As the early morning sunshine blazed outside Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's home in Fremont, California, the best-selling author leans back in a state of repose in her simple study.
A small shrine rests on top of a table; one of the few adornments in the otherwise ascetic room. It is a shrine dedicated to her spiritual teachers -- Swami Chinmayananda and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda -- and a place where Divakaruni seeks spiritual strength and guidance before plunging into the story-telling that has gained her such acclaim.
"I meditate for a few minutes before I write," she explains. "I ask for guidance and say, 'let me not block the writing, let me not have an agenda as I write.' Writing is a sacred activity that comes from a deeper source within me and whatever success I have achieved I am thankful for it."
Divakaruni has good reason to be thankful as her newest compilation of short stories, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, gets ready to hit the market on April 17 amid favourable reviews from several fellow writers.
"This is an extraordinary collection," says Ha Jin, an American writer of Chinese descent, winner of the 1999 National Book Award for fiction and author of the popular Ocean of Words and Waiting, among other books. "Intelligently conceived and passionately written," is his verdict.
Divakaruni's novels, Sister of My Heart and Mistress of Spices, won the 44-year-old Bengali writer critical acclaim and added numerous fans, both Americans and Americans of South Asian descent, to her list of admirers.
The Unknown Errors of Our Lives is Divakaruni's latest foray into the trials and tribulations of the South Asian experience. But unlike her previous collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage, Unknown Errors is a slightly darker exploration of immigration, love, longing, disappointment and cultural bonds.
"The Unknown Errors of Our Lives shows my growth as a writer and a person," Divakaruni says. "It is a much more subtle collection than Arranged Marriage, because in Arranged Marriage the stories were straightforward, discussing how immigration changes the relationships with people around [the characters], namely love relationships."
In this collection, Divakaruni has focused more attention on exploring the relationship between the generations and shedding light on the difficulty Indian American parents and children have in communicating their desires to each other.
"A lot of the things I said about women's choice and independence, I said already in past stories," she says. "In Unknown Errors, the range is wider and deals with three generations -- the immigrant, the immigrant dealing with the parents that didn't want to come but were lonely and the people that don't immigrate."
In addition, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives gives voice to the second generation of Indians who struggle with questions about their identity and learn through trial and error what they accept of the culture and what they reject.
In the title story, the main character Ruchira -- an American-born Indian girl who decides to try her hand at an arranged marriage at the urging of her family -- is forced to deal with her fiancé Biren's wild past and question her own ties to the man she has fallen in love with.
"Unknown Errors explores the complexity of the experience of moving into a world that's so different," Divakaruni says. "It is a book about the human desire to communicate and the inability of people to communicate what they feel."
Divakaruni's fascination with human desire goes back to her school days, much before she became a graduate student at UC-Berkeley in California where she studied Renaissance literature, a subject she later received her doctorate in.
"Since high school I have been attracted to the Renaissance because of the dramatists of that period," she said. "They discussed the human spirit and what people desire and it is important to look at it and remember that we haven't changed that much. A lot of my work is on the same subject."
While her stories are reflective of this common theme, Divakaruni also delved into her own experiences as a new immigrant studying in the United States. Divakaruni came to study in Ohio in 1976, after letters from her brother, a medical student in the US, sparked a fascination for the guarded 21-year-old.
"I lived a very sheltered and traditional life in Calcutta," she remembers. "Growing up, I was taught to look at life with traditional Hindu values. There was the expectation that I would become a homemaker even with a good education."
But Divakaruni discovered a whole new way of life upon coming to America. "When I went to school at Berkeley, I was exposed to so many alternative lifestyles and I was so radical. I think I gained my real education meeting all those people from around the world at Berkeley."
While she experienced an intoxicating level of freedom in the United States, Divakaruni was also struck by the insidious racism and sexism that lay beneath the surface of that liberty. "I could do all kinds of things as a woman that I couldn't do otherwise, but under that freedom, there were problems and complications," she recalls. "It was a subtle and subversive form of prejudice and I became aware of a double set of prejudices because not only was I a woman but I was a woman of colour."
Divakaruni's experiences as a woman of colour in the United States served as an impetus for her to write and the theme of racism has appeared in many forms throughout her writing.
