Mistress of pathos

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Novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a master at telling stories-within-stories and has a knack of transporting the readers to different lands with the sights, smells and enchanting imagery of her prose. This time she brings in a bunch of nine characters trapped in the visa office at an Indian Consulate after a massive earthquake hits an American city, who then take the story forward in her latest offering One Amazing Thing. As they wait to be rescued, they begin to tell stories, each recalling ‘one amazing thing’ in their life, sharing things they have never spoken of before.

Chitra finds the whole immigrant experience very perplexing. For her leaving one’s homeland for unknown shores is complex and dealing with loneliness unnerving. But the exciting part is to strive to reconnect with the homeland. So what prompted her to write about it? Her grandfather’s demise, she says.
When she received a call from India informing her that her grandfather had passed away, she was devastated. “I was doing my Ph.D at Berkeley at that time and couldn’t go back for the funeral. My grandfather was very dear to me. He told me wonderful folktales of Bengal, stories from The Mahabharata and The Ramayana. One day, I was thinking of him and I couldn’t recall his face. I realised how much I was forgetting about my growing up years. That got me started. I wrote bad stories and I rewrote. And I didn’t believe that a good writer is good from Day 1,” she says.
Food plays a pivotal role in all her books. She makes an effective use of food metaphor in OAT too. “I feel food becomes an important tool to talk about quirks and obsessions. Food was a way for my mother and other women of the family to express their creativity. Food was power and an expression of their love. Food is a medium to share our culture with the world,” says Chitra, who herself is a lousy cook, but loves cooking fancy food sometimes.
After food, it is the sense of loss that is prominent in her storytelling. “I agree that I depend too much on personal loss. In OAT, though I was trying very many things simultaneously, I brought back the pathos which all go through in my novels — the kind of loss that hits one hard in the gut,” she informs.
Her 2008 novel The Palace of Illusions takes us back to the time of The Mahabharata and through her narrator Draupadi, Chitra gives us a feminist interpretation of an epic story. Her love affair with myths started way back in Kolkata where she grew up. She reveals, “Mythological tales are very powerful in terms of their effect on our psyche. I had been thinking about strong women characters and I thought of their feelings. It was then that I got attracted to Draupadi because I found her very contemporary. She was a woman who questioned and fought for her rights. Every woman can relate to her. Next I plan to explore the life of Sita. Sita is again a very powerful character. There is already a wonderful novel titled Sitayan in Bengali about her being abandoned by Ram. I hope readers will accept her in the similar fashion in which they loved Draupadi.”
But before this, Chitra plans to give us another mythic story set in contemporary time. “It is a daughter’s journey to the US to find her father, who she believed was dead,” sums up Chitra.