Bharathi’s Mukherjee’s “Desirable

BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S “DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS”:
A STUDY

            Desirable Daughters reads like Mukherjee’s sly response to the doctrinaire multiculturalists who demand that she writes about their own kind. She’s done just that, with precision and mockery and strong reminders of dangers inherent in narrow cultural self definition. Mukherjee begins the novel by telling the story “The Tree Bride” which has influence on the rest of the book. Jai Krishna Gangooly was a pleader at Dhaka High Court. A Bengali Brahmin, he was a staunch believer in Hindu culture. He had three daughters, Tara Lata, Parvati and Padma, the youngest named Tara Lata was five years old and he arranged her marriage.

Just before the wedding, however, the bridegroom’s father increased his demands for the dowry. Refusing to be cowed into submission, Jai Krishna took his daughter into a deep forest and married her to a tree, and thus Tara became known as Tree-Bride.

The marriage that takes Tara to America gives her an undreamed of independence and longing for more than just trips to the shopping mall. Her search for identity leads her through childhood memories against the drops of scenes from India’s history, which gives a rich portrait of what it means to grow up female in a society that has little regard for women. Moreover, the things Tara discovers about her family’s past assist her in opening up to a more wider world, and in this process, her personal evolution comes about from dealing with something thrust upon her from the outside in the form of the false Chris Day, as much as her own decisions and actions. The point is that though she is not completely free of her long ingrained prejudices regarding cast or religion, she is trying gradually, to breakout of these mindsets and come to terms with the reality with an American mind. That is why some of her actions seem apparently contradictory. She is appalled at her sister’s doubtful adultery, finds herself unable to slap her son, being an Indian mother; calls her husband by his name only after divorce, yet she is quite comfortable while mentioning her lovers and knowing her son being a gay, preferring western clothes and food.

In Desirable Daughters, three Lear like sisters born in a wealthy Kolkata family are faced with the realities of living in modem day India and American societies. Although Padma, Parvati and Tara have obeyed their ancestral teachings and adhered to the laws of arranged marriage, their everyday rebellions are tenderly charted. The grand themes of secrets and lies in families are explored with subtlety and humour. Mukherjee does not shy from portraying her characters as three dimensional human beings with frailties, needs and desires. Tara, the youngest and the rebel of the family, is divorced and living in San Francisco. Here, a mysterious stranger enters her life, claiming to be the son of her older sister Padma. Tara, the sophisticated valley denizen, is suddenly caught in a mysterious web of deceit, she is faced with the fact she really does not know her sisters. Could her sister have had a child out of wedlock? Were her parents instrumental in keeping the entire affair secret? Is she the only one who does not know?

At this point, Mukherjee changes gears obsessed with finding the truth. Tara relies on memory to piece together the past. Suddenly, innocent events take on mysterious hues. The thoroughly modem Tara explores the nature of familial relationships and learns that, even in the closest of relationships, humans are often true only to themselves. Even in our tell-all society, where the spilling of guts is commonplace. One really never knows the entire truth. Truth, like every thing else, has nuances and layers, and is inevitably cliche ridden.

In researching her personal past, Tara discovers connections to history. She finds there are no coincidences, only convergences. Tara is searching for the pattern that connect “human memory and mathematical certainty”. Tara seeks information about her heritage. She’s trying to figure out what a 5 year old child, proxy, married to a tree in the late 19th century, could have to do a vibrant, independent woman of the 21st century. The novel tells three stories as it moves and forth in time and over several continents. There’s the story of Tara and her ex-husband as they try to reconcile; the story of Tara and her newly conceived child and the relationship with her new ob-gyn, Dr. Victoria Treadwell Khanna, and the history of the title character.

It appears to be merely a coincidence that the doctor’s husband taught computer engineering to Tara’s husband at Stanford University. Tara soon learns, however, that she bears a telling historical relationship to her gynaecologist who, in turn, passes on cache of “moldering papers” that detail the history of the Treadwell family and its connection to Tara Lata Gangooly, the tree bride. The bulk of the novel slowly uncovers the modem-day Tara’s connection to the woman who was a freedom fighter in India.