In the story Silver Pavements, published in her Arranged Marriage collection, Divakaruni wrote of the trauma and disillusionment one young Indian woman felt as she and her aunt were verbally assaulted by racists, who called for them to "go home" to India. Divakaruni says the fictional account was based on a similar experience she had had in Chicago years ago.
But while many of her stories are based on real experiences, Divakaruni insists her writing is not autobiographical. "If I would feel strongly about something that was happening to me or someone in the community, in writing it I would transform it into fiction," she says. "The characters would be different and the way they resolve their problem would be different. A lot of my work is a mixture of what I have observed and plain fiction."
She feels strongly about the problem of domestic abuse within the South Asian community. And it is a theme that she has been passionate about including throughout her writing. "I have been volunteering in women's shelters for a long time since when I was in university," Divakaruni says. "As I was working in mainstream women's shelters, I realized that South Asian women saw a stigma with going to 'white establishments' where their culture would not be understood."
As she heard more and more stories of South Asian women trapped in abusive situations, who could not go home to their families in their home countries because of the shame, Divakaruni was spurred to action. She co-founded MAITRI, a help line for South Asian women trapped in domestic violence, about a decade ago.
MAITRI began as a phone line where trained volunteers would refer women to agencies and counselling. If a situation proves dangerous, the women are flown to different locations and shelters for their protection. "Many people look at the situation and say, 'why doesn't she get up and leave', but it's more complicated than that," she explains. "There is an external pressure on the woman who is conflicted with love for her children and her husband, both of whom she loves a lot."
In Unknown Errors, Divakaruni devoted a story, The Forgotten Children, to the issue of domestic abuse. Set in India, the story is told through the eyes of a young girl who witnesses her mother and younger brother being abused and endures the abuse herself. The sensitive tale showed a different side to Divakaruni's writing, invoking the naiveté of childhood shattered by the trauma of violence.
"I wanted the reader to think about the issue and feel compassion for the situation and the children who are the ultimate victims," she says.
But while The Forgotten Children is one story Divakaruni feels has an important message for readers, it is the final story in Unknown Errors -- The Name of Stars in Bengali -- that she identifies with the most on a personal level.
Publisher's Weekly calls the story a 'beautifully nuanced story of a San Francisco wife and mother who returns to her native village in India to visit her mother, in which each understands afresh the emotional dislocation caused by stepping on a time machine called immigration.'
The story comes from deep within, explains Divakaruni. "I put everything I know into that piece." At the heart of the story is the desire the main character has to share the culture she left behind with her children. "It is a paradoxical desire," Divakaruni explains. "She wanted to get away and she wants to get back at the same time."
It is a story that seems to mirror Divakaruni's own life as she raises two sons -- Anand, 9, and Abhay, 6 -- with the hope of preserving their heritage. Like the character in The Name of Stars in Bengali, Divakaruni recognizes that her children are Indian-American, but she wants them to love their culture and connect with their Indian family.
Divakaruni's mother, like the character in the story, still lives in their ancestral village of Gura, about four hours outside of Calcutta. The village, which appears from time to time in her stories, serves as a reminder of where she comes from.
"I had a mixed reaction from my family over my success," she says. "They were proud of my accomplishments, but they were concerned that I may be getting too far away from my Indian roots." But as Divakaruni proves over and over again, it is that mix of Indian culture with American experiences that has her fans eagerly awaiting the release of her new book.
And Divakaruni is looking forward to meeting with her fans as she begins her book tour around the country at the end of April. "Tours are always very stressful and I hope that lots of South Asians will come to see me," she says, laughing. "I'm very nervous when I go into town, so I hope that they will take pity on me and come out to support me."
In the meantime, she is hard at work on a new novel that she hopes will be much different from her previous work. While she does volunteer that the new novel will employ different techniques such as people speaking into tape and the use of letters to tell a story, Divakaruni prefers to remain tight-lipped regarding the novel.
"I just feel that if you talk about something before it's done, the energy that you put into it gets drained," she said. "I guess it's just my little belief."
Superstition or not, readers will be sure to be at the edge of their seats as they wait to see what new magic the Mistress will conjure up next.
