It was an unusual morn. Sunny and crisp-clear for a change. Rhapsodical for a panacea. She settled into a chair in her room. The woozy noise of vehicles and spectacle of the Manhattan skyscrapers outside didn’t bother her reverie. Closing the eyes, tuning into the energy in the room, she felt safe, nurtured, as if wrapped in a soft cocoon. Past no longer appeared demonic; the moorings not painful anymore. It wasn’t resuscitation; it was resurrection evermore. ‘I’m one of you now’– she confessed honestly.
Indian born, but no more Indian now. Adopting a foreign citizenship, she became one among the strangers. India lost nothing for it had never found her. Brain drain is not new to it. And she, as a literary genius, got it early and packed herself off forever.
She’s Bharati Mukherjee—the one who bagged the American National Book Critics Circle award (NBCC) in late eighties for her piece of ‘realistic’ fiction The Middleman and Other Stories. Reviewers compared her to greats like John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov, another immigrant, whose Lolita was also a paean to America. Catapulted into the same genre as third world prodigies like V S Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, she had the cheek to proclaim herself as an American with no hankering for the ‘glorious’ Indian heritage. Says she, “Now America is more real to me than India. India—especially the Hindu religion—has given me a way of looking at things, but India is part of a past that I am proud of but my life is here. I need to belong. America matters to me. It is not that India failed me—rather America transformed me. The letting go of India was very traumatic, but to hang on willy-nilly to an outdated image of the country you’ve left is to insulate yourself” (Special Issue, India today).
Earlier when Bharati wrote her first novel The Tiger’s Daughter in 1971, she had a mawkish attitude of projecting realities. The Tiger’s Daughter was a woman who marries outside her culture and knows that her life is permanently located in the US but whose emotional life is lived in India. At that time, Bharati had two perfectly balanced worlds, drawing on both ambidextrously. She hadn’t lost one and hadn’t totally immersed herself in the other. She could see the world she had left as intact but she was far away enough to write about it.
The evolution, somehow, occurred. The Middleman is about the transition, between two cultures. At ease in both, yet having to negotiate the minefields of being in the middle—being a wheeler-dealer. It is a book about the new America. Even as immigrant themes has been the one and only thread that runs firmly through her literary career, Bharati as a woman has found her true identity with only The Middleman. The identity that she claims coincided with her discovery of herself as an American.
Besides, her book broke the ground vis-à-vis the confrontation between the Third World and the First which has escaped the attention of most of American authors. The subject of Bharati’s book is something surprisingly contemplative and vital. Making her motley characters come alive, she voyages through different immigrant minds to almost hear their accents and smell their ambitions. She may not sound nostalgic about her roots—the one she disowned so calmly—but her writings divulge how she has tracked down her alter ego in various characters who careen through her earthly stories.
In 2017, Bharati passed away to other world, never to return from. Married to Canadian writer Clark Blaise, she is survived by a son. Bharati also taught writing at Columbia University and Queens College.
Determined not to look back, she was perhaps well-aware of the fate that Nirad Chaudhuri met as an ‘unknown Indian’. And yet, she empathized with her lost roots! Perhaps it is not so much what people do in this world as their reasons for doing it, which really makes a difference. Sacrifices are not as important as the reasons for which you sacrifice, and then hold no regrets, no remorse.
Bharati did it well. And only few like her can do it that way!