Arranged Marriage: Stories, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Acclaimed poet, novelist, and story writer Chitra Banerjee Divrakaruni’s first book of fiction was published in 1995, and the eleven stories in Arranged Marriage established her as a master of imagery in the short form. They also demonstrated her gift for chronicling female cultural dislocation, and the compound identities that come with leaving one place, with its engrained customs and beliefs, for another. Divakaruni focuses her intensely evocative portrayals on Indian-born women and girls, characters who often encounter jarring, and sometimes life-changing moments. In “Bats,” a young girl is entranced by the unfamiliar world of a revered uncle, discovered when her mother flees there in an effort to escape her husband’s physical assaults. “Clothes,” concerns a young wife follows her husband to America, harboring dreams of modernity—college, fashionable clothes, independence—until he’s murdered in the course of a robbery at the 7-11 he owns. In “A Perfect Life,” a fastidious, successful, Americanized young woman, certain she does not want the traditional life of marriage or children, is changed forever when she takes in a young boy, left nearly feral by neglect.
Divakaruni, whose 1997 novel Mistress of Spices, was an international bestseller, was born in India in 1956, and arrived in California in 1985 to attend University of California, Berkeley. Divakaruni often uses the setting of Northern California in her stories, and the suburban locales of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and Mountain View adds a wonderfully idiosyncratic and rich character to these stories. The contrast of California, with its pristine streets, apartment buildings, green lawns, and well-appointed kitchens, works as contrast to the traditions and ideals that challenge so many of these characters. There are stories too, set in the close-knit communities of India, especially around Calcutta, showing the inequities and strictures, the comforts and cloistered worlds of girls and women. These Calcutta stories, such as “The Maid Servant’s Story,” work as a kind of backstory to the California stories, showing the weight of history so many of these women carry.
A lone story is told from a male point of view, “The Disappearance” shows the cultural lens through which women are seen—but considers the collection’s thematic drift from a darker position. An unnamed husband learns his wife has disappeared, vanished on an otherwise uneventful day after running errands in Mountain View, a Silicon Valley enclave. In hindsight, we learn the husband questions whether or not his wife was happy. Though he made every effort to provide for her in traditional ways, his view an old-world, male-centered one: telling her she looked prettier in traditional Indian clothes than American clothes, not buying her a car because she’d never learn to drive, and though insistent about sex, never forced her in the cruel way some men did. The reader understands that indeed the wife must have been unhappy, that her marriage has cost her a loss of self, something the husband cannot see. And when after a year, she doesn’t return, her presence n the house, through photos, memories, and mentions of her, disappears as well. Here’s the husband remembering the first time he saw her, when he’d mentioned he was specifically interested in women with a college education:
He’d flown to Calcutta to view several suitable girls that his mother had picked out. But now, thinking back, he can only remember her. She had sat, head bowed, jasmine plaited into her hair, silk sari draped modestly over her shoulders, just like all the other prospective brides he’d seen. Nervous, he’d thought, yearning to be chosen. But when she’d glanced up there had been a cool, considering look in her eyes. Almost disinterested, almost as though she were wondering if he would be a suitable spouse.
The story, one of the collection’s more spare in style, stands out as a powerful depiction of the struggle with the issues of dependence and freedom. The aim to reconcile old and new, freedom and dependence is poignantly addressed in the collection’s final story, “Meeting Mrinal.” Asha, divorced, facing financial difficulties and raising her rebellious, metal-listening teenage son alone, is contacted by a longtime school friend, Mrinalini. Yet as they catch up, Asha paints her life as she wishes it was. It’s a heartrending story, and I’ll withhold the details that follow—but Asha’s effort to make sense of her life and set it right has some of the most lovely passages, like this one:
I tell myself that I shouldn’t be too concerned about his clothing or hairstyle, or even the long hours when he shuts himself up in his room and listens to music that sounds furious. That they’re just signs of teenage growing pains made worse by his father’s absence. But sometimes, I call his name and he looks up from whatever he’s doing—not with the irritated what, Mom, that I’m used to, but with a polite, closed stranger’s face. That’s when I’m struck by fear. I realize that Dinesh is drifting from me, swept along on the current of his new life which is limpid on the surface but with a dark undertow that I, standing helplessly on some left-behind shore, can only guess at.
Learn more about the author here.
—Lauren Alwan