Sister of My Heart

Anju is the more headstrong and willful of the two sisters, providing a foil to Sudha that helps illuminate The Diversity of the Female Experience. In the opening chapter of the novel, while Sudha listens rapt, Anju scorns Pishi’s stories as superstitious and old-fashioned. Anju’s response is partly due to her different circumstances. The daughter of the Chatterjee household, Anju does not share the burden and vulnerability of economic dependency that haunts Sudha and her mother.

From an early age, Anju admires and idealizes Western culture. Through the British and American literature she consumes, she gains a window into the cultures that she associates with the freedom that her own life lacks. Her overly rosy vision of American life only intensifies when she falls in love with Sunil, who presents the country as a “fairy kingdom” of infinite possibility.

Once in the United States, Anju finds that neither day-to-day life nor her husband prove quite as perfect as she hoped. Although she loves her studies and enjoys many new freedoms, she misses the traditions, history, and connections of her home and worries about her mother and, above all, about Sudha. Anju’s continuing frustration leads her to reject her male doctor’s advice, as she senses the patriarchal and imperialist tone of his guidance: “Who does he think he is? Queen Victoria?” (290). Her anger at Sudha’s treatment by the Sanyals and Sunil’s apparent lack of sympathy only compounds Anju’s frustration. Ultimately, rebelling against the limitations of her body by working flat out against medical advice, Anju suffers a pregnancy loss. She is haunted thereafter by the idea that she might be partly to blame.

Anju ultimately finds solace in feminine community and family ties. At the end of the novel, she imagines herself, Sudha, and Dayita as an alternative, feminine trinity, a pair of Madonnas holding up a salvific female child.

As girls, Anju and Sudha jokingly refer to their three “mothers,” as a feminine version of the Hindu Trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. This paradigm casts Gouri as Brahma, the creator, as she is the matriarch and breadwinner of the family, responsible for carrying the Chatterjee name and estate.

Since her husband’s death, Gouri has felt duty-bound to maintain the dignity of the Chatterjee household, largely because of her parting promise to her husband. This role leaves her in a somewhat contradictory position: On the one hand, she provides a strong, independent female role model for her daughter and encourages her to pursue her education. On the other hand, she is highly sensitive to social mores and scandal. The threat that Dayita poses, an unborn girl representative of the new generation of Chatterjee women, forces Gouri to choose between tradition and change. When Gouri finally lets go of the past to which she has been clinging so desperately, emblematized by the vast, crumbling Chatterjee mansion, she feels a huge sense of emancipation. As Sudha observes,

Along with the old house, the mothers seem to have shrugged off a great burden of tradition […]. Away from those ancient halls echoing with patriarchal voices which insisted that foremost of all they must be widows of the Chatterjee family, for the first time they can live their lives with a girlish lightness (296).

Sudha and Anju associate Pishi with Vishnu, the preserver. In keeping with this role, Pishi is, at first sight, the most conservative of the three mothers. She takes the restrictions of widowhood far more seriously than Gouri or Nalini, dressing in white and shaving her head. She is also a preserver of family history and ancient tales, which she passes down to Anju and Sudha, inspiring Anju’s love of literature and Sudha’s penchant for storytelling.

It is characteristic of the novel’s interrogation of the concept of family that Pishi, who is not the biological mother of either girl, has the most conventionally maternal relationship with them. Anju’s description of Pishi’s activities in the opening chapter captures Pishi’s maternal behavior:

She is the one who makes sure we are suitably dressed for school […]. She finds for us, miraculously, stray pens and inkpots and missing pages of homework. She makes us our favorite dishes: luchis, rolled out and fried a puffy golden brown; potato and cauliflower curry cooked without chillies; thick, sweet payesh […]. On holiday she plaits jasmine into our hair (16).

Here as elsewhere in the novel, the act of food preparation is symbolic of love and nurturing.

When Sudha returns home, heavily pregnant and estranged from her husband and mother-in-law, Pishi undergoes a radical transformation that reflects Sudha’s own transformation. Namely, Pishi fiercely rejects the traditions by which she has been constrained for much of her adult life. She recalls that, after her widowhood, “My life was over because I was a woman without a husband. I refuse to have our Sudha live like that” (269). In her desire to protect Sudha, Pishi manifests the theme of Resisting Patriarchy via Sisterhood, drawing on the other mothers’ capacities to destroy old traditions with the aim of generating new ones.

