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April 1999

Sister of My Heart

A review of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novel,

Sister of my Heart** by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Doubleday, 1999 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-American author who achieved prominence and critical acclaim with the publication of her international bestseller, The Mistress of Spices. Sister of My Heart represents her latest contribution to the blossoming genre of what has come to be known as the literature of the Indian diaspora. Although the novel is firmly rooted in India, as Divakaruni is herself, limbs and tendrils of plot curl out over the sea, reaching for America and beyond. At the heart of this story are frictions. Individual, generational, cultural. Caste-based, gender-determined, secret-spawned. They permeate the lives of the small clot of characters who form the novel’s core. Yet the charm of this novel is the magical capacity the sisters of the title, Anju and Sudha, have to smooth these creases of worry from their lives. Although not blood relatives, the girls are bound by a bottomless affection for one another, a Gemini intuition which enables wordless communication of thought and emotion. Not unlike Salman Rushdie’s magic-touched twins in Midnight’s Children, Anju and Sudah are linked by the special circumstance of having been born and having lost their fathers at almost the same moment. The girls even share the narration in alternating chapters, cleverly conveying the intertwining of their hearts and minds, while highlighting the sad, inevitable divergence and mistrust which accompany maturity and loss of innocence. The girls grow up in a home ruled by what the girls refer to as “the mothers,” (their own plus a doting widowed aunt) in a privileged enclave of modern Calcutta. Conflicting ambitions are a source of worry to them all. The mothers, wary and traditional, wish to guarantee their daughters’ happiness with a bond of arranged marriage. The daughters, products of their age, yearn to escape the confines of custom. Anju and Sudah, nourished on Indian lore as rich as mango creme, grow plump with assurance that their faith in falling stars and sword queens is justified and will preserve them from the sad fates that befell their mothers. For most of the novel, Divakaruni writes in lively, uncluttered prose. Unfortunately, in the final third the writing falls victim to her penchant for hyperbole (“Nails of rust and ice tore at my flesh” is a reaction to anything from true tragedy to an unwanted phone call). A series of soap-opera tragedies strike the women, the events as histrionic and unrealistic as those of any potboiler romance. A cast of cardboard characters – the unfeeling, manipulative mother-in-law, the wise, selfless servant – takes the stage, robbing even Anju and Suda of any credibility. It comes as a great disappointment that Divakaruni was ultimately unable to resist the temptation to leave a few plot threads unknotted, to leave in a little of the disorder of real life.

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