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Chapter – III

East -West Encounter

‘He has lost his own country and has not acquired any other’.

-Rudyard Kipling

Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and other Stories depicts the problems of the

people emigrating to America and the dream of new life which tempts them to go

there. America holds out to them the promise of a bright future, a world free from

inhibitions, racial differences based on multinational customs, religions, traditions,

languages, etc. The collection of stories presents a rich vision of the free new world

that is America through a variety of American characters who essentially hail from

different countries of the world – China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia,

Hungary, Iraq, Trinidad, Sri Lanka, Italy, German and Philippines. While characters

from European countries are taken to be the real Americans, those having their origins

in the Third World countries are looked upon and brought into the focus as

immigrants who dream of realizing their destinies in America.

The immigrants from the Third World countries undergo considerable suffering.

The emigration to America is achieved at a heavy price. The middlemen claim a big

chunk of money as they arrange fake visas, passports, transport and jobs to the

intending travellers. The emigrants face these travails and tribulations because of their

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realization that America is their ultimate destination. They take up menial jobs in the

new country of their dreams to earn their livelihood and survive. However, they do

hope that ultimately they will get permanent settlement and they will tide over the

present situation somehow.

A study of her works shows us the transformation of the novelist from an

immigrant author to an American writer. The Middleman truly reflects the stages of

development which Bharati Mukherjee claims. As a writer, America is at the centre of

her heart. In 1990, Bharati Mukherjee toured India and participated in several

seminars and literary meets. “The United States Information Service” was the proud

host to the new celebrity of the American literary world. At the Sahitya Akademi,

New Delhi, Bharati Mukherjee spoke at length about her writings. She said that she

was nostalgic about India but had no regrets. “America is my home”, she declared

proudly. She has assimilated American culture and ethos and she wants to fall in line

with American literary tradition rather than Indian.

Bharati Mukherjee’s writing has close resemblance with the writing of Bernard

Malamud. Bharati Mukherjee talks about the lines of newcomers from the Third

World and how Malamud describes the lives of East European Jewish immigrants.

Like Malamud, she writes about a minority community which escapes the ghetto and

adopts itself to the patterns of the dominant American culture. Malamud has held a

special charm and appeal for Bharati Mukherjee. His work has given her a great

confidence to write about her own community. Apart from Malamud, she has a close

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literary kinship with Joseph Conrad who, despite his Polish origin, came to be

regarded as one of the best mainstream British writers.

In the short story collection The Middleman and other stories, all the eleven stories

deal with Asian immigrants, though some are narrated by native-born Americans who

feel the impact of these immigrants on their lives.

Bharati Mukherjee attempts to highlight the tensions arising from a conscious and

sometimes unconscious endeavour at re-rooting oneself in the soil of an alien culture.

For Trying to bridge the gap necessitates cross-cultural tensions both external as well

as internal. Bharati Mukherjee offers two sets of characters in her fictions: immigrants

who seem either unable or unwilling to move out of their cultural moorings and others

who assert their claim to an American identity by struggling to make their relocation

in a new territory. However, one cannot possibly come out of this process of

relocation unsheathed. The wound, whether internal or external, has to be borne.

Bharati Mukherjee herself admits in Chicago Tribune: “There are no harmless

compassionate ways to remake oneself…” (6:1).

Eight of the eleven stories are in the first person narratives. The theme of all the

eleven stories is immigration and the reciprocal effect of the immigrants. Bharati

Mukherjee says in the interview given to Alison B. Carb: “Immigration from the

Third World to this country is a metaphor for the process of uprooting and rerooting”

(645). In another interview given to Hancock Geoffrey, she called it unhousement and

‘rehousement’ (39). In these stories that deal with energetic immigrants, there is a

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definite movement away from expatriates who are middlemen in more sense than one.

They are not only brokers or go-betweens in various deals, but people who are in the

middle of where action is. In this collection, four stories are first person narratives by

immigrants, four are first person narratives by native Americans whose lives have

been affected by immigrants, and three are third person narratives with Indian

immigrants as protagonists.

The title story, “The Middleman”, has as its protagonist Alfie Judah, a

quintessential immigrant, energetic, resilient, opportunist and capable of quickly

adapting himself to any situation. Judah took control and wrote his own story, says the

author. “He travels around the world providing people with what they need – guns,

narcotics, automobiles” (TM, 14). He says that “there’s just demand and supply

running the universe” (14) “I have no feeling for revolution, only for outfitting the

participants” (15). The story reveals his ability to bounce back to life even after

traumatic experiences. He has the buoyancy to stay afloat on the choppy sea of

existence and also the hustlerish energy found in successful immigrants.

