Closely chaperoned Bharati Mukherjee, 23, had never been alone in the same room with a man when she met Clark Blaise at the University of Iowa near the unanticipated end of the Kennedy presidency. Two weeks later, the two young writers were married.
Almost 48 years after that, following dual careers in which the couple have published almost 30 books between them, two of them co-written and the latest two so intertwined they actually share some characters, the authors sit together in Toronto for their first-ever joint interview.
The occasion marks the launch of Blaise’s The Meagre Tarmac, a suite of linked stories about successful Indian immigrants to North America, told in their own voices, as well as the recent appearance of Mukherjee’s Miss New India, a novel chronicling the adventures of a provincial girl in the now-booming home country. More symbolically, it signals the couple’s ultimate reconciliation with a country they left in anger 30 years ago.
Calcutta-born Mukherjee and North-Dakota-born Blaise (his parents were Canadian) became immigrants together when they moved to Montreal in the early 1960s and he took a post teaching creative writing at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University. He moved immediately to the forefront of the new Canadian writing. “Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje – these are all old friends from my early 20s,” Blaise says. Both became Canadians, eventually drifting on the tides of history down the 401 to Toronto.
By then, they were happily ensconced in good academic jobs, with literary careers that included one co-written bestseller (Days and Nights in Calcutta). But Mukherjee grew increasingly infuriated by the casual racism she encountered in 1970s Toronto and insisted they leave the country for an unsettled life of mainly temporary jobs in the United States – leaving behind her a blistering j’accuse in Saturday Night magazine.
“It was because I hadn’t yet accepted – and still haven’t accepted – social demotion as a consequence of immigration,” says Mukherjee, an effortlessly aristocratic woman, born a Brahmin and raised amid wealth. “For me, the demotion was so steep. And I had the guts to say, ‘I think this is wrong and I’m going to say it as loudly as I can.’ ”
“It was tough,” adds Blaise, at 71, just a few months older than his wife, but battered where she is elegant, with a scab near one eye marking a recent fall, wires in his mouth holding together a jaw broken in an earlier fall, and an Order of Canada pin on the lapel of a commensurately battered blue blazer.
“Just as Conrad said of London in Heart of Darkness, ‘This too is one of the dark places of the Earth,’ ” Blaise says. “Toronto has been a dark place. Vancouver has been a dark place.”
That has changed, they both add, but the wounds remain. The couple moved constantly in the States, “piecing together a little necklace of jobs,” according to Blaise, rarely living together in the same city as they brought up two sons and struggled to re-establish the stability they had surrendered by leaving Toronto.
Today, retired from his post as director of the international writing program at the University of Iowa, Blaise lives in New York. Mukherjee, nearing the end of her tenure as a full professor at the University of California at Berkeley, lives a continent away.
But the winding journey they never planned has helped to put them both in the forefront of a literary movement neither of them anticipated. Fulsomely praised in the U.S. press, Mukherjee is both a leading practitioner and critic of the new immigrant fiction that is changing the very definition of English literature.
