The Short Stories of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Categories: Fiction

As readers all across Cincinnati discuss and celebrate Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, I’d like to introduce another fantastic author.  Like Tan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni tells stories about the the power of tradition and the experiences of first-generation Americans.  Divakaruni has written a few novels as well as numerous short stories, nine of which appear in the 2001 collection, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives.  I highly recommend this collection to any fan of great writing.

In the first story, Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter, the title character tries to adjust to life in California with her son’s family.  While her son and his wife seem to have easily assimilated to suburban life in America, Mrs. Dutta can’t figure out the mechanics of the washing machine or the jokes on television.  After all, she washed her clothes by hand in India!

Mrs. Dutta is grateful for the invitation to live there after losing her husband, but she feels useless and burdensome.  Through crackling detail that reaches all five senses, Divakaruni lets the reader understand Mrs. Dutta’s guilt and discomfort. 

A young woman searches for her roots in The Lives of Strangers.  Leela, born and raised in America, decides to go on a pilgrimage to India.  Leela watches and listens as some women in her tour group gossip about the unlucky Mrs. Das:

Leela studies the kaleidoscope of emotions flitting across the women’s faces.  Excitement, pity, cheerful outrage.  Can it be true, that part about an unlucky star?  In America she would have dealt with such superstition with fluent, dismissive ease, but India is complicated.  Like entering a murky, primal lake, in India she has to watch her step (p. 58).

Like Leela, the reader is surprised by where the pilgrimage leads.

Each story in Divakaruni’s collection is rendered in twenty or thirty pages.  With so little space, the writer must be terribly efficient with her words.  And that is why I love the short story form: one beautiful sentence follows another.  In many ways, short stories resemble poetry more than they do novels.  Short story collections rarely appear on the best-seller lists, and that’s too bad.  From Dave Eggers to Amy Hempel, some of today’s most exquisite writing is in that form.  After all, if one story doesn’t appeal to you, a new one with different characters is just twenty pages away!