Arranged Marriage

April 29, 1996
Poet Divakaruni, who was born in India and now teaches in America, makes her fiction debut with 11 stories about transformation and immigration.

May 29, 1995
In this collection of emotionally fraught short stories, poet Divakaruni (Black Candle) relates the travails of Indian women trying to adapt to the often alienating culture of middle-class America. Her mostly young characters-students or brides-are negotiating the schism between Indian values and new possibilities here. In ``Clothes,'' Mita moves from a tiny Indian village to be with her husband, who runs a 7-Eleven in California; after he is murdered in a holdup, Mita questions her naive vision of America. In ``The Word Love,'' an Indian graduate student living in Berkeley with a man named Rex agonizes over whether and how to tell her mother back in India about the relationship. The narrator of ``Affair'' suspects her husband of sleeping with a close friend, realizing eventually that, whether or not her suspicions are correct, her marriage to an old-fashioned, judgmental and bossy man is troubled. Particularly poignant is ``Meeting Mrinal,'' in which Asha, recently deserted by her husband and coping with an adolescent son, lies to a childhood friend, now a successful, independent businesswoman, insisting that her life is fine. In transparently simple language, Divakaruni places her characters at the volatile confluence of two conflicting pressures: the obligation to please traditional husbands and families, and the desire to live modern, independent lives. First serial to Good Housekeeping.