DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS By Bharati Mukherjee Rupa Price: Rs 195 Pages: 310

She could be Amy Tan's Indian cousin, a transvestite of ethnic origins who trades on her duality. If Tan begins one of her Gothic tales in a village pig sty in ancient China, where the family would stash its unwanted baby girls, Bharati Mukherjee kick-starts her latest novel with an equally riveting fable about the Tree Bride and the curse of the serpent goddess, Manasa. There is mist and mystery shivering in the air as she plots her way through the past, using the image of a raised white path, a "shanko" as she tells us at the very end, that brings us back to the beginning. Does this make her a marvellous storyteller, as Tan assures us that she is with an excessively adulatory quote on the cover of the Indian imprint, or merely a somewhat manipulative one?

It's as if Mukherjee is asked to join an American quilting bee where each woman may contribute a small square in which she is permitted to embroider her own story within the fixed colours of the main design. Their skill is in stitching in pieces of folk wisdom and sequinned fragments of exotic scenery that they have kept hidden in the treasure chest of their past life. Mukherjee has cut out the shapes of three Bhattacharjee girls of Ballygunge and placed them at strategic points-Mumbai, where the middle one lives, New York, where the most forward of the girls has settled, and San Francisco, where Tara, the youngest, makes a home.

ROOTS GATHERER: Mukherjee

As in the best of folk tales, it's the youngest princess who is on a quest that will either set them free with the truth or find the miraculous new path. Mukherjee has used an image of the snake-creature which enters Tara's life in the form of a young man and implies he could be the illegitimate child of Sister No. 1 and an Anglo-Indian boy. Hunting for the truth not only puts the story in the Shirley Conran "Lace" league, breathlessly exciting with every turn of Tara's investigations, but allows Mukherjee to return to the Calcutta of post-Imperial grace and snobbishness, a kind of eastern Georgette Heyer land, though since Tara's mother reads Mrs Henry Wood and Erle Stanley Gardner, these must be seen as literary antecedents.

What is enticing about living in the past is that it allows the characters to be so filled with their own view of their position in society-the Bhattacharjees are so filled with their sense of Brahminical superiority-that even as a reader you are made to feel somehow privileged. This is balanced by Tara's life in the democratic USA, where she copes with the news that her son Rabi is, yes, yes, we know this is what happens in San Francisco-gay. If this sounds as if it will end like any B-Grade film in the Bay area, it does, but that shouldn't put anyone off, Mukherjee is spot on in registering every quake and quiver of the arriviste Indian as she or he sloughs off the past and settles down quietly as a patch in the great American quilt.

Mukherjee has been often on the lecture trail in India, warning aspirants to the New World about how a creative person has to cut off her roots to grow in a new environment. Obviously it does not mean they should not go back and examine the severed stumps with all the horror and relish of the newly liberated. Mukherjee camps it up with style. She proves she can be a princess no matter where she lives.

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