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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who was born in India, is an award-winning poet and writer who is also a co-founder (and past president) of MAITRI, a helpline for South Asian women.

In 1995, her short story collection Arranged Marriage was awarded the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewer Award for Fiction, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Her fourth poetry collection, Leaving Yuba City, was published by Anchor in August of 1997. Her first novel Mistress of Spices was released by Anchor in 1998. Another novel, Sister of my Heart, was released in February 1999 by Bantam Doubleday Dell. The Unknown Error of Our Lives: Stories was published in April 2001.

Her newest novel is Vine of Desire: A Novel (Doubleday: Jan. 2002)

Profile by Arthur J. Pais
Feb. 1999
Arthur Pais is a New York-based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in many of the top U.S. and South Asian publications. He teaches writing at the New School and Marymount Manhattan College. See profile of Arthur Pais.

Long before she founded Maitri, a women's self-service group in San Francisco, and before she wrote her magical 1997 novel, "The Mistress of Spices," Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was intrigued and fascinated by the bond between women

"I have been watching how Indian women were forced to do certain things - as the stories of sacrifice and devotion in the mythology demand from them," Divakaruni says, taking a break from her teaching chore at the University of Houston. "And then there are inspiring stories about women like the Rani of Jhansi that offer women refreshing role models - and the strength to fulfill their own destinies."

And now in "Sister of My Heart," Divakaruni, poet, teacher, wife, and mother of two boys, continues mining the imaginary lives of her characters, exploring their world of duty and sacrifice. She also introduces them to the world of self-fulfillment.

"Hers is one of the most strikingly lyrical voices writing about the lives of Indian women today," says novelist Amitav Ghosh in a pre-release review. And the influential Publishers Weekly in a starred review calls Divakaruni "an inspired and imaginative raconteur." And like her previous novel, "The Mistress of Spices," which was translated into 12 languages and is being filmed for a division of Walt Disney - and "Arranged Marriage," a collection of stories, the new novel has "emotions that are very recognizable," says fellow novelist Rosellen Brown.

Friendship with women were very important to Chitra Banerjee when she grew up in Calcutta, and then moved to Dayton, Ohio, to study at Wright State University in 1977. In Dayton, she would meet Murthi Divakaruni, brother of her close friend, and marry him a few years later. Her husband, who is an engineer, is also her best friend, faithful reader and critical angel, she says. "He understands women as few men do," she says in her gentle, flowing voice.

Divakaruni knew from her Wright State days that there were hundreds of interesting stories in her own life - and those of her friends that needed to be retold in poems ("Leaving Yuba City") and prose. But first she had to learn something about America - and the Indian immigrants living there. "There were not that many Indians, so I was a curiosity," she recalls her student days in Dayton. "When I walked down the streets in a sari or salwar kameez, people would stop their cars and whisper and point." She laughs at her own misconceptions of America. "I came to the plain fields of Ohio with pictures painted by Hollywood movies and the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller… None of them had much to say -- if at all - about Dayton, Ohio."

It was a different world in California where she would earn a doctorate in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley. "The (San Francisco) Bay Area is definitely the best part of this country and is most cosmopolitan and the most multicultural," she says of her home for nearly 20 years - she moved to Houston about six months ago. But there was also sadness for her in California. For she began to discover that there were hundreds of fellow expatriate women who were trapped in abusive marriages or relationships or who did not know how to cope with the more free-wheeling Western society.

Many years later, when she plotted "The Mistress of Spices," her protagonist will also fear and care for the expatriates and other hurt people. Maitri, she says, also taught women how to be self-sufficient and acquire the skills to meaningfully live in America. "Many women who came to Maitri needed to know simple things like opening a bank account or getting citizenship," she says, nodding her head in disbelief. "Some of them had lived in America for a decade but knew no life outside their homes.". They also need to have friends to share their emotions - just the way Divakaruni's literary characters do. "Many women in Maitri spoke English," she explained in an interview with San Francisco Examiner. "But their English was functional rather than emotional they needed someone who understands their problems and speaks their language.."

Chitra, daughter of an Esso oil company officer, wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps and be a teacher. While her mother taught kindergarten and elementary classes, Divakaruni taught English and multicultural literature at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills in California. She became serious about writing about 10 years ago when she joined a writing group in Berkeley and went on to publish four books of poetry. She also edited two cross-cultural anthologies, "Multitude" and We, Too, Sing America." "In many ways, being an expatriate increased my desire to write for publications that were not confined to academia," Divakaruni says. "Expatriates have powerful and poignant experiences when they live away from their original culture -and this becomes home, but never quite, and then you can't really go back and be quite at home there either. "So you become a kind of outsider to both cultures. This is very good for writers-to be in a position of looking in from the outside "

While she enjoyed doing her dissertation on Christopher Marlowe and studying Renaissance literature at Berkeley, she was also "feeling very dissociated from life." "I needed to do something intellectually connected to my life as an immigrant woman in America." She wonders whether she would have also thought seriously about fiction had her husband remained cool to her poems but marveled at her story ideas. "I realized then that fiction is in a way more gratifying to write because it appeals to a wide range of people." "Poetry often scares people, I think," she adds with a big chuckle.

Her publisher, Doubleday, is giving a high profile treatment to her newest book. Starting Feb 20, it is sending Divakaruni to more than 20 cities to publicize her book. Similar publicity for "The Mistress of Spices" netted rich results for Doubleday. The book, which was hailed by international best- selling novelist Pat Conroy "as a splendid novel," was on the bestseller lists in California for over a year. Its recognition brought her invitations to write poems and short stories for such publications as The New Yorkers and Harper's.

She chafes when some readers - often Indians - ask her if she writes with Western readers in mind who want to read either about an exotic and mythical India or about a deprived India.

"I have always loved writers from other cultures who create a world where I may not know every single reference but I understand the feel of it," she said last year in discussing the magical realism in "The Mistress of Spices."

She offers her readers a window into the multicultural world of her characters, she says. "I have no particular reader in my mind but a passionate desire to tell a honest, moving story," she adds. "If it is good literature, I know as all sensitive writers know, the reader and the writer will connect. It is inevitable."

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