India, once removed

For every immigrant’s American dream, there is an equally potent yearning for the home left behind. Few writers know this better than Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, each having written multiple fictions about American characters of Indian origin who struggle with that twofold longing.

Though they are very different kinds of novelists, Mukherjee and Divakaruni share a few identifying details. Both are American, Calcutta born, and both are Bengali Brahmins from traditional Hindu families who have lived for lengthy periods in California. They also share a literary challenge: After thoroughly examining the threshold experience of immigration, in which characters waver between a reluctantly surrendered past and an uncertain future, where does a fiction writer go from there?

The answer, in Mukherjee’s case, is further into the past. “The Tree Bride” is a sequel to her 2002 novel, “Desirable Daughters,” in which a menacing stranger propelled Tara Chatterjee to reexamine her family history. She is the youngest of three daughters of a tea merchant in high-society Calcutta in the early 1960s. That novel traced the sisters’ journeys to their present-day lives in Bombay, New Jersey and the once-golden Silicon Valley, where Tara’s estranged husband, Bish, made his fortune. Tara also paid homage to her namesake great-great-aunt, Tara Lata Gangooly, an independence fighter during the British Raj who was nicknamed the “Tree Bride” after her young fiance died.

Mukherjee’s new novel picks up seamlessly from the previous book, which ends with the firebombing of modern-day Tara’s San Francisco house just as she and Bish try reconciliation. “The Tree Bride” begins with Bish convalescing from painful injuries and a pregnant Tara visiting gynecologist Victoria Khanna, whose family history happens to have remarkably coincidental connections with Tara’s.

Those coincidences, which Bish compares to the Internet’s sense of randomness, include the following facts: that Victoria’s Indian husband was Bish’s mentor at Stanford; that Victoria is the granddaughter of Vertie Treadwell, a British district commissioner in Bengal responsible for the 1942 arrest of Tara’s freedom-fighting ancestor; and that both Victoria and Tara are linked through complex family ties to the murderous young stalker who is threatening Tara’s life anew.

Mukherjee gives voice and flesh to the many personalities intricately woven in this “wire-web of history.” It’s a tale, Tara acknowledges, that is a pastiche of half-destroyed old documents and family lore combined with pure imagination; it is less a chronicle of colonial Bengal and contemporary San Francisco than a dream of those places and times. But it’s a dream that hints cunningly at truth, as dreams do, and empowers Mukherjee to conjure both past and present milieus far more evocatively than straightforward documentary evidence would allow.

She devotes a spellbinding section to the early life of the founder of the Tree Bride’s village, a Victorian urchin who makes his way from London to Calcutta aboard one of the great East India Company ships and establishes a utopian community deep in the forests of East Bengal (formerly East Pakistan and now Bangladesh). She plumbs the psyche of Vertie Treadwell, a small-minded bureaucrat who loves everything about India except for “the bloody Indians, God’s test for Englishmen,” and whose career with the Raj is “one long resume of bitterness.”

She transforms the Tree Bride from a hazy folkloric figure into an indomitable realist who, confined for life in her father’s house, teaches herself to read three languages and develops a kind of underground railroad for every crucial figure in the struggle for Indian independence. And she makes modern-day Tara an appealingly multifaceted personality, by turns frightened and resilient, irritable and hopeful, eagerly assimilated yet captivated by the power of a far-flung heritage.

By conjuring a dream of Tara’s desh, or place of origin, Mukherjee expands the dimensions of immigration literature backward into history as a way of illuminating the present. Alternatively, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s fourth novel, “Queen of Dreams,” is about a young divorced mother unhappily cut off from her Indian roots who explores the subconscious as a means of connection.

California-born Rakhi Gupta is trying to launch a painting career while keeping her shabby-chic Berkeley teahouse from bankruptcy after a Starbucks-like latte joint opens across the street. Beneath Rakhi’s quotidian troubles is a deeper source of distress. All her life she has longed to be close to her mother, a dream interpreter. (“A tree that is cut down in a dream means a big expense is about to fall upon you.”) Yet her mother has refused to share clues about her early life in India or her gift for clairvoyance -- a talent Rakhi did not inherit but that her 6-year-old daughter may have.

Rakhi has grown up hankering for a homeland and connection with a parent about whom she knows painfully little. When her mother dies suddenly and mysteriously in a car accident, she begins poring over her mother’s dream journals: “Each word she’d set down was a gift and a wound; it could be healed only by being read.”

Divakaruni has a knack for mysticism, which plays a significant role in most of her fiction. (The priestly sisterhood of dream interpreters to which Rakhi’s mother belongs may remind some readers of a similar sect of female healers in her first novel, “The Mistress of Spices.”)

In “Queen of Dreams,” the mystical element that binds Rakhi yearningly to her mother has an unmatched poignancy, more affecting than the rather prosaic relationships between Rakhi and her best friend, Belle, or her ex-husband, Sonny; more forceful even than the scene shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, in which Rakhi and her friends are attacked by racist thugs looking to beat up anyone resembling a terrorist.

“Queen of Dreams” suffers from some stiff dialogue and longueurs; Mukherjee’s prose rarely falters and she justifiably is considered the doyenne of Indian American literature. Divakaruni’s book shines, though, in its examination of the subtle, extrasensory connections between mothers and daughters that continue to develop even after death divides them. That deftly rendered otherworldly dimension transforms the novel from yet another story about the desi (expatriate Indian) experience in America into an emotionally heightened narrative, making that familiar desi longing seem new.

What most distinguishes these novels is something Divakaruni and Mukherjee happen to share. It’s not their Northern California locale; not the common underlying current of violence; not the mutual theme of divorced women struggling with questions of career, motherhood and identity; not the topicality of computer culture or Sept. 11.

It’s the fact that the most successful choices each writer makes -- Mukherjee’s extended historical forays and Divakaruni’s investigations into the “dream time” world of the subconscious mind -- are also by far the riskiest. That those ambitious choices pay off so handsomely is good news for the evolution of immigration literature and the future of fiction writing in general. *