Going Home Again … or Not

When God exhorted the Israelites to love the stranger because they had once been strangers in a strange land, He apparently overlooked the possibility that the stranger might not want the host’s love. Tara Chatterjee, narrator of Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tree Bride, tells us about the emotional dislocation and loss she has suffered by emigrating from India to the United States, but, at the same time, does not see absorption into North American culture and community as a solution. Even though she knows she can’t go home again, the West just is not quite good enough.

A brainy, beautiful Brahmin, Tara Chatterjee lived the good life in Calcutta. Unlike those forced to flee their homeland due to persecution or disaster, she and her husband, Bish, chose freely to move to California so he could attend Stanford University. Immigration for self-betterment is tricky psychologically. Unless life becomes demonstrably better in the new home and the world left behind...