Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and poet. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines.
She was born in India and lived there until 1976, until she was 19, at which point she left Calcutta and came to the United States. She continued her education at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, receiving an MA in English. Later she got a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. After graduating she lived for a short time in Chicago and Ohio before making Sunnydale, Ca. her home in 1979.
Most of Divakaruni's work deals
with the immigrant experience and is largely autobiographical. Her novels "Sister of My Heart" and "The Mistress of Spices;" the story collections "The Unknown Errors of Our Lives and Arranged Marriage," received several awards, including the American Book Award.
Divakaruni also authored four collections of prize-winning poetry, "Dark Like the River," "Leaving Yuba City," "Black Candle" and "The Reason for Nasturtiums."
Divakaruni divides her time between Houston and Northern California. She has two children.
Since 1991, she has been the president of MAITRI, a helpline for South Asian women that particularly helps victims of domestic violence and other victims of abuse.
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The Arranged Marriage
The night is airless-still, as
before a storm. Behind the wedding drums,
cries of jackals from the burning grounds.
The canopy gleams, color
of long life, many children.
Color of bride-blood. At the entrance
the women have painted a sign
of Laxmi, goddess of wealth, have put up
a blackened pot to ward off
the witch who lives beyond
the Sheora forest and eats
young flesh.
Guests from three villages
jostle, making marriage jokes. A long
conch blast for the groom's party,
men in dhotis white as ice. Someone runs to them
with water of rose, silvered betal leaves,
piled garlands from which rise
the acrid smell of marigolds.
The priests confer, arrange wood and incense
for the wedding fire. The chants begin.
Through smoke, the stars
are red pinpricks, the women's voices
almost a wailing. Uncles and brothers
carry in the bride, her face hidden
under an edge of scarlet silk, her trembling
under the wedding jewels.
The groom's father
produces his scales and in clenched silence
the dowry gold is weighed. But he smiles
and all is well again. Now it is godhuli,
the time of the auspicious seeing.
Time for you, bride of sixteen,
mother, to raise the tear-stained face
that I will learn so well,
to look for the first time into
your husband's opaque eyes (14-15).
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The River
I lie on the grass and listen
to the river inside me. It
pulses and churns, surges up
against the clenched rock
of my heart
until finally it spurts from my head
in a dark jet. Behind,
the clouds swoop and dive
on paper wings, the palace walls
grow taller, brick by brick, till they rise beyond
the painting's edge. The river
is deep now and still, an opaque lake
filled with blue fish. But look,
the ground tilts, the green touch-me-not plants
angle away from my body. I am falling.
The lake cups its liquid fingers for me,
the fish glint like light on ice. Evening. The river pebbles
are newborn pearls. The water rises.
I am disappearing, my body
rippling into circles. Legs, waist,
armpits. My hair floats upward, a skein
of melting silk. I give
my face to the river, the lines
of my forehead, my palms. When the last cell
has dissolved, the last cry
of the lake-birds, I will, once more,
hear the river inside. |
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