Dreams,
but a refreshing slice of reality too
New Delhi March 31, 2005
Anoothi Vishal /
Now that The Mistress of Spices is going to be turned
into a film, Chitra Divakaruni, US-based author and
teacher of creative writing, is back in the news.
Ever since her first novel, Divakaruni, along with
the likes of the Bharati Mukherjees, the Jhumpa Lahiris,
the Jaishree Misras of the world, has been part of
what critics often see—sometimes unfairly—as
that band of Non-Resident Indian women writing in
English about middle class lives and concerns.
The writing is often dismissed as formulaic, low brow;
Indian exotica meets immigrant angst kind of fiction,
which, like we said, is not always a fair way of looking
at either the works or authors of arguably diverse
merit.
But without getting into debates on the literary quality
of such outpourings, let this be said right at the
beginning, Queen of Dreams, Chitra Divakaruni’s
third and latest novel, passes that one acid test
for all fiction: It succeeds in engaging its reader.
The title is a take on the popular Bollywood number
of the 1970s, “Mere sapno ki rani”. Not
that this tiny nugget tucked away in the musings of
one of the characters has anything to do with the
plot, per se.
Instead, it refers, literally, to a gift and a calling.
The story is told in the voice of Rakhi, an artist
and a single parent living in California, a second
generation Indian, who has never been to the land
of her ancestors but paints fanciful pictures of it
in a bid at closeness with her roots.
Just as Rakhi hankers for India, she hankers for closeness
with her own mother, a closeness that has always been
denied to her because of her mother’s profession—of
being a dream teller.
“My mother always slept alone. Until I was about
eight years old, I didn’t give it much thought...
My discovery occurred on an afternoon when I’d
gone to play at the home of my classmates... Why don’t
you sleep with Dad? I kept asking.
Or at least with me, like Mallika’s mother does?
Don’t you love us? She was quiet for so long,
I was about to ask again. But then she said, ‘I
do love you’, I could hear the reluctance in
her voice, like rust making it brittle, ‘I don’t
sleep with you or your father because my work is to
dream. I can’t do it if someone is in bed with
me.’”
Rakhi’s mother is a mysterious figure. Her past
in India is a closely guarded secret. Her early life
as a young girl training to be a dream teller, part
of a mysterious order of women living in forest caves,
ascetic and eschewing domestic lives and loves, the
stuff of ‘eastern exotica’ that you could
accuse of luring real foreign White readers as much
as the fictional daughter.
Though Rakhi very much wants to understand and be
a part of her mother’s world, she can never be
because she does not share the gift: Mother can not
only interpret other people’s dreams but also
dream them for others.
She spends her life chasing this alternate reality—traumatised
when her power wanes in the distant continent where
she must begin her life afresh with the man she loves,
assiduously nurturing the gift even at the cost of
personal relationships, helping others but unable
to help her own family, finally, plunging to her death
for this realm of shadows.
It’s a life the daughter only begins to get a
glimpse of when she encounters the ‘dream journals’
on her mother’s death. The journals detail a
journey from the forests of India to distant California;
spatially, culturally and emotionally, taking the
story of the dream teller forward.
But it is also through Rakhi’s closely entwined
narrative of a more real world, her life as a second
generation immigrant, that the plot progresses. If
one of the themes, then, of Queen of Dreams is a fantastic
delving into the subconscious, there’s a second,
much more ‘real’, one too—more expertly
delineated.
Through Rakhi, Divakaruni shows us a slice of immigrant
life that is much more amalgamated into the melting
pot of the west than the worlds of ABCDs (American
Born Confused Desis) similar fiction has hitherto
portrayed.
Far from being peopled by oily-haired techies, mystic
masseurs and stereotypical gurus, Divakaruni’s
characters are hip, young artists making a mark in
a smart California gallery (Rakhi), successful, often
wild DJs (Rakhi’s ex-husband, Sunny) and single
women entrepreneurs running cosmopolitan cafes-turned-cha
bars that would not be out of place in a Friend’s-type
set-up (Rakhi’s friend Belle). Identity is still
a concern for these young Indians but not in the same
way as for their parents. They are much more at ease
with their worlds, far less fragmented—even when
they seek out their cultural roots by way of old Hindi
film songs, singharas and pakoras.
This is a refreshing—and much more real—picture.
The alienation, when it occurs, is understandable
too. As an event that shook America and one that has
redefined race relations in a more substantive way
than perhaps any other event in modern history, 9/11
cannot be ignored.
It creeps into the story through the dream of young
Rakhi’s daughter—to whom the family legacy
has been passed on—and through other more ‘real’
incidents. In the aftermath of the attack, Rakhi and
her friends find that they must wear their patriotism
on their sleeves.
When they don’t, their ethnicity attracts the
wrong attention and right-wing hate. What the larger
political, cultural and personal implications of such
violence are are questions beyond the dream tellers.
For, now, this is a tale that ends happily, without
leaving too many uncomfortable, unresolved thoughts.
Queen of Dreams
Chitra Divakaruni
Time Warner Book Group UK
(Distributed in India by Penguin India)
Price: £5.50 (Indian price)
Pages: x+307