This includes a swashbuckling tale of piracy and mutiny on the high seas, a mute orphan and a colonialist with a hidden past. The years of World War Second details Britain’s involvement with India and the Tree Bride’s clashes with established regime.

Bharati Mukherjee was born in 1940, which means that she was witness to colonial brutality. They lived on a large street along which there were regular funeral processions of teenage martyrs. They were carried in rope cots, all strewn with flowers, every one shouting “Quit India!” There was constant domestic brutality all around – extreme verbal, physical abuse, of women, which Mukherjee witnessed, and a lot of it ritualized.

Mukherjee’s characters are exiles caught between two cultures, Indian and American, as well as between tradition and the pull of modem life. There is no better example of this than Tara Chatterjee, the central character in Mukherjee’s novel, Desirable Daughters. In this spellbinding and suspenseful tale, Tara is one of three sisters who came of age in Kolkata, the daughters of a well-off tea merchant. The only sister to succumb to an arranged marriage, she moved her husband, Bish, to California, where he became the boy wonder of Silicon Valley and the head of a powerful technology company.

Tara smoothly assimilated into American culture, but constantly cast glances over her shoulder at her deeply rooted family history in India. Tired of Bish’s constant absence, she filed for divorce and eventually moved to San Francisco with her son Rabi, where she is just another single, working mom albeit one with an exotic history. What unfolded in Desirable Daughters was the beginning of a riveting mystery tied to Tara’s family’s past and the vast history and turmoil of India’s fight for freedom.

In the final pages of Desirable Daughters, Tara stands in San Francisco street watching her house go up in flames. Along with her teenage son, Rabi and ex-­husband, Bish, she was lucky to be alive after barely escaping what turned out to be a bomb set to kill. Throughout the novel, Mukherjee uses these marginal plotlines to propel Tara into a re-examination of her life. She may be as comfortable in Jeans as in a Silk Sari, but she cannot discard the demands of her deeply ingrained Indian upbringing. She is also a believer in ghosts, visions, rituals, Hindu cosmology and above all, coincidence. By way of Tara’s discoveries, the author creates a palpable and personal history of British colonial rule in India.

Smart and unstoppable, Tara, who’s 36 but feels older, had been researching the Tree Bride of Mishtigunj when the bomb blast left her own life in shambles. Reunited with Bish, who was severely injured saving her form the fire, she is scarred and pregnant. Mukherjee, moving and forth between cultures and across continents, weaves an enchanting and disturbing story that is as much a mystery as it is a history lesson. The Tree Bride delves deep into the complex story of India’s fight for freedom from the British Raj. As Charles Dickens did with Victorian England, Mukherjee unspools her story with a beguiling use of humour, detail, and colour. She grasps the complex points of history and whittles them into a compelling, if sometimes confusing, story, reading carefully is a must here. Mukherjee is a master at creating the magical, and the mysterious that resound with spiritual healing for both the dead and the living.

Mukherjee examines, “the stubborn potency of myth in the face of overwhelming change” in the lives of the three desirable daughters. Padma, Parvati and Tara. Tara struggles to unravel the secrecy surrounding her past, to discover the truth behind her sisters’ prevarications and fragmented stories. Plot recapitulation would only spoil the novel’s many surprises, Desirable Daughters confirms Mukherjee’s place as a complex writer with a keen eye for the subtleties of Indo-American life and a superb gift for characterization.
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            “Shopenheur was the last man at random. I am neither afraid nor ashamed to say that I share his enthusiasm for Vedanta and, feel indebted to it for much that has been helpful to me in my passage through life. The Upanishads are the sources of the Vedanta philosophy, a system in which human speculation seems to me to have reached its very acme. I spend my happiest hours reading them. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains, so simple, so true, if once understood.”
–MAXMULLER

            “According to the old religion, an atheist is one who does riot believe in God. According to our Vedantas’ an atheist is one who does not believe in himself. Strength is life. Weakness is death.
–VIVEKANANDA