Mistress of Self: Chitra Divakaruni The Unknown Errors of Our Lives: Review of Divakaruni's new collection of short stories
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Mistress of Self

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

By Neela Banerjee

Growing up an aspiring writer in a house full of doctors was never an easy thing. While I wrote rambling stories in spiral notebooks about girls with magic horses, my parents talked medicine and my brother volunteered at hospitals. In my Aunt Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s poetry and fiction, I found validation for my own furtive scribbling. More than just literary inspiration, her work helped me understand how our bi-cultural lives are rich with stories waiting to be told.

Divakaruni’s three volumes of poetry, American Book Award-winning short story collection Arranged Marriage, and novels Mistress of Spices and Sister of my Heart, have established her as a major modern American writer. Her focus on the lives of Indian women struggling with cultural shackles, while seeing the everyday beauty of their lives, has made Divakaruni popular with women worldwide, as well as a critical success. Her essays into the lives of Indian Americans have appeared in numerous publications from The Atlantic Monthly to O Magazine to Salon.com. With the release of her latest collection of short stories, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, Divakaruni has fully settled into her role as one of the premier Asian American authors of today.

Born in Calcutta, India, Divakaruni came to the United States when she was 19 years old. She spent the first years of her American life in Dayton, Ohio, where her older brother, my father, lived. She received a master’s degree from Wright State University, and in 1979, I attended her wedding in my backyard, at barely 11 months old. As I was just beginning to mouth the name for “aunt” in Bengali, “pishi,” she moved to California to receive a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley.

Surprisingly, Divakaruni did not begin to write “creatively” until after she finished school and began teaching.

“I think what happened is that around that time, my grandfather died and I really wanted to write to remember him,” Divakaruni said. “I felt like I was forgetting things, forgetting him, and how things were in India and how people thought.”

Her elusive memories prompted Divakaruni to join a writer’s group, the Berkeley Poet’s Co-op. She says that at the time, writing was a purely personal matter, and joining a group helped her move her thoughts away from the private sphere.

“That was the first time I shared my work with anyone, and I got a lot of good feedback,” Divakaruni said. “Then, I started writing more about what it was like for me living here, being a woman of color here.”

Divakaruni’s first book of poetry, The Reason for Nasturtiums, was published by the Berkeley Poets Co-op Press in 1990. At this time, Divakaruni was teaching at Foothill College, and also became active in women’s issues in the Bay Area. She started out volunteering at shelters in the East Bay and working with Afghani women refugees and women from dysfunctional families.

“I saw that a lot of problems stemmed from issues of domestic violence,” Divakaruni said.

In 1991, she helped found a South Asian women’s service organization called Maitri, that has now grown into one of the most established help-lines for Asian American women in the country.

“The work I did definitely influenced my writing,” Divakaruni said. “It made me think a lot more about the issues I was seeing and how it related to the lives of immigrants, and I wanted to write about it.”

As Divakaruni began to write more short fiction, her literary career took form fairly quickly. Her first book was sold to the publisher with only three stories done.

“This is when I really started to think of myself as a writer,” she said. “Before, I would do all my other work first, and then write in the time I had leftover. But with the stories in Arranged Marriage, that really changed. I was really consumed by these stories and the need to write them.”

Arranged Marriage, which focuses on the lives of Indian immigrants, won both the American Book Award and the PEN Oakland Award in 1996. Her first novel, Mistress of Spices, is being optioned for a film by British filmmaker Gurinder Chadha. Sister of My Heart, published in 1998, was a national best seller.

Divakaruni’s success came at a time when Asian American fiction was being heralded for its originality and the lyricism of writers writing in their second languages.

Divakaruni said there are both pluses and minuses to belonging to the huge influx of Asian American writers. The interest in Asian American literature makes it easier to get published than maybe 10 or 15 years ago.

“The best part is that your writing is now available to so many people, both within and outside of the community,” Divakaruni said. “Young South Asians have come up to me and said, ‘I really relate to this story. This story has helped me understand my mother, helped me understand my culture.’ That’s a really good feeling.”

Along with the positive sides, Divakaruni admits the classification as an Asian American writer can have its drawbacks.

“You are expected to be a spokesperson for the community, and that is just an unfair kind of burden,” Divakaruni said. “I always try to make it clear that I am presenting one vision about what is true about the Indian American community. It is a very diverse community, and mine is just one angle of looking at it.”

Divakaruni returned to the Bay Area last year after teaching creative writing at University of Houston’s top-ranking MFA program. She now writes full-time, putting in four to five hours a day, which allows her to spend more time with her sons Abhay and Anand, and her husband Murthy.

Divakaruni’s advice to writers is to be careful readers, to read slowly with a pen in hand and make notes in the margins.

“Apart from the reading, I think you have to give yourself a lot of time and a lot of practice,” Divakaruni said.

For Asian American writers, Divakaruni spoke about the importance of being true to one’s cultural heritage, and not being afraid of the dramatic.

“There is a definite, wonderful vibrancy to our culture, within the language and just how people behave,” she says. “And we don’t want to lose that.”