US-based author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni likes to set her books in places where she actually lived and her latest work "Before We Visit the Goddess", a three-generational immigrant story about mothers and daughters, spans from Bengal and Assam to California and Texas.
She also uses this particular form for the first time - a novel in stories, where each chapter is a complete story but is related to the other in a particular way.
The particular language, the prose each one uses has to be different and relate to the character, she says.
"Before We Visit the Goddess", published by Simon & Schuster, is about three generations of mothers and daughters who discover their greatest source of strength in one another.
The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but due to her family's situation college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single, unforgiveable misstep.
Years later, Sabitri's daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.
As the marriage crumbles and Bela is forced to forge her own path, she unwittingly imprints her own child, Tara, with indelible lessons about freedom, heartbreak, and loyalty that will take a lifetime to unravel.
"Writing about women has been very important for me for a long time. Many of my books have women protagonists," says Divakaruni, a McDavid professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
She started thinking about this novel after her mother passed away.
"So I was really thinking about our relationship and the heritage she's passed on to me, what is the heritage I am trying to pass onto my children. Out of that came this three-generational story which is not autobiographical but just follows my concerns.
"One part of my concern is what it means to be a successful woman. Does that meaning change from one generation to the next? Does it change when we move from one culture to another? This book explores these ideas which I think is a timely theme for India and America and probably other cultures also. It's something women need to think about," Divakaruni told PTI in an interview.
The characters in "Before We Visit the Goddess" are fictional.
"What are most autobiographical in my books are the
locales because I always like to set my books in places where I have actually lived. The landscape should be authentic. I believe setting is very important as places affect the characters. The places where the women in the book have lived are the ones where I also lived. Otherwise the book is all fictional, all imaginary," she says.
However, she says, one of the challenges was to make important things happen at these places - West Bengal, Assam, California and Texas. Divakaruni was born in Kolkata and her father worked in one of the oil companies in Assam. She's now based in Texas.
Language, according to her, is very important, so is the particular kind of prose chosen and the images.
"Each of these women when they were young was told certain sayings and proverbs. These proverbs stuck in their minds and have had an effect on the view of what a woman should be and what are the choices available to them.
"So that's one of the things I do in this book. And it also has an immigrant theme as it is moving from India to America and is showing the different challenges women have, depending on the different landscape in which they live," she says.
When asked which of the characters she felt was the strongest, Divakaruni says, "Each of the character is strong in her own way but probably the grandmother Sabitri is the strongest because she's the one who has to deal with the biggest challenges earliest in life.
"Bela and Tara also have their challenges but most of these are self-created problems where Sabitri has to deal with larger social issues.
Divakaruni has penned 16 books, including "Oleander Girl", "The Mistress of Spices", "Sister of My Heart", "Palace of Illusions" and "One Amazing Thing". "The Mistress of Spices" and "Sister of My Heart" have been adapted into movies,
Asked if "Before We Visit the Goddess" can be a movie plot, she says, "It would be a very dramatic story as locations are very interesting - from old Kolkata to wild landscape of Assam to California and Texas and also the women characters are very strong.
