant's Story" ends like Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "Night has taken over the lawn by the time Deepa Mashi finishes the story. We sit in the dark room, held by the echo of her words, until she reaches over to switch on the lamp. . . . We sit like this, two women caught in the repeating, circular world of shadow and memory, watching where the last light, silky and fragile, has spilled itself just above the horizon like the palloo of a saffron sari." Here an Indian woman has returned east and been told an inconclusive story by an Indian woman instead of a European man in the pose of a Buddha whose meaning she must work out. The epigraph to Sister of My Heart is from the "son" of Conrad famous for trying to kill the "father," Achebe: "It is only the story . . . that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence."

Another instrument is the mysterious figure who nags the subconscious, made visible in The Mistress of Spices, a magical novel which heals through the senses, the protagonist herself falling in sensual love with a young American, losing her powers, and becoming human during the California earthquake. Freedom is earthshaking. Anju accepts it: "There'll be trouble enough later-like an animal I sense it prickling the nape of my neck. I'll deal with it when it comes. But for now the three of us [including Sudha's daughter] stand unhurried, feeling the way we fit, skin on skin on skin, into each other's lives. A rain- dampened sun struggles from the clouds to frame us in its hesitant, holy light." She will create a room of her own.

In Divakaruni's work, despite sex, class, and caste oppression, women need not end up as victims. America chips away at ossified Indian tradition for people to see, as Krishna shows, that the imperative of life is deeper than arranged marriage. America and India are twinned.

Peter Nazareth

University of Iowa