Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  I attended the trial, which was held in a cramped, dusty courtroom in Delhi. The accused man had the reputation of being a flamboyant escape artist, so the security staff was on high alert, and the tension in the small courtroom was acute. The hearings were mesmerizing. The prisoner cut a compelling figure. He was a short, slight, muscular man with fiery eyes and an arrogant manner. In spite of his heavy shackles, he dominated the hearings. For the first and only time in my life, I felt that I was in the presence of evil in that courtroom. I was repelled, outraged, frightened, and, at the same time, fascinated.

  Q: Was it difficult to write about something so disturbing?

  BM: It has taken me twenty years to transform that disturbing personal encounter with evil into a novel. Art works in mysterious ways to soothe our nightmares.

  That wasn’t the only difficulty. The first draft of this novel was stolen in 1994. Burglars vandalized my Manhattan apartment and took every portable thing of value, including my laptop. I hadn’t made a back-up disk. I hadn’t even made a hard copy of that draft.

  Q: How did you start writing again?

  BM: I was so traumatized that for two months I couldn’t face reconstructing that stolen draft. And then, on a hot July afternoon in Saratoga Springs, I experienced a miraculous emotional breakthrough. I heard Debby’s voice. She spoke the first page and a half of part one. After that, Debby took over, as had Jasmine and Hannah in my two preceding novels. She surprised me. She became my alternate self, the “what if …?” self. The pace, the language, the events—all were dictated by Debby. I suppose that sounds a little crazy, but it’s the way I’ve always written fiction.

  Q: What made you think to investigate such a disturbing, personal encounter with evil through the lens of a Hindu myth?

  BM: I wrote the story of Goddess Devi in the prologue to provide a template for reading the novel. I hoped the prologue would allow the reader to react to Debby/Devi’s actions. In the myth I use, Devi the goddess slays the Buffalo Demon because she is charged with that mission by the Cosmic Spirit. The Cosmic Spirit makes her its agent for ridding the world of evil on that occasion. I intended for all of Debby/Devi’s experiences to be interpreted by the reader as visitations from God. Characters like Wyatt, Frankie Fong, the blond in the Spider Veloce, and Ham operate in a larger than real way. They are guardian-corrupters; they are demigods, innocent as Greek gods, untouched by the suffering they cause. They operate outside normal laws. They don’t consider the consequences that their actions have on other people’s lives. Jess, Debby’s biological mother, is villainous on a pettier, more human scale. She is just a flower child gone nasty.

  That story of the Goddess Devi—also known as Maha Devi or the Great Goddess—is also very much a part of my personal experience. It is recited with great feeling in Sanskrit during the most important Bengali Hindu religious festival. I can still hear my father, who was a scientist and the founder of a successful pharmaceutical company, chanting this musical passage about Goddess Devi slaying the Buffalo-Demon in his clear-toned, authoritative voice.

  Q: The myth originates in India but plays itself out in the United States. Is it difficult for you to work with myth in this cross-cultural way?

  BM: Using myths in cross-cultural ways came to me quite naturally and organically. In these days of megascale diaspora, when whole peoples are crossing borders because of better job opportunities or wars, cross-cultural applications of myths seem the most appropriate way to go. Myths embody archetypes, which is why they speak to all of us no matter what our ethnicity. I don’t have to be a pagan Greek in order to empathize with Oedipus. You don’t have to be a Hindu Indian to recognize the part that Devi the goddess is asked to play in the struggle between good and evil. As a student of world myths, I see how much in common—in terms of emotional and moral struggles—myths from different cultures have.

  Q: Did it feel natural, then, to weave together a Hindu myth and a Greek myth in Leave It to Me?

  BM: That presented an unusual challenge. The conflict that I had to resolve in synthesizing a Hindu myth and a Greek myth in Leave It to Me was this: Greek mythology, according to scholars like Edith Hamilton, places humans at the center of the story whereas Hindu mythology places destiny at the center. My solution: Debby is convinced that she is at the center of her universe, but the reader—having started out with the prologue—is always aware of divine providence.

  Q: How does Leave It to Me rewrite the Eleetra myth?

  BM: Myths are renewed each time we retell them. And depending on who is doing the telling of a myth, to what kind of an audience, and at what moment in history, that myth is interpreted in new ways. Poets like Homer, Aeschylus, and Ovid could take the same story, keep the cast of characters and the plot intact, but suggest very different motivations for what the characters do.

  What I took from the Electra myth was the seriously dysfunctional family. The Electra myth comes out of the stories about the House of Atreus. You get endless, vengeful, in-family adultery, cuckolding, betrayal, murder, the dismembering of little children, and even a bit of cannibalism. I know, I know, Greek mythic tales are full of violence! The mother-father-daughter triangle is at the core of the original myth. In my novel, I found myself working with three separate such triangles, because Debby has a biological father, an adoptive father, and, in Ham, a lover who she wishes had married her mother and so had become her natural father.

