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Summary: Complicated Indian-American family relations
Review: Yet another example of this author's unusual talent, Desirable Daughters is storytelling that is, at first, deceptively simple, but builds into a skillful and complicated portrayal of Indian-American life. What begins as a piece of family lore, the tale of an ancestor known as a "tree-bride", finds meaning in familial ties and generational memory.Growing up in Calcutta, three Bengali sisters are "three peas in a pod". Convent taught, each has lived an exemplary Bengali life, the eldest and youngest, immigrating to America: Tara, the voice of the novel, is divorced from her billionaire husband and raising a teen-aged son; Didi, older than Tara by six years, resides in New Jersey, pursuing a glamorous life as a performance artist, her husband basking in her beauty and accomplishment. Yet the sisters could not be more different in their Americanized lives. Didi is an enigma, part of the Indo-American glitterati, using the name Padma Mehta (the family name Bhattacherjee too difficult to pronounce) and relentlessly evasive with her sisters, especially Tara. Didi enjoys a kind of anonymity in family matters, evasive and self-protective. Tara gravitates to her middle sister, Parvati, married to a Bengali Brahmin. Parvati's family lives in a spectacular fifteenth floor high-rise overlooking the Arabian Sea; far below, the poor cobble together makeshift shelters along the water's edge, a reminder of Calcutta's dire poverty. Determinedly parenting her son, Rabi, in San Francisco, Tara indulges in a live-in affair with a red-breaded, Buddhist ex-biker. When the sisters speak, they have developed a pattern of superficiality, dictated by expensive telephone rates and infrequent personal contact. "The whole point of these phantom family reunions is to stop time when we were... three pretty virgins in pastel saris chatting about their days in Calcutta." Tara's son sees these mindless dialogs as an excuse to cling to a past that no longer exists. A young man approaches Tara, calling her the familiar "auntie", bearing identification papers from his father. "Christopher" requests a meeting with Didi, whom he swears is his birth mother, although he doesn't have her address or phone number. Unconvinced, Tara tries to communicate with her older sister, but Didi refuses to consider such a ridiculous assertion. Christopher is daily more adamant and Tara resorts to other measures, including a clandestine visit to the police department. No assumption, no relationship is left untouched as Tara's contentment is shattered, her family stalked by menace. Shaken out of her complacency, Tara's life has developed a fault line that will ultimately affect her son, ex-husband and eldest sister in a brilliant and convoluted plot characteristic of this author. The shallow inter-continental relationships of the three sisters are exposed to harsh reality. With utter simplicity and cunning, Mukherjee offers a fictional feast, rich in cultural detail and the endless complications of love and belonging. Luan Gaines/ 2003.
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