The opening passage of “The Middleman” foretells the ethnic diversity that defines

the rest of the collection. Alfie Judah is a professional gunman working for an arms

smuggling operation somewhere in Central American Jungle. Judah tells about

himself:

My name is Alfie Judah, of the once – illustrious Smyrna,

Aleppo, Baghdad . . . Judahs and looking around him

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announces, I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen Baghdad, Bombay,

Queens – and now is moldering spread deep in Mayan

Country. Aztees, Toltees, Mestizos, even some bashful

whites with German accents. All that and a lot of Texans. I’ll

learn the ropes. (3)

The passage is a typical celebration of ethnic diversity. For this Iraqi Jew, currently

a resident of United States, there is little to fear from the physical / demographic

jungle he faces, with its melange of Europeans, Middle Easterners and indigenes (a

synergetic mix of Amerindian and Spanish ancestry). Judah’s story is also typical for

Bharati Mukherjee’s choice of the first-person narrative to explore the minutiae of

subjectivity.

“The Middleman” is narrated from the point of view of an Iraqi character Alfie

Judah, the middleman in the story who makes a living from things that fall. The story

as narrated by him is about an irresistible and reckless half-caste Maria. Her adulteries

are her mainstay in surviving the Latin American scene of violence. Alfie is Maria’s

vulnerable slave and feels too inferior to accept her love. He admits: “I know I am no

hero. I know none of this is worth suffering for, let alone dying for” (10).

“A Wife’s Story”, a frequently anthologized story, told in the first person and the

present tense by the wife herself is about a woman named Panna Bhatt who had a

traditional Hindu marriage. Her parents with the help of a marriage broker picked out

a groom and as she recalls, “All I had to do was get to know his taste in food” (31).

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Since her arrival in New York she has “broadened her horizons” (31). Panna enjoys

freedom from wifehood in India through her two-year Ph.D. course in Special

Education in America.

Gail Low argues that Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction emphasizes an exuberance of

immigration. The stories are exploring “alienation and madness in ways that paint a

dystopic view of America” (112). The wife of an Indian business man and a woman

of fine breeding tell of her life in the States after she receives a scholarship for

doctoral study there. She exclaims: “My manners are exquisite, my feelings are

delicate” (27).

The protagonist, Mrs. Panna Bhatt, has adapted herself so well to the social and

cultural milieu of America that she feels light and almost free. She tells:

I’ve made it. I’m making something of my life. I’ve left

home, my husband to get a Ph.D. in Special Ed. I have a

multiple entry visa and a small scholarship for two years.

After that we’ll see. (29)

In a delightfully conversational first person narration, she brings out the contrast

between her situation and that of her mother and grandmother. She depicts her mother

as follows:

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My mother was beaten by her mother-in-law, my grandmother, when she’d

registered for French lessons at the Alliance Francoise. My grandmother,

the eldest daughter of a rich Zamindar, was illiterate. (29)

What she derives from her stay in USA is not a crisis of identity but a sense of

triumph. Mrs. Bhatt, a traditional Indian wife, senses and relishes the freedom that she

could never hope for in India. As she roams the streets of New York with a Hungarian

immigrant and hugs him on a sudden impulse she realizes:

My husband would never dance or hug a woman on

Broadway. Nor would my brothers. They aren’t stuffy people

but they went to Anglican boarding schools and have a well-

developed sense of what’s silly. (28)

USA has certainly broadened her horizons and there is a suggestion that she did

not find her true identity in India, not in the traditional marriage, nor in the Laxmi

Cotton Mills Pvt. Ltd., of which her husband is a Vice-President. She is candid

enough to admit:

That part of my life is over, the way trucks have replaced

Lorries in my vocabulary, the way Charity chin and her lurid

love life (she is estranged from her husband and is sleeping

with Phil, the flutist have replaced inherited notions of

marital duty. (32)

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For the most part, Panna Bhatt’s experience is of profound liberation.

In contrast to India, a world not only of poverty and social turmoil, but also – for

women – of arranged marriage, deference and a lack of sustained education, America

represents unlimited freedom. Yet, such freedom is impaired by the racism expressed

by white America towards diasporic communities. This appears most overtly at a

performance of a David Mamet play which Panna attends with a Polish friend Imre,

and in which she is indignant at the racial stereotyping of Indians. The condition of

Indians in America is portrayed thus: “They work hard, eat cheap, live ten to a room,

stash their savings under futons in Queens” (25).