  Q: You recognize the violence in Greek myths. Leave It to Me is just as violent. Why?

  BM: As in the original Electra myth, my mother-father-daughter characters are not afraid of committing mayhem. Debby/Devi pulls off a couple of disturbingly violent deeds. For me, the important question is whether Debby/Devi is a callous arsonist and killer or a facilitator of divine justice.

  I also wanted the violence to be emblematic of the violence in the real world. Just one small example: These days we can’t board a plane without going through a metal detector. As in real life, some of the violence in the novel is caused by malevolent people. But there’s another kind of violence that intrigues me more. I’m thinking of earthquakes, tornadoes, typhoons, floods, wildfires. Debby is violent in the way that such forces of nature are. The Gray Nuns who rescued her must have guessed this since they named her Faustine after a typhoon.

  Q: Leave It to Me explores Devi’s struggle to discover her identity as she crosses cultural boundaries. Has this been a personal struggle for you?

  BM: The themes my writing explores are the making of new Americans and the consequent two-way transformation of America. These themes have thrust themselves into my fiction because of my personal daily experiences as a naturalized American citizen.

  Q: What were those daily experiences when you first entered the United States?

  BM: Shortly after entering the United States, I married Clark Blaise, a fellow graduate student at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, during a lunch break in a lawyer’s office in September 1963. I have a dangerously impulsive streak! It was only a week into married life that I realized the long-term consequences of our five-minute wedding. Suddenly I felt stranded in a country that I didn’t know. I felt frighteningly alone and miserably displaced. I was coming out of an extremely old-fashioned, patriarchal Brahmin family and leaping into a United States that, at the time, was exuberantly experimenting with civil rights, women’s rights, sexual permissiveness, and drugs. It took me fifteen years to recognize that I preferred to make my own traditions, to choose my own “homeland,” rather than be given an ancestral village.

  Q: You once said of yourself: “I didn’t want anyone to know where I fit in, so I could be whoever I wanted to be, anywhere, and I could keep moving.” Did making your own traditions mean maintaining a certain flexibility?

  BM: I came out of a society in which identity was fixed from the moment of birth. I was who I was because of the family, class, caste, and language I’d been born into. Communal identity was the only identity that mattered. There was no tole
rance of individual quirkiness or rebellion. Those who dared marry outside their caste lost their original caste, and losing caste was a very big deal. In fact, any Bengali who moved out of the state was patronized as being a “not-quite” Bengali. When I was growing up in Calcutta, upper-middle-class Bengali Brahmin women were not supposed to have ideas and opinions of their own. My mother, who was married off to my father when she was in her mid-teens, had to put up with verbal and physical abuse from her in-laws because she believed in education for girls and insisted on sending us to the best girls’ school in the city. For me, empowerment meant escaping the identity I had been assigned by my tradition-bound community. I think of myself as being composed of a series of fluid identities.

  Q: Do you think of Vietnam as a moment in which that American idealism was corrupted?

  BM: I am convinced that the United States’ perception of itself was permanently changed when it lost the Vietnam War. I arrived as a student in Iowa when John F. Kennedy was president. All my American friends, even as they were making the shift from the plaid-skirts-and-white-blouses staid correctness of the fifties to the long-lank-hair-and-sandals-and-heavy-eye-makeup permissiveness of the sixties, acted on the assumption that the United States was the greatest country in the world. My friends had grown up confident that America was the most powerful nation in the world. The last days of the Vietnam War, when network television played and replayed the frantic evacuation of American troops, threatened that assumption.

  Q: Does Leave It to Me challenge the reader to think about Vietnam in a new way?

  BM: We are aware of how the Loco Larrys were victimized by the war. But I see Devi and her generation as the unacknowledged victims of that war. Ham and Jess acted without much regard for consequences. Devi involuntarily suffers the consequences of their actions. Devi asks, “What about us, Vietnam’s war-bastards and democracy’s love-children? We’re still coping with what they did, what they saw, what they salvaged, what they mangled and dumped on that Saigon rooftop that maniacal afternoon.” What Devi tries to do is make Ham and Jess’s generation aware of the moral consequences of their actions.

  Q: Is this why you offer such a vivid depiction of Haight-Ashbury?

  BM: I felt that I had to use the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco and Berkeley as the main setting for Leave It to Me because this area was where the “hey!—no consequences” kind of culture started when Ham and Jess were young, and it resulted in the birth of Debby and the dumping of her like “a garbage sack on the hippie trail.” The choice of setting was deliberate. My intention was to have Debby, as Devi, bring moral accountability to these places. I live in The Haight and I teach at Berkeley. I know the geography and the mentality of these places at a gut level.

  Q: How did you begin to write?