Following the Hindu Trinity paradigm for the “mothers,” the girls cast Nalini as Shiva, the destroyer, perhaps in reference to the disastrous consequences of her husband’s actions for the Chatterjee family. Nalini is the least sympathetically portrayed of the three mothers. Even her own daughter, Sudha, guiltily considers her the last, and perhaps the least, of the three: “Lastly—I use this word with some guilt—there is my own mother, Nalini” (17).

However, the evening after Nalini insists that Sudha must abandon her education to marry early, Sudha has a revelation about the difficulty of her mother’s life and the precariousness of her situation. Sudha is suddenly filled with empathy and compassion for her: “To my mother, her life must have seemed like a trick of the moonlight. One moment her arms were filled with silvery promises. The next she was widowed and penniless” (85-86).

The son of “new money,” Ashok is perhaps the character in the novel with the greatest freedom. He is allowed to choose his wife and, when Sudha rejects him, he remains single. He shares none of Sudha’s fatalism concerning their relationship, perhaps because he has not experienced the rigid intergenerational obligations and constraints that she has inherited growing up as a Chatterjee.

Sudha initially sets Ashok on a pedestal, imagining him as a fairy-tale prince who will come to her rescue. As she grows more self-reliant, though, she perceives his flawed humanity. Though she sympathizes with his failings, her transformation sees her repositioning herself as a sister and mother first; Ashok’s misstep in asking that she leave her newborn daughter behind with the mothers is thus fatal to any romantic attachment.

In her youthful romantic imaginings, Sudha sees herself as being swept away by a heroic prince. The prince would have all the agency and take all the initiative, while Sudha would remain utterly passive. In reality, she ends up with a husband who is incapable of standing up for himself and much less for her or her unborn daughter. Sudha must ultimately find the strength within herself to save her daughter.

Ramesh is portrayed as a sympathetic character, despite his lack of backbone. Much like the women, he is also a victim of the oppressive patriarchal system that forms the backdrop to the novel. Throughout his life, he has borne the brunt of his widowed mother’s frustrations and difficulties, and he has carried the weight of her expectations, which stem from her own patriarchal views.

Having grown up in an abusive family presided over by a tyrannical, narcissistic father, Sunil is determined to be a liberal, progressive husband. He defends his mother from his father and encourages Anju to pursue her studies and live the life of an emancipated Western woman. However, throughout the novel Divakaruni hints that there is something superficial about Sunil’s progressive values.

Sunil’s superficiality reflects the performative nature of his solidarity with Anju as she struggles to build a life of her own. From their first meeting, Sunil lacks sincerity, wooing Anju by faking a shared enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf. He later discloses that he has never read any of the author’s works, speaking of literature with a broad dismissiveness: “All that arty-farty stuff is not for me” (208). He only pretended to be a fan to “start a conversation” with Anju (208). In the United States, although he is supportive of Anju’s studies, he feels humiliated when she seeks financial independence and displays clear irritation at his wife’s lack of domestic skills. Sunil does not share Anju’s outrage when Mrs. Sanyal wants to abort Sudha’s pregnancy. Worst still, he blurs the issue through recourse to cultural relativism, suggesting at the same time that Anju should be grateful to him for bringing her to the United States. When Anju insists on bringing Sudha to the United States, against his advice, he seems to feel justified in committing adultery, transferring the guilt for his lack of self-control onto his wife:

How many times had Sunil tried to stop me from bringing Sudha over to America. How many hints had he given? Why can’t you leave well enough alone? I’d thought he was being selfish, stingy. But he’s only been trying to save me.

There’s a roaring in my ears like opened floodgates. You don’t have a choice anymore, says my husband’s voice (322).

Sunil, in short, is not as perfect as Anju’s initial impressions would suggest.

That Sunil nonetheless has his moments as a sympathetic figure, especially in his care for Anju when she is at her most vulnerable, speaks to the nuance in how the novel approaches the issue of solidarity. As elsewhere, love and nurturing are symbolically manifested through food: First, after Anju is distressed by Sunil’s father’s treatment of his mother, Sunil feeds her. Then, in the United States, following a distressing conversation with Anju’s mother, Sunil brings her food again: “Like a child I allow myself to be consoled by food and warmth, the voice of a loved one and his touch” (227). The capacity of Sunil to recognize Anju’s need for emotional support only in certain moments emphasizes, by contrast, the types of moments in which he fails to recognize it. Namely, Sunil stumbles worst and most often when solidarity requires him to humble himself enough to deconstruct how he still upholds the patriarchy.