A response!!! from Bharati Mukherjee

Dear Angelika,1

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Dear Angela/Malika:3

I was very moved by your email and your conflicted, honest response to my story, "The Lady From Lucknow." Writing is such a lonely occupation, and the reward is how any sentence, let alone a story or a novel, touches a reader OUT THERE in unknown places. The connecting between published work and a reader attuned to that fiction at a sensitive, receptive time is so serendipitous! I'm delighted that my story, which I wrote at a troubled time in my own life, had the effect of pushing you to write your own stories.4

This is an insanely busy time, career-wise, in my life. I teach full-time as Professor of English at the University of California; have JUST returned from lecture trips to the Kolkata Book Fair and several U.S. campuses; and am sweating imminent deadlines on 2 due essays (one for Harvard U Press, and the other for Harper Collins). As a result, I shan't have time to download and read your work for a while, but I do look forward to doing that.5

May you prosper!6

Bharati Mukherjee 7

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Dr. Mukherjee,9

I hope this email finds you in good health and spirit.10

My name is Angela, but my desi friends and family call me Malika. I'm from Chicago, near Devon.11

It was sometime last winter that I was sitting in the Air Canada employee lounge at O'hare, skimming the abandoned book collection when I found you, or should I say, your 'Lady from Lucknow'. I overlooked the book on short stories wedged in the corner several times before I opened it. The passages written by Canadian women didn't interest me straight away and I almost put it down until I did a double take on your name. 12

To be honest, I didn't like 'The Lady' at first. I saw too much of her in me, or at least the part I had tried so desperately to admonish. I was intrigued, though, and definately surprised. Where was this breed of Muslim, or even Indian women? I see hundreds of brown faces a day and have a bad habit of thinking the worst in people, and still the only Muslim woman I know capable of being close to who you described was me. 13

It was around this time I started writing. I went to my local used bookstore, and for the first time in my life came out frustrated. No story came close to my life, or what I was creating in my mind. I was, metaphorically speaking, sitting wounded on an abandoned bridge somewhere in the middle of Pakistan-america, the new Pangea that had closed in around me. 14

Anyway, I'm better now and confident in my potential. And, with that I would like to make clear that I am not an aspiring author. Aspiring authors ultimately write to be published and promoted; I write so that I can feel whole again. I write because I cannot explain who I am in less than 12 chapters. I write so that if I die, my daughter can know me, hate me. 15

Your 'Lady' stayed in my heart and mind even though I pushed her away vehemently. My quest to become whole has left me disconnected unless I reach out to the people around me, and the people that inspire me, hence this email. You are probably the singlemost inspiration to me, and in my mind, you own my work. I'm not sure if that means anything to you since you must here something like it often. 16

I hold no illusions as to what this email is bound to initiate; I see this message just sitting, unopened or ignored, in your inbox for all of eternity. I'm not as well-read as some of your students. I have a graduate degree, but not in English. I've never been invited to any fancy book reviews, or visited an Ivy Leaugue school. I understand you are a professor and get paid to read amateurish work, and I'm sure that I cannot afford your fee. Either way, my work is a gift for you, if you accept it or not.17

Sincerely,18

Angela/ Malika19