Alphabet Soup

When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni discovered that the American palate can be tickled byIndian condiments she hit pay-dirt. With books like Arranged Marriage and Mistress ofSpices, she struck a rich vein running through the American subconscious—thelonging for a lost homeland that characterises the ‘immigrantexperience’—and she’s mining it for all it’s worth. In The UnknownErrors of Our Lives, she continues to delve into the mixed up psyche of the

America-Born-Confused-Desi, bringing up nuggets of wisdom about home and the world:Ghare baire with a distinctive West Coast twang: “Home. I turn the sound over on mytongue, trying to figure out the exact tenses in which such a word might exist. The smellof my children’s damp heads after they’ve come in from play? Sandeep’saftershave, the way it lingered in our first bedsheets? A dim cement-floored alcove inCalcutta, the smell of frying bitter gourd, the marvel in a listening boy’s eyes? Isthere ever a way back across the immigrant years, across the frozen warp of theheart?”

NRI nostalgia-trips are bad enough, but when they’re couched in thisgetting-in-touch-with-your-inner-Indian Californian therapy speak, my inner fascist willout. For a start, Chitra, the rhetorical questions you are posing, are not illustrative of‘tenses’, exact or otherwise; secondly, aftershave lingers on bedsheets not inthem; and, finally, what precisely is a frozen heart warp?

All of the stories here deal, in one way or another, with the family. The only storywhere Chitra seems to be emerging from under her self-appointed role of Cultural Explaineris The Forgotten Children. Without those stumbling blocks (referring to arelative as ‘Third Aunt’ for example), the narrative flows a little easiermaking it possible to believe that one day Chitra’s alphabet will extend beyond justABCD.