Vineeta vijayaraghavan biography of mahatma gandhi
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The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Doubleday, 268 pages, $23.95
Motherland
By Vineeta Vijayaraghavan
Soho, 232 pages, $23
In “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,” the opening short story in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new collection, “The Unknown Errors of Our Lives,” a widowed grandmother lately from India struggles to fit into the rhythms of her son and daughter-in-law’s California home. With painful delicacy, Divakaruni describes the grandmother’s childlike gratitude for a moment of her son’s precious American time and we sense, almost with some inexplicable shame flushing our own faces, how fully starved she has become in their isolated, suburban nuclear family.
While frying him luchis, she giddily assumes the pose of her former motherly self — needed and authoritative — and tells him a story about the time when, as a child, he hid from the doctor by locking himself in the bathroom, until his
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Motherland: a novel
(Book)
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Motherland
For non-Indians, MOTHERLAND might be an interesting window into a certain kind of South Indian life--a very elite life, however, where people speak English, belong to clubs, maintain gardens, drive cars, obsess over clothing, and have parties. Their children attend elite private schools presided over by old English women. It should have been marketed as a "young adult" novel, in which case I would have skipped such a wooden novel entirely. The author questions very little, taking the voice of an Indian-American teenager returning to live with relatives for the summer, dealing with family problems, learning more about her own identity. This sort of theme is ideal for teenagers, but Goodreads folk will have to admit that a large number of novels already exist in the field, even if they don't focus on South Indian tea plantations. She spins a mundane coming of age story into which she inserts a political problem---a h