| Vintage Divakaruni, New Desire
By Michelle Reale
Book
review of Vine of Desire
The
Vine of Desire
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Doubleday, Hardcover, $23.95
373 pages, ISBN: 0385497296
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s latest effort The Vine
of Desire continues the story of sister-cousins Anju
and Sudha. This highly readable narrative marks a remarkably
mature voice, and a depth hinted at in previous works,
but fully achieved in this one. While Sister of My Heart
introduced Anju and Sudha and their titanic emotional
bond embedded in a narrative ripe for continuation,
in a conversation with Divakaruni she reveals that she
did not, in fact, have a sequel in mind when she penned
Sister of My Heart. In fact, she felt that there was
already “an aesthetic closure” and the story could have,
indeed, ended there. Readers will be glad that it didn’t.
The characters of Anju and Sudha are remarkably dimensional
and complex. This can be attributed Divakaruni’s growth
as a writer. While the maturing of a writer’s “voice”
to and vision could be, and often is, seen as a natural
progression of talents, Ms. Divakaruni credits, of all
things her part in judging the National Book Awards
during the writing of The Vine of Desire and the Herculean
assignment of reading upwards of 300 books as solidifying
and engendering a new vision of her writing. In addition
she is committed to never losing sight of what she feels
is one of the most important questions she can ask herself
during the writing process: “What makes writing speak
to us?”
During my phone interview with Chitra, she observes
discreet silence when I assert, rather earnestly, that
I feel the book is somewhat existentialist in its view.
While not refuting this point exactly, Ms. Divakaruni
explained that as a writer she is different, possessing
more depth, which directly translates into a deeper
complexity which makes easy answers, predictability
and tidy endings not easily arrived at and much less
likely. The result of this approach she feels is that
it “invites people into the life of my characters allowing
the reader to see similarities in their own lives.”
The comparison of similarities and dissimilarities continues
long after the book is finished since the characters
are so real and so stubbornly, albeit realistically
flawed, one can’t resist imagining their world beyond
the pages of the book. Indeed, in the beautiful and
haunting prologue Anju experiences all of the pain and
none of the joy in delivering her body of the lifeless
baby held within. Divakaruni sets the tone of the novel
as one of the great expectations that life often holds
us hostage to, and the many forces in our midst that
conspire against their fulfillment, most grievously,
holding on to those who must or want to leave: Alone
in the sea-green light, the woman feels her muscles
begin to loosen in spite of herself. She is coming apart,
the way a braid does when one has been swimming a long
time. Soon her eyes will flicker with furious dreams
under her closed lids. Her unruly eyebrows will angle
into questions to which there are only uncertain answers:
Why? Why? Where? With the last of her strength, she
pushes her body to the edge of the mattress, cups it
into a shape against which a child might rest. There,
that’s good. With the last of her strength, she holds
on to something she heard a long time ago, in another
country, when she was not much more than a child herself:
the dead are not irrevocably dead as long as one refuses
to let them go.
Loss and change are at the forefront of this novel.
At the same time that Anju has been emotionally reeling
since the lost of her much hoped for child, her cousin
Sudha is leaving a marriage in which her husband sides
with his mother in attempting to force her into aborting
her pregnancy when it is discovered that she is carrying
a girl. Opting instead to have the child, she has no
choice but to relinquish her marriage and leave behind
all that marked her, in a society that prizes and expects
conformity, as respectable: home, clothes, jewelry and
a certain security. Arriving in the United States with
baby daughter Dayita in tow, Sudha settles in already
cramped quarters with an emotionally needy Anju and
her husband, Sunil, who resents Sudha’s presence because
of a long and unresolved emotional attachment to her.
Besides the obvious complications, further, Divakaruni
has cleverly imbued each character with not only personal
disappointments and shortcomings, but public ones as
well, such as those that are nearly irreconcilable within
the orthodox Indian community: divorce, single parenthood,
childlessness and adultery. Thus the double bind of
not only failing to live up to your own expectations,
but losing the acceptance of your community as well,
a warm and comforting though often censorious pleasure
not often noticed until it has been withdrawn.
Because much if not all of Ms. Divakaruni’s fiction
is set in the Indian community at large, when asked
if she writes for a particular audience, perhaps intending
to “explicate” the Indian culture to the west, she bristles
mildly, saying: “I am definitely not writing for a particular
audience. I really have none in mind. In fact, I would
hope that my fiction reaches across both time and geographical
boundaries.” And it certainly seems so.
Because while Divakaruni’s character’s are Indian they
suffer the universal angst of the desire to love and
be loved and the quest for a fulfillment that can be
attained from the inside out, rather than the other
way around, exploiting a certain individuality often
at odds with the community one finds oneself ensconced
in.
Thus, Anju forges ahead with college classes, writes
missives to both dead son and father and protects her
body from the marital sex that caused a pattern of pain
in the first place. Sudha, struggles with the knowledge
that a life spent in the service of others is not worth
the cost to oneself and that the young Indian doctor,
Lalit, who seems singularly devoted to her and her daughter
Dayita may initially build walls to protect her, will
only later turn into a confining jail of sorts:
“Live for yourself . . . I’m not sure what it means.
I’m not sure I know how to do it and still be a good
person. And I want to, you know. I still want to be
a good person, even if I’ve failed at being a good wife.
There’s a terrible pull to the idea of living for myself,
and a terrible emptiness. I feel like a flyaway helium
balloon——all the people I know are on the ground somewhere,
but so far away and small, they hardly matter. Yet I
know I can’t go back to the old way, living for others.”
The deterioration of relationships is all encompassing
as nearly each and every emotional bond is tested and
severed, taken for granted, exploited and used as a
scapegoat. Anju and Sudha suffer the greatest and most
emotionally violent rupture in their relationship, even
more than Anju and Sunil, since the two of them possessed
a Herculean bond, though never tested in such ways.
Divakaruni uses a myriad of styles within the book to
convey the many and varied ways the characters attempt
to communicate with one another and with themselves,
such as Anju’s term papers, Lalit’s conversations with
himself, a series of letters that Sudha writes home
to India and snippets of Sunil’s journal entries, which
beas witness to honest and introspective communication
with himself.
Readers should expect to ruminate upon the last chapter
that is exceptionally beautiful and lyrically poetic,
and to feel admiration for characters that fall and
indeed fall hard, but live to tell the tale. When I
asked Chitra how her writing has changed after the events
of Sept 11, she spoke of the need to ferret out the
heroes in our stories and our lives and her deep and
sincere desire to explore this in future works of fiction.
But it seems to me, that she has already begun with
The Vine of Desire. These characters are heroes, indeed,
though may not be recognized as such in the conventional
way. They have found a way to not only survive, but
to live and to work around the pain inherent in being
human: “This is what you do with grief, you lean into
it and open your fingers. You let it support you like
the frail beauty of the turning luminous earth.”
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End Of Article.....
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