-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the Book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:
"Why don't you sleep with Dad?" I kept asking. "Or at least
with me, like Mallika's mother does? Don't you love us?"
She was quiet for so long, I was about to ask again. But then she said,
"I do love you." I could hear the reluctance in her voice, like rust,
making it brittle. "I don't sleep with you or your father because my work
is to dream. I can't do it if someone is in bed with me."
My work is to dream. I turned the words over and over in my mind, intrigued.
I didn't understand them, but I was in love with them already. I wanted to be
able to say them to someone someday. At the same time, they frightened me. They
seemed to move her out of my reach.
"What do you mean?" I asked, making my voice angry.
There was a look on her face--I would have called it despair, if I had known
to do so. "I dream the dreams of other people," she said. "So I
can help them live their lives."
I still didn't understand, but her face was pale and tight, like a cocoon,
and her hands were clenched in her lap. I didn't have the heart to badger her
further. Hadn't she admitted to the most important thing, that she loved us? I
nodded my head as though I were satisfied with her explanation.
Her smile was laced with relief. She gave me a hug. I could feel the remnants
of stiffness in her shoulders.
"Why don't you decide what you want for dinner?" she said.
"You can help me cook it, if you like."
I allowed myself to be diverted and asked for ravioli. I'd had it for the
first time on that fateful afternoon in my classmate's house. At home we rarely
ate anything but Indian; that was the one way in which my mother kept her
culture. She had never made ravioli before, but she looked it up in a cookbook.
We spent the rest of the afternoon rolling, crimping, stuffing dough with
cheese. The ravioli turned out lumpy, and the kitchen was a disaster, sauce
smeared everywhere and shreds of cheese underfoot, but we were delighted with
ourselves.
In the middle of boiling the ravioli my mother turned to me and said--though
I hadn't shared my classmate's words with her--"Rakhi, remember this: being
different doesn't mean that you're weird." She startled me in this manner
from time to time, referring to things she couldn't possibly know. But her
clairvoyance was erratic. It would create problems for us over the years, making
her ignorant of events I expected her to know, secrets I longed to tell her but
couldn't bear to speak of.
For example: the reason why I left Sonny.
At dinner Father admired the creative shapes we'd made and said it was a meal
at once delicious and instructive. He cleaned up the kitchen afterward, humming
a Hindi song as he scrubbed the sink with Comet, his hands encased in neon
yellow rubber gloves. He was the tidy one in our household, the methodical one,
always kind, the one with music. My mother--secretive, stubborn,
unreliable--couldn't hold a tune to save her life. I wanted to be just like her.
Years later, after she died, my father would say, "Not true. She didn't
love me, not really. She never let me get that close. The place right at the
center of her--that was reserved for her dream gods or demons, whoever they
were. She never shared that with anyone. Not even you."
And I would be forced to admit that he, too, was right.
Excerpted from Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, pages 1-9 of the hardcover edition. Copyright© 2004 by Chitra Divakaruni. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
 (1).gif)
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
