Born in a big old Calcutta house on the same night, the wild, tragic night both their fathers were mysteriously lost, Sudha and Anju are cousins. Closer even than sisters, they share clothes, possessions, worries, dreams - and three mothers, who preside over the matriarchal Chatterjee household where the cousins grow up, cocooned in a timeless world of feminine lore. But when Sudha learns a terrible secret about the past, and hides it from her cousin, and then when Anju discovers the sister of her heart is secretly ...
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Born in a big old Calcutta house on the same night, the wild, tragic night both their fathers were mysteriously lost, Sudha and Anju are cousins. Closer even than sisters, they share clothes, possessions, worries, dreams - and three mothers, who preside over the matriarchal Chatterjee household where the cousins grow up, cocooned in a timeless world of feminine lore. But when Sudha learns a terrible secret about the past, and hides it from her cousin, and then when Anju discovers the sister of her heart is secretly nurturing a forbidden love, their mutual loyalty is sorely tested. As the day of leaving school draws near, a family crisis forces the cousins to abandon their university plans, and their mothers swiftly start the serious business of arranging their marriages to the sons of suitable families. And thus the inseparable pair is torn apart: Sudha moves to her new family's home in rural Bengal, while Anju joins her immigrant husband in California. But although they have both been trained to be perfect wives, nothing has prepared them for the great challenges, for the pain as well as the joy, that each will have to face in her new life. Compelling and passionate, rooted in Indian folklore and steeped in the mysticism of ancient tales, this bright, jewel-like novel shines its light on the bonds of family, on love and loss, against a backdrop of the realities of traditional arranged marriages, and the adjustments needed for modern-day life in the West.
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Fair in fair dust jacket. This is a used book. It may contain highlighting/underlining and/or the book may show heavier signs of wear. It may also be ex-library or without dustjacket. This is a used book. It may contain highlighting/underlining and/or the book may show heavier signs of wear. It may also be ex-library or without dustjacket.
"Sister of My Heart" is a novel about an upper-caste family in Calcutta, India, the Chaterjees, and about two women Sudha, a striking beauty and Anju, relatively plain but intelligent and curious. The two share the same birthday and grow up together. Indeed they are inseparable and prefer each others company to the exclusion of others. They grow up in a society of women (the "mothers") who try unsuccessfully to provide to them a life sheltered from modernity and its woes. However, Anju can't be kept from the bookstore her biological mother operates, Sudha can't be kept from the consequences of her beauty, and the two girls growing into adolescence can't be kept from the consequences of simply growing up.
The story is told in chapters with each chapter alternating between the voice of Anju and Sudha. The fathers of the two girls disappeared and presumably died before their birth on a wild scheme to find a ruby mine in the jungles of India.
Through adolescence and into adulthood, the two become inseparable -- close through the many bad times and the few good times. Both Anju and Sudha have marriages arranged for them with the mothers concern for their well-being and the downward turn of their families fortunes and health.
Sudha stays in Calcutta with her engineer of a husband who is dominated by his mother. In marrying the mother's choice, Sudha forsakes Asoka, her seeming true love whom she met in a movie theater and who wants to marry her. Anju travels to the United States where she pursues, as agreed to by her husband, a college education.
The plotting of the book is implausible, as are its twists and turns. The book also is also full of coincidences which detract from the story and from any sense of characterization or purpose.
Partly because of the elaborate nature of the plot, the characterization of Sudha and Anju is, in my opinion, very weak. They can do no wrong, Sudha with her beauty, Anju with her intellect, and the two of them with their love for each other. They are products, the author would have us believe, of an Indian society in transition between traditionalism, which the book sees almost exclusively in terms of male domination, and modernity, again described almost exclusively in terms approaching American feminism.
In addition to its unconvincing story line and weak characterization, I didn't like this book because of its feminist stereotyping and its judgmental, hostile character to Indian society, (American society as well) and to men. For most of the book they are portrayed as bullies and bores, concerned only with sex and with using women as objects. Sudha and Anju, in turn, are presented as pure hearted, as perceptive, and as victims.
The portrait is not convincingly done and it is overly obvious. It made me angry with the book. There are nuances with the development of the plot but they are insufficient to override the general male-bashing and society-bashing.
I tried to think of an appropriate way to express what I found wanting in the book. Here it is, put simply. There is another Calcutta than that that we are given here and it is the Calcutta of Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa is reputed to have said "If you judge people, you will have no time to love them." Her statement captures much of what I find troublesome in this novel. For all their love for each other and their thwarted ambitions, Sudha and Anju, and for the most part their novelistic creator, are judgmental and partial to others. They have no sympathy for India, for men, or for the promise of America either beyond the bounds of a strident feminism. They view people through the lenses of their own ideas exclusively and can't see others or sympathize with them as others see themselves or as Sudha and Anju themselves wish to be treated.
These are the reasons I can't recommend this novel. I have a hard time imagining a male reading the book with pleasure. It is a difficult read, ornately plotted, poorly characterized, and written, in my view, in a spirit of undue judgment and criticism.