There is also a suggestion that she tugs at the bondage of a traditional Hindu wife

who must dress up in a saree and jewellery to meet her husband at the air port. Her

change of dress code is vividly given in the following lines:

I change out of the cotton pants and shirt I’ve been wearing

all day, and put on a saree to meet my husband at JFK. I

don’t forget the jewellery; the necklace of mangalsutra, gold

drop earrings, heavy gold bangles, I don’t wear them every

day. (33)

Even then, her husband takes her to task for not wearing his mother’s ring, and the

reply is a lie. The truth is that she has outgrown that sort of jewellery: Panna Bhatt

reveals her detachment towards Indian way of life: “His mother’s ring is a showy in

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ghastly taste anywhere but India . . . My mother-in-law got her guru to bless the ring

before I left for the States” (33).

Through incisive irony, Bharati Mukherjee juxtaposes the contrast between the

wife’s adaptability and the husband’s mental blocks when he visits America. The

theme of “A Wife’s Story” is not only that a foreign culture is not a hindrance but a

help in the protagonist’s self knowledge, It is also a harsh indictment of the institution

of marriage. And the wife has to cut off her moorings from a marriage that does not

free but stifles. For her, there is no going back. This is brought out in two telling

images of freedom. First the little girl with wiry braids: “Then she starts to flap her

arms. She flaps, she hops” (39). “And the wife’s reflection in the mirror as she waits

for her husband to make love to her. She says, “I am free, afloat, watching somebody

else” (40).

That “somebody else” is her new found self that has emerged out of the cocoon of

years of bondage and oppressive meaningless tradition.

“Loose Ends”, “Orbiting”, “Fighting for the Rebound” and “Fathering” are first

person narratives by native Americans who have felt the impact of immigrants on

their lives. These stories mainly present immigrants from the American point of view,

though sometimes the viewpoint is suddenly reversed and Americans are seen through

immigrant eyes.

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Jeb Marshall, a Vietnam Veteran narrates “Loose Ends” in the first person. He is

full of anger and resentment towards immigrants who prosper in America and employ

native Americans. “We’re coolie labour in our own country” (44), Marshall says

when he returns from Vietnam after the war. He has felt a sense of displacement and

discontinuity. Unable to pick up the threads of life and move on, he particularly

resents the immigrants, who, according to him, have crept in by the back door and

become prosperous in America during his absence and are now controlling life in

America as middlemen.

At the Patel Motel where a family reunion is in progress, Marshall resents their

prosperity, clannishness and community feeling, which make him feel left out, a

freak. “They look at me. A bunch of aliens and they stare like I’m the freak” (52).

Marshall resents the fact that native white Americans are retrenched from their jobs

by the immigrant bosses when their own men arrive. Marshall lets out his feelings: “I

think of Jonda and the turbaned guy. He fired her when some new turbaned guy

showed up” (53).

He takes out all his accumulated rancour against the prosperous immigrants on the

Indian girl, who shows him into his motel room, by raping her there.

“Orbiting” is a first person narrative by Renata de Marcos, daughter of first

generation Italian immigrants. In this story, the stereotype of the backward Asian

clashes with the reality of Ro, the refugee from Afghanistan. The reaction exemplifies

the first kind of tropism, an unwillingness to deal with the strangeness of the

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foreigner. Besides demonstrating how the American family has become very

different, not just because of social influences and new sexual standard, but because

of the interaction between mainstream American and new immigrants, the story also

throws light on the trials of illegal immigrants.

In this story, the Italian – American narrator watches her father and brother – in –

law, Brent, react with their instinctive prejudices towards Ro, and realizes that they

are unable to imagine a foreigner, especially an Asian, who is more cultivated and

experienced than they are. When Ro explains that he does not yet understand

American sports, they look down on him. Yet as she points out:

Ro loves squash, but none of my relatives ever picked up a

racket. I want to tell Brent that Ro skied in St. Moritz, lost a

thousand dollars in a casino in Beirut, knows where to buy

Havana cigars without getting hijacked. He’s sophisticated,

he could make monkeys out of all of us, but they think he’s a

retard. (71-72)

Ro is another of Bharati Mukherjee’s desperate refugees. He has fled torture and

the treat of death in his homeland to start a new life in America. When Ro talks about

Afghanistan, the father and the brother-in-law hear about a world which they find too

threatening to deal with.

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It’s an unwelcome revelation to him that a reasonably

educated and rational man like Ro would die for things that

he, Brent, has never heard of and would rather laugh about.

Ro was tortured in jail . . . Electrodes, canes, freezing tanks.

He leaves nothing out . . . (72-73)

There are scenes which portray the inability or refusal to tolerate foreignness in

almost every story. If a character’s behaviour does not fit within certain parameters,

then he is perceived as a threat.

