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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - One Amazing Thing

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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni One Amazing Thing

One Amazing Thing: summary, description and annotation

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Divakaruni is a brilliant storyteller; she illuminates the world with her artistry; and shakes the reader with her love. --Junot Diaz Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair. When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. Theres little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, one amazing thing from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival--and about the reasons to survive. Praise for One Amazing Thing The plot of Chitra Banerjee Divakarunis new novel could be ripped from the horrifying headlines about Haiti in a strange case of art imitating life. ...One Amazing Thing, which was written well before the Haiti earthquake, is receiving high praise. --USA Today The appeal of these life stories, like that of Chaucers Canterbury Tales, is that they throw the spotlight onto varied lives, each with its own joys and miseries. Together, the stories show how easy it is to divert young lives into unforeseen and restrictive channels, and how hard it is for people to realize their early dreams. Their shared experiences and fears form the frame that holds together this compendium of short stories into an absorbing novel. ...At the end of her novel, her readers are fully engaged in what will happen to those nine people. --Washington Post Hauntingly beautiful. ...One Amazing Thing is a page-turner with high drama, elegant writing, and lots of helpful tips for teamwork in a crisis. --Houston Chronicle Her fiction is so intimate that it often seems as if cultural context is irrelevant. Her characters dreams and disappointments are paramount... The karmic energy of One Amazing Thing revolves around Divakarunis gifts as a novelist. --Seattle Times Masterful storyteller Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni examines such stories in an apropos novel for our times. Her suspenseful tale of nine souls who suddenly dont know if they will live or die is a tribute -- on many levels -- to hope and survival. But it is also, most successfully, a ringing rebuke to rushes to judgment. Its an adult, literary version of The Breakfast Club, with dire circumstances. Hell is other people, Uma thinks as she looks at one of her fellow distraught victims. But redemption can be other people, too, Uma and the others soon understand. One more amazing thing weve learned from Divakaruni. --Miami Herald Divakaruni portrays in beautiful prose, haunting characters, and a luminously and ominously developed plot, the universal and individual qualities of the search for meaning in life, as well as the searchs timelessness. We see the parallel as soon as Uma does: as in The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucers characters are pilgrims to a holy site, the visa applicants are also pilgrims, on their way to India. Divakaruni is a beautiful writer, using words as lithely and effortlessly as breathing, and while she breathes, she sings. --Huffington Post One Amazing Thing collapses the walls dividing characters and cultures; what endures is a chorus of voices in one single room. --Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake I was up very late. I read straight through because this is the sort of book that pulls you along. Divakaruni is so adept with her characterizations...I wanted to be in any of the beauty salons described so lovingly. I wanted to eat the bits of food described with such delicacy. --Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and A Plague of Doves, from her blog at birchbarkbooks.com Ingeniously conceived and intelligently written, this novel is a fable for our time. The characters, troubled or shattered by their past, vibrate with life whenever they begin to speak. The book is a fun read from the first page to the last. --Ha Jin, author of A Free Life and the National Book Award-winning Waiting Chitra Divakaruni understands the power of stories to heal us, make us laugh, and comfort us in the most difficult of circumstances. One Amazing Thing is one powerful and beautifully written book. I loved it, and Im sure that readers everywhere will embrace it too. --Lisa See, author of Shanghai Girls Praise for Chitra Divakaruni [Her] sentences dazzle; the images she creates are masterful. --The Los Angeles Times Divakaruni beautifully blends the chills of reality with the rich imaginings of fairy tale. --The Wall Street Journal Authentic and complex . . . Sophisticated and compassionate . . . Moving . . . [It is] a vision of what it means to be human, and in that resonance lies this collections triumph. --The Washington Post Divakarunis stories will touch everyone who reads them . . . It is her gift of language and her ability to cast sentences of exquisite beauty that make her such a high-performance writer. --USA Today

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TO MY THREE MEN

M URTHY

A NAND

A BHAY

We create stories and stories create us. It is a rondo.

CHINUA ACHEBE

If no one knows you, then you are no one.

DAN CHAON

W hen the first rumble came, no one in the visa office, down in the basement of the Indian consulate, thought anything of it. Immersed in regret or hope or trepidation (as is usual for persons planning a major journey), they took it to be a passing cable car. Or perhaps the repair crew that had draped the pavement outside with neon-orange netting, making entry into the building a feat that required significant gymnastic skill, had resumed drilling. Uma Sinha watched a flake of plaster float from the ceiling in a lazy dance until it disappeared into the implausibly green foliage of the plant that stood at attention in the corner. She watched, but she didnt really see it, for she was mulling over a question that had troubled her for the last several weeks: Did her boyfriend, Ramon (who didnt know where she was right now), love her more than she loved him, and (should her suspicion that he did so prove correct) was that a good thing?

Uma snapped shut her copy of Chaucer, which she had brought with her to compensate for the Medieval Lit class she was missing at the university. In the last few hours she had managed to progress only a page and a half into The Wife of Baths Taledespite the fact that the bawdy, cheerful Wife was one of her favorite characters. Now she surrendered to reality: the lobby of the visa office, with all its comings and goings, its calling out of the names of individuals more fortunate than herself, was not a place suited to erudite endeavors. She surrendered with ill graceit was a belief of hers that people ought to rise above the challenges of circumstanceand glared at the woman stationed behind the glassed-in customer-service window. The woman was dressed in a blue sari of an electrifying hue. Her hair was gathered into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she wore a daunting red dot in the center of her forehead. She ignored Uma superbly, as people do when faced with those whose abject destinies they control.