  BM: I used to create stories in my head when I was three years old. These stories were so real to me—the characters so intense, the settings so graphic—that I hated having to come out of them to play with neighborhood kids. I’m not sure when I started writing them in notebooks. The earliest manuscript of mine—a manuscript that my mother found—was several chapters of a novel that I started in English in London when I was nine. It was about a child detective. My first published story appeared in a school magazine when I was twelve. It was written from the point of view of Julius Caesar. The second one, published when I was thirteen, was written from the point of view of Napoleon.

  Q: You mention that your earliest manuscript is written in English. Did you—do you—ever write in a different language?

  BM: My mother tongue is Bengali. The first eight years of my life I was uniquely Bengali-speaking. At age eight, I went with the rest of the family to Europe. We stayed abroad for three years, which meant that I had to go to school and live in cities like London, Liverpool, Basel, and Montreux. That’s how I first learned English and picked up some Swiss German and French. English was the language of instruction when I returned to school in Calcutta, and, because I have lived in North America for more than thirty-five years, English has become my stepmother tongue. When I am writing fiction, I think and imagine only in English. To relatives in Calcutta, I write letters or notes in Bengali.

  Q: You once said that there was “no formal language that American fiction [made] available” to you. What did you mean by that statement?

  BM: In the early eighties, when I first started making fiction out of the urgency and the confusion I felt as a brown immigrant in black/white/red America, I suddenly realized that I had no models in the contemporary American stories and novels that I read for pleasure. Raymond Carver and his imitators were very popular at that time. I loved Carver’s writings, but the ways his characters thought and talked were totally alien to, and inappropriate for, my non-European fresh-off-the-jet characters. I didn’t have a ready-made community of readers who understood the motivations and the reasonings my characters were going through, how they struggled second by second with language to express their feelings to English-speaking America. I had to invent my own models. That was both scary and exhilarating.

  Q: Which writers influenced you as you invented your own models?

  BM: The writers I cherish because I have learned about the perverse workings of the human heart and soul from their fiction are Anton Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor. Among the contemporary American writers I admire extravagantly are Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Joyce Carol Oates. They take huge risks; they dramatize important issues so movingly that the reader ends up caring about them; they understand the power and the pliability of language.

  Q: In what ways has your writing changed most significantly over time?

  BM: I’m convinced that it’s changed in two ways. First, in the level of energy of the writing and the pleasure I take in improvising vocabulary; second, in what intrigues me—more accurately, obsesses me—as material. When I thumb through pages of my novels in chronological order, I am stunned by the changes. Like Jasmine, like Debby, I have gone through several incarnations. For instance, my very first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, could only have been written by an Indian expatriate writer still coming to terms with the hometown that she had left behind. The vocabulary, the wit, and the sentencetions play on, or parody, the British English literariness that I was taught to admire unquestioningly by the Irish nuns in my Calcutta school. As I started thinking of myself as an immigrant in the United States, my fiction became more and more urgently about being a non-European immigrant in North America. I wasn’t aware of the changes as they happened; I was only aware of the urgency I felt as I was living through, and writing of, that immigrant experience. The story collection, Darkness, was my breakthrough into this uncharted material. Just writing those stories was a marvelously intense experience.

  Q: Does Leave It to Me mark a departure from your earlier novels?

  BM: Actually, I think of my last three novels, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, and Leave It to Me, as a trilogy. The protagonist of each novel—Jyoti/Jasmine, Hannah/Salem Bibi, and Debby/Devi—is a strong woman who longs for a world that’s more just and more generous than the one she inherited at birth. These women are also bold enough, or maybe foolhardy enough, to act out their dreams. They are idealists and romantics; and because of this, they are also restless. But each woman responds in her unique way to dreams for a better life. Jasmine is innocent, curious; she embraces her new experiences in the New World even though she is often bewildered by them. Hannah is an illegitimate daughter in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts. She has to escape her Puritan surrounding in order to return to it with a deeper understanding of its potential as well as its limits. Debby is a multiracial orphan, born and abandoned in India, then adopted by an American family in upstate New York. She is confused, hurt, angry. She has to sort through her various racial, cultural, social heritages before she can be at peace with herself. I think of Debby as the difficult sister of Jasmine. These three characters are very real to me. They are still
carrying on their lives inside my head.

  Q: What changes do you anticipate in your writing or in the projects you undertake?

  BM: I never anticipate. The changes emerge, in spite of myself. At any given time, my head is crowded with characters who shout out their stories. Right now I’m working on two projects: a book of stories that I am tentatively titling Happiness, and a novel about three sisters, much like us three Mukherjee sisters, and the very different choices they make in adult life.

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  What attitude does Leave It to Me take toward adoption? How do you feel when Faustine/Debby/Devi abandons the DiMartinos so early in the novel?

  When Debby starts her search for her “other life, [her] real life,” Serena DiMartino tells her daughter that her biological father had a police record. Debby recognizes that a police record will help her find her bio-parents: