Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
It took the twin hurricanes of 2005 to inspire Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's newest novel. As a volunteer with Katrina evacuees and then as part of the mass exodus out of Houston ahead of Hurricane Rita, she witnessed the contradictory ways people responded to such disasters. Some openly carried their guns at the ready, others shared food and water with strangers. A lesson in life, indeed.
In One Amazing Thing, Divakaruni has transposed those experiences to an unnamed city in what appears to be California just as an earthquake strikes strangers who have been waiting impatiently in a basement office for visas to travel to India - new beginnings, new escapes.
Divakaruni is best known for her 1997 novel, Mistress of Spices, which became emblematic of a certain "masala 'n' sari" writing style, one that has kept her from being seen as a part of the serious desi-lit movement. One Amazing Thing, with its Oprah-ready title, may turn out to be her mid-career breakout novel.
As tensions mount among the group of survivors trapped amid the rubble, each is caught up in his or her own fears and suspicions. Uma, a grad student carrying Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in her backpack, suggests that they all tell a true story, that "one amazing thing," to keep them occupied.
One by one, the strangers reveal the most personal of secrets, beginning with the elderly grandmother, Jiang, who recalls a life among the Hakka Chinese in Calcutta and a forbidden love affair just as war begins between India and China. As their situation continues to worsen, with water seeping in around them and further cave-ins occurring, the others follow.
There are the prim and proper Pritchetts; Lily, the punk Chinese-American teenager half-heartedly rebelling against her family; Tariq, the angry young man, less enraged on behalf of his Muslim brethren than the impact of 9/11 on his hard-working father; Cameron, the asthmatic Vietnam vet and de facto leader, still in search of redemption from a mistake he made in his youth; and the real outsiders of the group, the married visa officer Mr. Mangalam and the co-worker he has been wooing, Malathi.
Divakaruni brings a real humanity to these stories and a belief that the universal can be found in the most personal of stories, as stereotypes fall away to be replaced by fully realized individuals. Her de facto Scheherazade-in-the-round - she began her literary career with Arranged Marriage, a collection of short stories - shows how both accidental missteps and studied lunges for stability can easily waylay a life.
In one sense, the title is misleading, making the novel sound more like an exclamation point than an inward-looking, spiritual guide. (It turns out that One Amazing Thing was deeply influenced by Oprah fave Eckhart Tolle's bestselling spiritual guide, The Power of Now.) So it is no surprise that karma - and its cycle of good and bad deeds though one's life - has a special place in the stories. If every action has a reaction, Divakaruni gives the characters the chance to redeem themselves for the wrongs they have once committed, sometimes in real life, sometimes by simply confessing their previous frailties.
Jiang's and Malathi's stories of struggle are the most riveting and bittersweet, as Divakaruni is best at writing about immigrant women. They are also the ones with the least overt metaphysical layers. The stories become more incomplete as the novel nears the end, as if the storytellers and listeners were too caught up in their own reflections about their own lives, both once and future, to inquire further.
Move over chick-lit: With One Amazing Thing, spirit-lit has arrived.
Piali Roy is a freelance writer in Toronto.