When she arrived in this country from India in 1976, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s initial glimpse of the United States came right here in Chicago. And her first impression?
“It was just at the end of winter — about the same time of year as right now,” she recalled. “It was very cold. I thought I would freeze immediately, like Lot’s wife — but in a different way.”
Yet the woman who went on to write several acclaimed novels, poetry collections and children’s books didn’t sit around complaining. “I would go to the Art Institute and spend the whole day, looking at all the beautiful paintings.”
Even in the midst of discomfort and uncertainty, then, she sought the simple, accessible pleasure of art — a gesture that is repeated by many of the characters in her stories, stories that often deal with the immigrant experience, in works such as “Queen of Dreams” (2004), “Sister of My Heart” (1999), “The Mistress of Spices” (1997) and the short story collections “The Unknown Errors of Our Lives” (2001) and “Arranged Marriage” (1995).
Divakaruni will be interviewed at 6 p.m. Monday in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St., by literary critic and radio host Donna Seaman, as part of Columbia College Chicago’s Story Week Festival. The event is free and open to the public.
Her latest novel, “The Palace of Illusions” (Doubleday) hearkens back to the Indian epic “The Mahabharata,” yet also has relevance to today’s world, Divakaruni said in an interview from her home near Houston.
“It’s the story of a princess, one woman, who is in many ways a timeless and universal figure,” the author said. “What she struggles with — love, family secrets, the role of women in the world — people from all cultures can relate to. What do you do when you love someone who’s inaccessible to you?”
Those topics seem to have been snatched from a blog posting five minutes ago. “Things don’t change very much, even in five or six thousand years,” Divakaruni agreed with a chuckle.
Linking the old with the new, the familiar with the exotic, is a goal of her fiction, she said. “The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ I didn’t have any problem. There was something archetypal in the power of the stories. There is something in human beings that loves stories.”
Novels by Indian-born authors are increasingly popular in both Europe and the United States because, Divakaruni speculated, “a culture like India is so old, so complex, that it is good material for fiction.”
She has begun two projects for children, Divakaruni said. “I took a little break after ‘The Palace of Illusions,’ to clear my head. But now I’m working on a picture book in which I’m retelling one of my favorite childhood tales of Bengal, where I grew up, that my grandfather told me. The other one is about a dystopic future world. The theme is that if we don’t take care of our environment, our beautiful Earth, it won’t be beautiful much longer.”
And that catastrophe, of course, would transcend every border ever created.
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