The story also throws light on the trials of illegal immigrants. Renata becomes

politically conscious and aware of American immigration laws only after meeting

Roashan, her Afghan boyfriend. Legal Afghan immigrants worked as waiters in an

Afghan fried chicken restaurant in Brooklyn while the illegals worked in a backroom

as pluckers and gutters. Renata loves the scars on her lover’s body and realizes that he

comes from a culture of pain. She observes that Asian men carry themselves in a way

that is different from Americans and Europeans. She also has a new vision of America

through the eyes of Ro:

When I am with Ro, I feel I am looking at America through

the wrong end of a telescope. He makes it sound like a police

state, with sudden raids, papers, detention centres,

deportations and tortures and death waiting in the wings. (66)

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Ro is happy to be in USA and has a work permit. His aim is to save enough to

study in New Jersey Institute of Technology. Renata is proud of him because he has in

him a heroic element and carries the weight of history on him and also he has the

energy, vitality and robust hope of an immigrant.

“Fighting for the Rebound” mostly presents the immigrant through the eyes of a

native American. The narrator is Griff, a stock broker who lives in Blanquita, the

daughter of a former Philippine millionaire who has supported Marcos and has

subsequently fallen on evil days. There are expatriate moments of regret and nostalgia

as Blanquita “does some very heavy, very effective sighing” and she says, “I should

never have left Manila . . . the East is East and the West is West and never the twain

shall meet” (80). But at other times, she immerses herself in the present, as if only that

existed: “She likes to act as though real life began for her at JFK when she got past

the customs and immigration on the seventeenth of October, 1980 and she exclaims

that “the USA is still a pioneer country” (81) Yet she retains her Philippines

citizenship in the hope of representing her country in the Miss Universe contest. She

is frank and forthright in giving her estimate of Americans as being “narcissistic” (84)

emotional cripples, unable to really love anyone.

In “Fathering”, the narrator is a native American Jason, whose life with his girl

friend in a small town in upstate New York is disrupted when the half-Vietnamese

child he has fathered in Saigon comes to visit.

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The child has lived through the trauma of war and killing and gets nightmares. She

demands attention from her father and is very possessive about him and wants him to

send away his girlfriend Sharon. Sharon approaches a nervous breakdown.

Jason tries to come to terms with the past by bringing Eng, his Vietnamese

daughter, to the U.S. He proclaims:

I did the whole war on Dexedrine. Vietnam didn’t happen,

and I’d put it behind me in marriage and fatherhood and

teaching high school … Until Eng popped up in my life, I

really believed it didn’t happen. (117)

Eng carries with her the indelible knowledge of what the war did to her and her

people, including the memory of her grandmother being killed by American soldiers.

Eng’s demons are too much for Jason’s wife, who leaves him for refusing to abandon

the little girl. “I want to comfort Sharon, but my daughter with the wild, grieving

pygmy face won’t let go of my hand. She’s bad Dad. Send her back” (123).

When Dr. Kearns tries to inject a sedative to Eng, Jason becomes very protective:

“I jerk her away from our enemies My Saigon kid and me. We are a team” (124).

The pronoun “our” suggests his oneness with his daughter. He decides to stand by

her against the whole world. The plight of the little girl makes Jason realize that she

has a special claim on his attention, that she requires a ‘caretaker’. Thus the story is

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narrated by a native American who reveals how his life has been affected by

immigrant.

“The Tenant”, “Jasmine” and “Burried Lives” are the only three stories which are

in the third person omniscient narrative. Their protagonists, Maya Sanyal, Jasmine

and Mr. Venkatesan, are all immigrants who plunge into life in the present and do not

indulge in the favourite expatriate occupation of nostalgically evoking the past.

Maya Sanyal, the protagonist of “The Tenant” is a Bengali Brahmin by birth. She

holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, teaching at the University of N. Iowa. She

has arrived at N. Carolina at nineteen, ten years before. She has left home, for, a

person needs to “Try out his wings” (98). She is an emancipated Indo-American

woman and she is at ease in U.S.A. She faces a multicultural society with equanimity

and exhibits a deep awareness of social reality around her. Mukherjee, in this story

creates a world in which cultural encounter does not lead to cultural shock but to a

wholehearted acceptance of the changes. Maya Sanyal’s loyalty to the country of her

adoption is reflected in her comment about Dr. Chatterjee: “He wants to live and work

in America, but give back nothing except taxes” (106).

Maya Sanyal has witnessed the post-independent India but has been in North

California since she was nineteen. She is a divorcee who had left John after two years.

