NEW DELHI: US-based author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni likes to set her books in places where she actually lived and her latest work “Before We Visit the Goddess”, a three-generational immigrant story about mothers and daughters, spans from Bengal and Assam to California and Texas.
She also uses this particular form for the first time a novel in stories, where each chapter is a complete story but is related to the other in a particular way.
The particular language, the prose each one uses has to be different and relate to the character, she says.
“Before We Visit the Goddess”, published by Simon & Schuster, is about three generations of mothers and daughters who discover their greatest source of strength in one another.
The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but due to her family’s situation college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single, unforgiveable misstep.
Years later, Sabitri’s daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother’s choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover – but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she’d imagined.
As the marriage crumbles and Bela is forced to forge her own path, she unwittingly imprints her own child, Tara, with indelible lessons about freedom, heartbreak, and loyalty that will take a lifetime to unravel.
“Writing about women has been very important for me for a long time. Many of my books have women protagonists,” says Divakaruni, a McDavid professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
She started thinking about this novel after her mother passed away.
“So I was really thinking about our relationship and the heritage she’s passed on to me, what is the heritage I am trying to pass onto my children. Out of that came this three-generational story which is not autobiographical but just follows my concerns.
“One part of my concern is what it means to be a successful woman. Does that meaning change from one generation to the next? Does it change when we move from one culture to another? This book explores these ideas which I think is a timely theme for India and America and probably other cultures also. It’s something women need to think about,” Divakaruni told PTI in an interview.
The characters in “Before We Visit the Goddess” are fictional. –PTI
