IndiaPost.com - Chitra Divakaruni - Sorceress of storytelling

India Post News Service

Chitra Divakaruni is one of the most seductive of story tellers of our time. In her re-imagining othe epic Mahabharata, she uses the main source text as a swirl of reference points in mining the core of characters in her latest book The Palace of Illusions.

The book is a sprawling story, a breathtaking saga, fierce, contradictory, and full of betrayals, secrets, revenge, conscience, and justice. All the elements fuse and resonate, as Chitra Divakaruni fits them together, layer by layer, mystery on mystery, with words tangled and suffused with lyricism, wisdom, poetry and dizzying truths. Set sometime between 600BCE and 5000 BCE, the story has parallels of today's warring nations, and mankind's history of violence.

The bloody battle of Kurukshetra is central to the plot as Chitra examines the personal and political motivations for the war. The horrors of war are only too human. Giving a new interpretation to the character of Draupadi who is known as Panchaali in the book, the author begins with her birth, by itself a dramatic, fiery one, where voices predict that Panchaali will change the course of history. In the course of the years, Panchaali, beautiful and intelligent, battered by the forces of history, reclaims the birthright of her five, heroic Pandava husbands, defies the expectations of her mother in law, nurtures her passion for Karna, is intensely aware of a complex relationship with Krishna, and tries to manipulate fate.

The story of Princess Panchaali is meticulously built in the first person voice and her unconventional marriage and her decisions lead up to the destruction of the Third Age of Man. Divakaruni admirably skirts tediousness and makes the novel an emotionally satisfying one as she juggles suspense and psychological drama revealing what we already know of the familiar story. And we do know the epic includes, lust, love, marital relationships, conflicts, wars, magic, redemption, forgiveness and immortality.

Chitra's inspired work is not a pop up book style fantasy sequence, it is written with a literary flair, a sweeping musicality, and vivid story telling engulfing our senses and resonating long after we have turned over the last page of the book The Palace of Illusions took her four years to write and has so many intertwining stories, but Chitra is focused and determined to tell the story from a woman's point of view. She weaves fiction out of the poetic Mahabharata.

For a number of years, she has been reading novels about ancient literatures including Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad based on Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, Marion Zimmer Bradley's, the Mists of Avalon retelling the Arthurian legends from a woman's perspective. The many strands of plots are interwoven in a compelling, hypnotic manner playing out like a thriller as she makes the connection between war and the individual, and scarily vivid.

The author's skillfulness in mesmerizing us comes close to something extraordinary. We are submerged in Panchaali's thoughts, emotions and passion, we face Kunti the mother of the Pandava brothers a strong and single minded woman, Gandhari the wife of a sightless king who chooses to blindfold herself upon her marriage so that she will not be above her husband in physical powers.

But is Paanchali a mythic character or a complex, vivid and inventive woman of our time secretly in love with a sixth man, the mysterious warrior king Karna? Is Kunti the harsh mother in law or a woman trapped by personal history? Is Gandhari as sacrificial and powerless as she appears to be? In this magical world peopled by gods, sages, and demons, Divakaruni reveals that the world is spiritual in nature as she explores the universe which exists in many levels.

In an interview, Chitra has said that Panchaali had always been the most interesting and unusual character since she was the catalyst for the great war and perhaps the one who suffered the most as a result of it. "I feel that there was more to her story than the usual male-centric readings allowed," she said. "Quick tempered, immensely proud, headstrong, Machiavellian when necessity calls for it-she's larger than life but definitely human-and I hope the readers will find her sympathetic."

And what of the title, Palace of Illusions? It is a place beautiful and nightmarish. In the same interview, Chitra said that the novel was full of illusions and palaces. 'Panchaali has many illusions about who she is- and so do the other characters.

Are the men's ideas about heroism and war illusory? Is what Panchaali believes about romantic love an illusion?" The book is a brilliant classic and I hope one day Chitra Divakaruni would write about Sita, Parvati, Durga, Damayanti and the hundreds of women characters who people our epics and till now have had their emotions and roles portrayed only when they affected the lives of male heroes, warriors and gods.

Chitra Divakaruni has had an exceptional writing career. Her novels, Mistress of Spices, Sister of my Heart, prize winning collections, Arranged Marriage, The Unknown Errors of our Lives, have won many awards.

Her work has been translated into 20 languages and included in over 70 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has also written poems, Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City and a children's book The Conch Bearer.

She lives in Houston, Texas and teaches at the University of Houston where she is the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Creative Writing.