Her numerous relationships have continued since then. She has broken up with Vern,

a pharmacist and has moved to a new flat with the help of Fran, who is in Hiring,

Tenure and Reappointment Committee. Maya drinks her first ‘bourbon’ that night

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because Vern has left for San Francisco. She tells Fran: “All Indian men are wife

beaters”. She means it and does not mean it. “That’s why I married an American”

(99). Reputed for her “indiscretions” Maya has not told Fran the whole truth about her

past.

While talking about the multiplicity of relationship, another interesting unspoken

relationship is that of Ted Suminiski aged 50 and her new landlord living across her

flat. He does not seem to have a family, and every time she is back from the campus

he is busy throwing darts of shooting baskets. Once, while she is on the phone, he

takes an aim at her shadow. Then she thinks that she hears the dart’s metal tip on her

window. Later, when back after an immigrant courtship with Ashok Mehta, she is

served a notice from her landlord who is getting married for the second time. Maya

feels that she may have misread her landlord for the “darts at her window speak of no

twisted fantasy” (111).

The acculturation process has resulted in adapting and acquiring a new identity and

forming of numerous real and imaginary relationships. “Maya has slept with married

men, with nameless men, with men little more than boys, but never with an Indian

man, never” (103).

Maya’s loyalty to the new country manifests itself when she hears Dr. Chatterji, a

teacher in Physics, react to his wife’s nephew Poltoo, a Brahmin, marrying a Negro

Muslim. Bharati Mukherjee tells about Dr. Chatterjee thus:

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He is pompous; he is reactionary, he wants to live and work

in America but give back nothing except taxes. The confused

world of the immigrant – the lostness that Maya and Poltoo

feel – that’s what Dr. Chatterji wants to avoid. (106)

The authorial comment on Maya is:

Maya’s taken some big risks, made a break with her Parent’s

ways. She’s done things a woman from Ballygunje Park

Road doesn’t do, even in fantasies. (100)

Dr. Rabindra Chatterji who invites her home for tea has the expatriate

characteristic of assuming moral and cultural superiority over the host country.

Defending his late arrival and upholding “Indian standard time”, he comments

deprecatingly: “These Americans are all the time rushing and rushing but where it

gets them?” (102) The authorial comment is that his words and manners suggest “that

Maya and Dr. Chatterji have 3000 years plus civilization, sophistication, moral virtue

over people born on this continent” (102).

But Maya is not an expatriate and wants to make it clear. “She’s not against

America and Americans” (103) Maya analyzes Dr. Chatterji and herself. She realizes

suddenly “that Brahmin isn’t a caste, it’s a metaphor. You break one small rule and

the constellation collapses” (106). People like Dr. Chatterji cling to the rules and

traditions because otherwise in their universe things will fall apart, for the centre

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cannot hold. This had happened earlier to Maya too. Her tidy graduate world became

lawless and collapsed when she slept with John Hadven. “All men became John

Hadven; John became all men . . . she lost her moral sense, her judgment, her power

to distinguish” (106-7).

“Jasmine” is a short story in the third person narrative. Jasmine, an enterprising

girl from Trinidad arrived at Detroit via Canada, an illegal immigrant. At first she

stayed with her fellow countrymen, the Daboos, who owned a motel. Later, she

shifted to Ann Arbor and took up a housekeeping job with the Moffitts, Bill and Lara

and their daughter Muffin. She felt happy and proud that “she’d become her own

person” (135).

Though she felt sentimentally nostalgic for her family at Christmas time there were

no regrets about leaving Trinidad. “She missed them. But” (135). Though she cried

with the Daboos, she asked herself, “What for? This is what she wanted to be” (135).

When Lara went on tour with her performing company, Nill seduced Jasmine and

she responded readily. When he called her “Flower of Trinidad,” she retorted saying

“Flower of Ann Arbor not Trinidad” (138).

As they made love on the Turkish carpet, in front of the fire, she thought she was a

bright, pretty girl, with no visa, no papers and no birth certificate. She was a girl

rushing wildly into the future.

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Jasmine, the joyous, energetic immigrant now creates herself a new country and

plunges into new life wholeheartedly. It was as if she was rebuilding herself up from

nothing, an existential task of creating herself in her new country. “It felt so good, so

right, that she forgot all the dreariness of her new life and gave herself up to it” (138).

“Danny’s Girls” and “Burried Lives” talk about the same theme but in a lighter

vein. In the former, American culture helps the protagonist, an adolescent boy of

Indian origin, achieve a measure of self knowledge, through meaningful sexual

relationship.

