Before We Visit the Goddess

Of Fortunate Lamps

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices was so good that one picks up every book of hers to see if it matches; only Palace of Illusions has so far.  Which is not to say her books are not well written, it’s just that tales of immigrant angst can have only this much variety and too many US- based writers of Indian origin are still hammering away at it.

Her latest, Before We Visit the Goddess, begins in 1995, Bela Dewan calling from the US, to tell her mother Sabitri, who lives in a village in Bengal, to persuade her granddaughter Tara not to quit college.

This distress call is unexpected because after Bela eloped to the US with her boyfriend, she never saw her mother again. Sabitri has never met Tara, but history is repeating itself. Tara is treating her mother just like Bela treated Sabitri.

Still, Sabitri sits down to write a letter to Tara, and in flashbacks the story of four generations of women unfolds. Durga, the expert sweet maker in a village who lets her daughter Sabitri go to Kolkata to pursue higher education.  Sabitri’s romance with the son of her mean-spirited patron, destroys that dream.

She marries another man, lives an affluent life which is ruined by an innocent remark by young Bela. After the end of her marriage, Sabitri sets up a sweet shop in memory of her mother, and makes it a success, with a man who throws away his own future to help her, and wants nothing in return. But she is unable to hold on to her resentful daughter, who runs off to the US to marry the self-centred Sanjay.

Her marriage is not all that happy, and eventually, her daughter Tara dumps her family to live precariously like an aimless American teenager.

Colouring between the broad strokes, are the seemingly unconnected stories that build a complete picture of the characters—the three women and people who offer them friendship or escape, influences that trigger life changes, love gained or lost.  It’s a difficult but interesting structure, creating a novel through stories. The book is readable, no doubt, but there is still the question of why a writer as talented as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is not stepping out more often from the small circumference of predictable family dramas. 

Before We Visit The Goddess

By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Published by Simon & Schuster

Pages: 240