Uma did not trust this woman. When she had arrived this morning, assured of a nine a.m. appointment, she found several people swirling around the lobby, and more crowding behind, who had been similarly assured. When questioned, the woman had shrugged, pointing to the pile upon which Uma was to place her paperwork. Clients, she told Uma, would be called according to the order of arrival for their interview with the visa officer. Here she nodded reverently toward the office to the side of the lobby. Its closed door bore the name Mr. V.K.S. Mangalam stenciled in flowery letters on the nubby, opaque glass. Craning her neck, Uma saw that there was a second door to the office, a blank wooden slab that opened into the sequestered employees area: the customer-service window and, behind it, desks at which two women sorted piles of official-looking documents into other piles and occasionally stamped them. The woman at the counter pursed her lips at Umas curiosity and frostily advised her to take a seat while there was one still available.

Uma sat. What else could she do? But she resolved to keep an eye on the woman, who looked entirely capable of shuffling the visa applications around out of bored caprice when no one was watching.

NOW IT WAS THREE P.M. A FEW MINUTES EARLIER, THE WOMEN at the desks had left on their midafternoon break. They had asked the woman in the blue sari if she wanted to accompany them, and when she had declined, stating that she would take her break later, they had dissolved into giggles and whispers, which she chose to disregard. There remained four sets of people in the room, apart from Uma. In the distant corner was an old Chinese woman dressed in a traditional tunic, accompanied by a fidgety, sullen girl of thirteen or fourteen who should surely have been in school. The teenager wore her hair in spikes and sported an eyebrow ring. Her lipstick was black and so were her clothes. Did they allow students to attend school dressed like that nowadays? Uma wondered. Then she felt old-fashioned. From time to time, grandmother and granddaughter fought in fiery whispers, words that Uma longed to decipher. She had always been this way: interestedquite unnecessarily, some would sayin the secrets of strangers. When flying, she always chose a window seat so that when the plane took off or landed, she could look down on the tiny houses and imagine the lives of the people who inhabited them. Now she made up the dialogue she could not understand.

I missed a big test today because of your stupid appointment. If I fail Algebra, just remember it was your faultbecause you were too scared to ride the bus here by yourself.

Whose fault was it that you overslept six times this month and didnt get to school for your morning classes, Missy? And your poor parents, slaving at their jobs, thinking you were hard at work! Maybe I should tell them what really goes on at home while theyre killing themselves to provide for you.

Near them sat a Caucasian couple at least a decade older than Umas parents, their clothes hinting at affluence: he in a dark wool jacket and shoes that looked Italian, she in a cashmere sweater and a navy blue pleated skirt that reached her calves. He riffled through The Wall Street Journal; she, the frailer of the pair, was knitting something brown and unidentifiable. Twice he stepped outsideto smoke a cigarette, Uma guessed. Sometimes, glancing sideways, she saw him watching his wife. Uma couldnt decipher the look on his face. Was it anxiety? Annoyance? Once she thought it was fear. Or maybe it was hope, the flip side of fear. The only time she heard them speak to each other was when he asked what he could pick up for her from the deli across the street

Im not hungry, she replied in a leave-me-alone tone.

You have to eat something. Build up your strength. We have a big trip coming.

She knitted another row before responding. Pick up whatever looks good to you, then. After he left, she put down the knitting needles and stared at her hands.

To Umas left sat a young man of about twenty-five, an Indian by his features, but fair-skinned as though he came from one of the mountain tribes. He wore dark glasses, a scowl, and a beard of the kind that in recent years made airport security pull you out of line and frisk you. To her other side sat a lanky African American, perhaps in his fifties, Uma couldnt tell. His shaved head and the sharp, ascetic bones of his face gave him an ageless, monkish appearance, though the effect was somewhat undercut by the sparkly studs in his ears. When Umas stomach gave an embarrassingly loud growl a couple of hours back (trusting in the nine a.m. appointment, she hadnt brought with her anything more substantial than a bagel and an apple), he dug into a rucksack and solemnly offered her a Quaker Oats Granola Bar.

It was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different races randomly thrown together. Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini UN summit in here. Whatever were all these people planning to do in India?

UMA HERSELF WAS GOING TO INDIA BECAUSE OF HER PARENTS folly. They had come to the United States some twenty years back as young professionals, when Uma was a child. They had loved their jobs, plunging enthusiastically into their workdays. They had celebrated weekends with similar gusto, getting together (in between soccer games and Girl Scout meetings and Bharatanatyam classes for Uma) with other suburbanite Indian families. They had orchestrated elaborate, schizophrenic meals (mustard fish and fried bitter gourd for the parents; spaghetti with meatballs and peach pie for the children) and bemoaned the corruption of Indian politicians. In recent years, they had spoken of moving to San Diego to spend their golden years by the ocean (such nice weather, perfect for our old bones). Then, in a dizzying volte-face that Uma considered most imprudent, her mother had chosen early retirement and her father had quit his position as a senior administrator for a computer company to accept a consultants job in India. Together, heartlessly, they had rented out their house (the house where Uma was born!) and returned to their hometown of Kolkata.

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