In the story there is an iterated insistence on the evil days on which the protagonist

has fallen:

My parents had been bounced from Uganda by Idi Amin

and then barred from England by some parliamentary

trickery. Mother’s sister – Aunt Lini sponsored us in the

States . . . My father sat around Lini’s house moaning about

the good old days grumbling about how hard life in America

was . . . My mother sold papers in the subways Kiosks,

twelve hours a day, seven days a week. (141-142)

The protagonist in this story is a thirteen year old boy of Indian origin. His father

was a backward – looking expatriate mourning his past prosperity. All the other

characters in the story – the narrator, his mother, his Aunt Lini, his boss Danny and

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Rosie, a lovely Nepalese immigrant have successfully adapted themselves to the new

life and even exploit it.

Danny, for whom the narrator works, is a hustler who arranges bets, ticket for

concerts, marriages with American girls of Indian origin to Indian men who want

Permanent Resident status in the U.S. for Rs 50,000 each, and marriages with docile

Indian girls for American men who paid $20,000 each. Danny also ran a brothel for

which the narrator worked as a pimp. Danny and the narrator are also middlemen in

their own right like Alfie Judah though on a smaller scale.

The title “Burried Lives” is taken from an Arnold poem and it is poetry that

sustains the protagonist at the beginning. It tells us in a comic mode the quest for

identity of a Tamil school teacher settled in Sri Lanka, named Mr.N.K.S. Venkatesan.

The protagonist is a forty-nine year old Sri Lankan school teacher, who decides to

migrate to Canada illegally, but is forced to stop over at Hamburg where he falls in

love with his landlady Queenie.

The protagonist leads a buried life, “living and partly living”, explicating Arnold’s

“The buried life” inside a St. Joseph’s collegiate classroom. Bharati Mukherjee

explains why Mr. Venkatesan, to whom nothing seems to happen and who is not a

political man, suddenly finds himself caught in the context of political activity

released by Tamil Liberation Tigers.

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Mr. Venkatesan . . . had a large family to look after. He had

parents, once set of grandparents, an aunt who hadn’t been

quite right in the head since four or five boys had signed up

with the Tigers, and three much younger unmarried sisters. . .

. It was to protect his younger sister that he was marching that

afternoon with two hundred baby-faced protesters. (154)

His younger sister is a large, docile girl who, before she got herself mixed up with

the Sporting Association used to embroider napkin and table cloth sets and sell them

to a middleman for export to fancy shops in Canada.

Mr. Venkatesan accidentally injures a Home Guards officer with his axe and life is

not the same after that:

Months later, in a boarding house in Hamburg, Mr.

Venkatesan couldn’t help thinking about the flock of young

monks pressed together behind a police barricade that

eventful afternoon. (146)

If the monks had not chased his sister and knocked her off the pale blue hood of the

car, Mr. Venkatesan would have stayed on in Sri Lanka, in Trinco.

Like the Gloster – subplot in King Lear, Bharati Mukherjee sets up two parallel

quests – the forty nine year old teacher’s thirst for freedom is counterpointed against

that of his sister. From a plain pliant girl she had changed into a fanatic revolutionary

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ferociously in love with a Tiger. According to Mr. Venkatesan, he is a ‘worthless

boy’. And “something harsh and womanly seemed to be happening inside her” (his

sister) (155). It is a kind of metamorphosis, and a creation of a new identity for her.

In his quest for freedom and a fresh identity (not just a school teacher who can

move his students to tears through reciting Arnold) Mr. Venkatesan thinks of

emigrating. “But every country he could see himself being happy and fulfilled in

turned him down” (160). But the force that drives him once again comes from his

sister’s example. “She’d meant to leave home, with or without his permission. She’d

freed herself of family duties and bonds” (163).

In other words, she had found her true identity and acts as a catalyst for the

protagonist’s severing all bonds, finding his true identity. All his life he has dutifully

lived for others and now he wants to live his own life. And so on to Hamburg, a

launching pad for Canada. There is bitter irony in the fact that Canada is still a distant

dream but what matters is the firm step the protagonist has taken towards freedom, a

new life, has escaped from his permanent prison.

When, Mr. Venkatesan was in Hamburg, a German tourist boarding with Queenie

rings up the police about illegal immigration. Queenie saves Mr. Venkatesan by

announcing that she intends to marry him. Queenie shouts at the police: “Leave him

alone!” she yelled to the man from Lubeck. You‘re harassing my fiancé! He’s a future

German citizen. He will become my husband” (176).

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And Mr. Venkatesan is overjoyed. The personal odyssey of Mukherjee from the

position of expatriate to immigrant is reflected in her writings at the thematic level.

This ongoing journey becomes a metaphor for the universal quest from alienation to

integration.

The final story “The Management of Grief” is the story that reminds us of the

Kanishka Tragedy, the plane that crashed, and many lost their lives. The plane was on

its way from Canada to India, near Ireland, when it crashed. The story presents how

Indian women suffer after deaths of their beloveds.

“The Management of Grief” has clearly come out of Bharati Mukherjee’s

scintillating and controversial documentary The Sorrow and the Terror (co-authored

with Clark Blaise) on the crash of Air India flight 182 on 23 June 1985, which killed

329 passengers, most of whom were Canadians of Indian origin.

The story is a first person narrative by Shaila Bhave who lost her husband and two

sons in the Kanishka crash. In addition to Shaila Bhave, the story also highlights the

personal tragedy of other Indian immigrants in Canada – Dr. Ranganathan, Kusum

and an elderly Sikh couple – all of whom were bereaved in the accident. A Canadian

social worker enlists Shaila’s help in reaching out to the families to enable them to

rehabilitate themselves after the tragedy. She confides to Shaila: “In the text books on

grief management, there are stages to pass through; rejection, depression, acceptance,

reconstruction” (192).

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These four stages suddenly become significant in the context of expatriation and

immigration, because they parallel the various phases in the movement from

expatriation to immigration – rejection of the new country and clinging to the past,

depression and a lost feeling, acceptance of the new way of life, plunging into the

present to build a new life for oneself and recreate oneself. Grief management thus

becomes a paradigm of immigration.

Mrs. Bhave has lost her husband, Vikram, and her two sons Vinod and Mithun.

Vinod was fourteen and they were good swimmers. When she with Kusum and Dr.

Ranganathan reaches a bay in Ireland, the place where the accident takes place, she

remembers her happy family: “. . . my husband would take my hand and the boys

would slap water in my face just to see me scream” (185). Love never dies, ever

remains fresh in mind. Struggling with her own grief, Shaila is called upon for

assistance by a local social worker, who has been appointed to help the grieving

families with financial support and counseling. In this way, she finds herself in

contact with some of the most elderly of local Indian community, whose self-imposed

isolation is distressing. There are “some of them (who) speak no English, others,

who’ve never handled money, and still others who have never gone outside their

bedrooms” (183).

One old Sikh couple she visits seems particularly desolate. They are the recent

arrivals in America and they refuse any help that is offered them, mistrusting the

intentions of the social workers, not understanding the legal forms that they need to

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sign, and going so far as to believe that documents which offer them financial

assistance are actually there to extract money.

Of this aloofness and withdrawal, their apartment block becomes symbolic, an

apparently self-contained “little India” surrounded by sari-clad women and cricket-

playing boys, and reeking “of frying ghee” (193) The Sikh couple’s apartment is even

more resonant. The two rooms are dark and stuffy. The lights are off. And an oil lamp

sputters on the coffee table. “The bent old lady has let us in, and her husband is

wrapping a white turban over his oiled, hip-length hair (193).

These people have not paid their utility bills, out of fear and their inability to write

a cheque. Their telephone has already gone “electricity and gas and water are soon to

follow” (193).

The abject domestic space is of course the grave, with its airlessness, coldness and

gloom. The act of cutting oneself off from the vital world around is not merely a

denial of hybridity, but a denial of life itself.

In “The Management of Grief” the Sikhs live a life of patriarchal regulation,

religions convention and ethnic prejudice. Their blunt refusal to “open up to a Hindu

woman” reminds Mrs.Bhave sadly of time and she says, “when we all trusted each

other in this new country, these people don’t” (193). The mono-perspectivist

adherence to the mores of one’s homeland lacks what Said calls the exiles potential

for “contrapuntal” awareness (172).

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Bharati Mukherjee’s characters frequently find themselves “shuttling between

identities” (Jas, 77). In Mrs.Bhave’s journey, it is only through a return to India, and

through a re-immersion in Hindu religious tradition, that she can begin to come to

terms with her loss and find new direction for her life in America.

At the same time, the story offers a Utopian vision of what a society might be like

once all hierarchy and intolerance is renounced. Soon after the plane goes down,

Mrs.Bhave travels to Ireland with other grieving families to watch the rescue workers

searching the waters for survivors. A local newspaper, discovering that it is a Hindu

custom to sprinkle petals on the water in mourning for the dead, entreats its readers to

donate flowers to the Indians, and Shaila Bhave soon finds that the Irish not only

“carry flowers with them” but they “rush to me and give me hugs” (TM,187).

The native determination to absorb aspects of their guests’ culture, their delight in

synergetic identity, is the very antithesis of ethnic bigotry, its beauty and fertility

symbolized by the flowers themselves. The experience forms as important a stage in

Shaila Bhave’s mourning as her later reconnection with Hindu tradition in India.

Mrs. Bhave comes from a traditional Hindu family, where love for her husband is

not openly expressed. When a faithful woman companion comes in contact with a

woman, then only is a husband – wife’s relationship told. Sometimes it is never told.

It does not mean there is no love between the couple, but it is the Indian characteristic

of family life. Mrs. Bhave tells Kusum:

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I never once told him that I love him, . . . I was too much the

well brought up woman. I was so well brought I never felt

comfortable calling my husband by his first name. (181)

On the other hand, Kusum replies, “He knew. My husband knew” (181). Kusum is

also the unfortunate woman who has lost her husband Satish and a little daughter in

the plane disaster. Dr. Ranganathan lost his family. Kusum has still one daughter

Pam. She is a different type of girl. “She dates Canadian boys and hangs out in the

mail, shopping for tight sweaters” (181). For Kusum, the daughter is not a support at

critical time but a problem. Pam is second generation Indo-American girl. Kusum, at

the time of grief, helplessly says to her:“Leave me alone. You know what I want to

do? If I didn’t have to look after you now, I’d hang myself” (182). This is a typical

characteristic of a loving Indian woman to end everything after her beloved has gone.

She also bears the responsibility of looking after the children after the death of her

man. Kusum could get the dead bodies of their beloved. With the bodies, Mrs. Bhave

and she go to India for cremation. But coffins are stopped for investigation purpose.

At that time, Mrs. Bhave strongly opposes: “You bastard! You think we we’re

smuggling contraband in those coffins”. The situation made them thus. In her words,

“Once upon a time we were well brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept

our heads veiled, our voices shy and sweet” (189).

In India, these widows have a different place. Change comes, but it is gradual.

Shaila comes from a progressive family. Mrs.Bhave says about her background:

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My grandmother, the spoiled daughter of a rich Zamindar,

shaved her head with rusty razor blade when she was

widowed at sixteen. My grandmother died of childhood

diabetes when she was nineteen, and she saw herself as

harbinger of bad luck. My mother grew up without parents . .

. . (189)

Shaila’s mother was raised up by an uncle indifferently. Her parents abhor

mindless mortification. The recent past of the family creates an effect on the minds of

the family members. But Mrs. Bhave’s parents mentally supported her. They also

wish she would marry. “They say her husband would not have wanted her to give up

things” (189).

For peace of mind at critical times, Indians seek shelter in the lap of nature, the

mysterious mountains of the Himalayas or the company of saints. Kusum and Mrs.

Bhave follow the path. Kusum leaves the Western world, Toronto, and comes to

Haridwar, the holy place of Hindus. She lives there as an ascetic, like a

sanyashrasham, one of the four Ashrams Hindus believes in. In India, in a Himalayan

village, Kusum has a very emotional experience:

. . . to a hut where a young girl, an exact replica of her

daughter, was fanning coals under the kitchen fire. When she

appeared, the girl cried out. “Ma!” and ran away. (196)

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She remembers her daughters. She also thinks she has seen her husband, Satish.

This is a wife’s faith for her man’s immortality. Mrs. Bhave is also brought by her

mother to a Sadhu, but she has a different experience. In her words, “. . . a sweaty

hand gropes for my blouse. The Sadhu arranges his robe. The lamp was hiss and

sputter out” (190).

All sadhus are not true seekers of spirituality. Some of them are ordinary human

beings and live with human evils. Mrs. Bhave has this experience; this event is taking

place in the temple. After coming out of the temple, her mother finds a change in her

daughter.

Mrs. Bhave leaves India and goes to Canada. She helps Judith Templeton to

provide help to the victimized Indians. Judith is an appointee of the provincial

government. To stand by the needy becomes her life mission. Whatever money her

husband has left, she wishes to use for charity (196). This is a typical Indian

characteristic; when a person can not be a sadhu, he can live like a sadhu. She follows

the path.

The story presents terrorism as not being the solution to any issue. Here, a woman

suffers more than a man when she becomes a victim. Bharati has skillfully portrays

Indian women. Man’s migration and adjustment with the new world is considered as

adventurous or heroic but the same adventures of women are considered from

different angles. A woman suffers in her journey to adjust with the change. Panna

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Patel, Dr. Maya Sanyal, Mrs. Bhave and Kusum are examples. All these women are

first generation immigrants of traditional families.

On the one hand, hybridity is necessary for the host culture, which like the Irish in

“The Management of Grief” needs to transform itself in order to fully accommodate

the migrant, on the other hand, the immigrant must view the selfhood “as a set of fluid

identities”, always seeking an opportunity for reincarnation (Darkness, 3).