I'm delighted to be in Tucson.
I know it's raining, but I was born during the monsoon
season in Kolkata.
So rain isn't going to prevent me
from enjoying a tour of both the city
and the surroundings tomorrow and getting to know some of you
in the colloquium, the next generation of writers.
I knew from age three that I was going
to be a writer because I came from the kind of neighborhood
in Kolkata where if you don't know by age two or three what
you're going to be, you will be told what you're going to be
or your life is doomed to failure.
What I didn't know though growing up as Clark
has said in fiction scavenging from real life
in that household of 40 to 50 people
that I was going to be an American writer or writer
of a globalized world.
The world that I grew up in doomed
us to be in the same neighborhood
among very homogeneous people speaking only uniquely Bengali
and following the same kind of social codes
and political leanings.
But fate or the serendipitous nature of one's life
landed me in Iowa at the Writers Workshop.
When I was 20 years old and again
fate or serendipitousness made me fall in love
with a man with blue eyes sitting in the row behind me.
How I saw his blue eyes from when he was behind
I don't know.
And after a two week courtship I got married.
And as a result during a lunch break by the way,
while you're having soup and sandwich we said, well,
why not?
And we went to a lawyer's office around the corner
and in five minutes I came down the stairs
as Mrs. Blaise instead of Miss Mukherjee.
Well, as a result of that impulsive act which
now is about 39 years ago, I lost the culture
and gained a wholly new vibrant world.
What has I discovered over book--
a couple of books and over decades
is that what fuels my writing, what
fuels my passion as a citizen of the world
and citizen of a country is the rerouting from one
set of beliefs, being uprooted and then being
transplanted into another.
And so I have chosen to read two little excerpts
from "Desirable Daughters" and one very short story
in order to show the different ways in which
different characters choose to deal
with the fact of voluntary transplantation.
Iowa was mentioned by Fenton in his marvelous introduction,
an introduction which made me feel like a world class writer.
So I want to take that introduction
and take it back with me.
But Iowa is where sitting on a very gloomy day in a farmhouse
at a very low point in my life, low in spirits,
low in finances.
I received from our mentor and teacher
Bernard Malamud early copy of his selected stories
which was showing me inadvertently,
again fate or serendipitous of life
sent this book to me at just the right moment.
And the book showed me how the Jewish American community
of writers of Bellows', Malamud's,
Roth's generations had also dealt
with similar kinds of transitions, adjustments
that had to be made.
And that suddenly was such an inspiration,
but my writing took off in a very, very different direction
than it might have if I had thought
of myself as a post-colonial expatriate stranded
by an accidental, impulsive, hormonal surge in North
America.
So the first little clip is from the narrator's point
of view of Desirable Daughters.
She's 36 years old.
She's been well brought up in Kolkata in a fancy family.
She's been married off through arrangements
by parents to a very successful engineer who comes to Stanford
and who makes a lot of money in Silicon Valley,
but who the narrator Tara leaves because she's pursuing
personal happiness in her perhaps
misguided concept of what it means to be American.
And so she's working as a teacher's aide
in elementary school or preschool
in the upper Haight area of San Francisco.
"There was a message waiting for me at school on Monday morning.
Bogside special ordered for the first grade.
I handled the multicultural acquisitions
as a school voluntee--were being held for me at the bookstore
down on the Haight.
I can't teach lacking the certificate,
but I do need time and money.
The little kids are 90% Asian, Latino, and African-American.
The teachers at least during the two years
that I volunteered here are all European Americans.
The rhetoric of modern San Francisco makes me invisible.
I'm not Asian which is reserved for what in outdated textbooks
used to be called Oriental.
I am all things.
When the little kids climb on my lap to be read to or just
listen to, I don't think they see
me as anything different from their parents or the school
nurse or their teachers.
I thrive on this invisibility.
It frees me to make myself over by the hour.
In the last municipal election it empowered me to canvass
enthusiastically for a gay Chicano candidate running
on his work in homeless shelters, needle
exchanges, and AIDS screening.
There's no explaining this collusion
with the other anywhere in my background,
yet I'm still too timid to feed my Bengali identity
into the kitchen garburator.
That dusty identity is as fixed as any specimen in a doctor's
glass case confidently labeled by my father's religion, Hindu;
caste, Brahmin; sub caste, Kulin; mother tongue, Bengali;
place of birth, Kolkata, formative region
of ancestral origin, Mishtigunj,
East Bengal; education, postgraduate and professional;
and social attitudes, conservative.
Playing with the pre-school children who
teach me nursery rhymes and languages I don't speak
or inside the bookstore on Haight street
where I immerse myself in heavy terms of history or science
or cosmology, I feel not just invisible but heroically
invisible, a border crashing claimant
of all people's legacies.
The moment I step outside the bookstore
onto crowded Haight street, I lose the heady kinship
with the world that I feel through my reading.
Nobody pays attention to me other than to ask
for spare change or press a hand bill to my closed fist.
I'm not the only blue jeaned woman with the pashmina
shawl around my shoulders and broken down running shoes
on my feet.
I'm not the only Indian on the block.
All the same I stand out I'm convinced.
I don't belong here despite my political leanings.
Worse, I don't want to go on.
Tourist buses mostly German and Japanese
still stop at Haight-Ashbury to take pictures of the street
sign and of hippies.
The free spirits, the revolutionaries, the flower
children dropouts have grown up, grown old, maybe grown bitter.
The tourists snap away all the same.
The street people pose often profanely
and scrounge for money.
And he is Tara's lover who is a Hungarian immigrant, ex biker,
ex Buddhist and husband.
Andy, who keeps shocking me with little disclosures of his pre
Buddhist youth, spent sweet times,
he says, on the Haight 30 years ago,
more and bigger than a hippie, he
says, a distinction I'm unlikely to be able to clarify.
To me, there is a small army of America's Untouchables,
a mockery of everything immigrant behavior stands for.
For every Bish Chatterjee, that's my husband,
there's a cluster of green haired waifs
with pit bulls outside the new kiddie Gap
and Starbucks begging for cigarettes and drug money.
I feel guilt and sorrow when I walk past them,
but a few blocks later rage takes over.
The marginality is rooted in the deep and profound ownership
that I will never know.
The families in Atherton who worked their way
to the big houses behind iron gates and posted guards
could lose it all in a single minute."