Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, On Voice in Fiction

00:08 [Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni] One of the big concerns that I have in Sister of My Heart is the use of voice. Most of my other pieces, whether it's just short story in "Arranged Marriage" or whether it's the entire novel of The Mistress of Spices, it's mostly from one point of view. But in this one I wanted the novel to be

00:30 equally Sudha's and Anju's, the two sisters who love each other so deeply and in such a mysterious way. So I wanted to create Sudha's voice very strongly and differently from Anju, to make it very different from Anju's. And I thought I'd read you a little passage from each of them. Sudha is the dreamer, she's the beautiful one, she's the one who listens to the old stories and thinks a lot about them and imagines herself as part of them.

01:00 Anju is the rebel, the iconoclast, the one who's breaking all the boundaries, or at least wants to break all the boundaries, the one who's always refusing to follow the status quo. So the first part is from the beginning of Sister of My Heart in Sudha's voice.

01:24[Passage reading] They say in the old tales that the first night after a child is born, the Bidhata Purush comes down to earth himself to decide what its fortune is to be. That is why they bathe babies in sandalwood water and wrap them in soft red malmal, color of luck. That is why they leave sweetmeats by the cradle. Silver-leafed sandesh, dark pantuas floating in golden syrup, jilipis orange as the heart of a fire, glazed with honey-sugar. If the child is especially lucky, in the morning it will all be gone.

02:00 "That's because the servants sneak in during the night and eat them," says Anju, giving her head an impatient shake as Abha Pishi oils her hair. This is how she is, my cousin, always scoffing, refusing to believe. But she knows, as I do, that no servant in all of Calcutta would dare eat sweets meant for a god. The old tales say this also: In the wake of the Bidhata Purush come the

02:30 demons, for that is the world's nature, good and evil mingled. That is why they leave an oil lamp burning. That is why they place the sacred tulsi leaf under the baby's pillow for protection. In richer households, like the one my mother grew up in, she has told us, they hire a brahmin to sit in the corridor and recite auspicious prayers all night. "What nonsense," Anju says. "There are no demons."

03:00 I am not so sure.

03:02 That's Sudha's voice. And here is -- at this point in the story, Sudha and Anju are about 8 years old, and here is a little bit from the beginning of Anju's chapter.

03:16 [Passage reading] Some days in my life I hate everyone. I hate Aunt Nalini for constantly telling Sudha and me about how good girls should behave, which is exactly the opposite of whatever we're doing at the

03:30 moment. I hate the endless stories she insists on repeating about her childhood. I know those stories aren't true--no one could possibly be so virtuous, especially not her. Worst of all is when she makes up little rhymes with morals tagged onto them. Good daughters are bright lamps, lighting their mothers' name; wicked daughters are firebrands, scorching the family's fame.

04:00 I hate her friends, all those waistless women with their hair pulled back in greasy buns who gather every afternoon in our drawing room to drink liters and liters of tea and eat too many sweets and show off their jewelry and knit sweaters with complicated ugly designs. And gossip, which is what they've really come to do.

04:24 And so Anju is going to go through the list of all the people she knows and how much she hates them, and then she will say, "But never Sudha. I could never hate Sudha. Because she is my other half. The sister of my heart. I can tell Sudha everything I feel and not have to explain any of it. She'll look at me with those big unblinking eyes and smile a tiny smile, and I'll know she understands me perfectly. Like no one else in the entire world does. Like no one else in the entire world will."

...

05:00 What I found was very helpful for me as a writer was to stop at the end of each chapter. In fact, I had to do it, I couldn't go from one chapter to the next. And I had to close my eyes and visualize this person and how she would move and her gestures and the expressions on her face. And when I did that, then I found that I could hear the rhythms of how they would speak also. And then I just tried to follow that.