QUEEN OF DREAMS By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Doubleday Price: £21.95 Pages: 340

Rakhi Gupta is American, her parents not quite so. Bengali immigrants in California, they carry with them an Indian past that they will not share with their daughter. Add to this situation a distant, silent father and an interpreter of dreams for a mother and the result can be a truly baffling childhood. Troubled by a fathomless yearning for her lost Indianness and the blurry edges, Rakhi sees between reality and dreams. She has more than her share of issues concerning identity and belonging, about who's who and what's what.

Chock-full of unanswered questions about herself, Rakhi grows up, moves to Berkeley, gets married, has a child, gets divorced. Now, as a quintessential American single mom, she spends her time running The Chai House-a teahouse and bakery-with her best friend Belle (i.e. Balwant) and pursuing her true love, painting. All the while she finds time for furious internal seething at the very thought of her former husband Sonny, the bhangra-pop DJ whose charms still distract her despite herself, and with whom she is forced to "time share" their daughter Jona.

PICTURE SPEAK

TRANSLATOR OF DREAMS: Divakaruni

The minutiae of Rakhi's life-her failing business, her fatal attraction to Sonny, her juggling act between motherhood and art, her relationship with her mother and her semi-bimbo best friend-is interspersed with excerpts from her mother's dream journals. In eerie poetic prose, they talk about glistening snakes, "the elders", lessons in dream caves and a book called the Brihat Swapna Sarita. Though her father calls his wife his sapno ki rani, queen of dreams, he remains sceptical throughout. But Rakhi, desperate to really know her mother, is deeply disappointed when as a child she discovers that she has not inherited the dream-teller's skill. Resolution comes only with her mother's death when Rakhi discovers the dream journals. The door to a secret past is suddenly opened and for the first time she finds that she needs her father-he must translate her mother's dream journals for her from Bengali to English. In the process the ice between the father and the daughter melts and the mystery of the mother's life is unravelled.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams is a modern American immigrant saga with a large dollop of that south Asian writerly fetish-magic realism. There are portents and omens, mysterious men in white, women in crowns of flowers and dreams becoming reality. The roomful of mourners at her mother's funeral may or may not have been imagined. When little Jona makes drawings of her disturbing dreams of people trapped in burning buildings, two planes crash into the Twin Towers in New York, and a circle is complete. But there are also coke-fests in seedy clubs, handsome strangers doing Tai Chi in eucalyptus groves and cookie-dough ice cream and peanut butter jelly sandwiches for lunch.

Queen of Dreams is distinctly women's writing as opposed to chick lit and is more than your average mother-daughter tearjerker. Two things really stand out in this novel. One, the inherent attack on huge impersonal business chains that swallow whole the Little Guy. Rakhi's Chai House is in danger when Java (think Starbucks), a huge chain of cafes infamous for cropping up around popular local joints and squeezing them out of business, opens a store down the street. And the other, how life changed overnight for the brown-skinned citizen in America immediately after 9/11.

Though there is no happy ending, there is some degree of hope that it could easily come, and with it some deeper understanding too. When the Chai House finds a new partner in Mr Gupta, the chef extraordinaire of Bengali snacks, exit the cookies and enter the pakoras. In striving to become "authentic", the teahouse survives the competition, and the lesson is learned-"To thy own self be true." Later when the teahouse is vandalised for being "foreign" and for being open the day after 9/11- though more people are outraged by the act than are in agreement with it-for Rakhi the refrain remains a comment made by one of the attackers: "You ain't American." Even though occasionally two-dimensional, the novel is more than occasionally profound. Shifting between first-person and third-person narratives, weird journal entries and real time, dreams and reality, issues of race and gender, Divakaruni has truly whipped up a big storm in a little teahouse. Quite worth a visit.

TOP 10 BESTSELLERS    A monthly national list of bestselling books compiled for India Today by ORG-MARG    based on data from 11 retail outlets in six cities.

FICTION NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER 1. (1) Are You Afraid of the Dark Sidney Sheldon HarperCollins 2. (2) The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown Doubleday 3. (-) Therapy Jonathan Kellerman Headline 4. (5) Five-Point Someone Chetan Bhagat Rupa 5. (7) The Hungry Tide Amitav Ghosh Ravi Dayal NON - FICTION NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER 1. (1) The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Robin S. Sharma Jaico 2. (-) You Can Have Your Cheese and Eat it Too William Cottringer East West Books 3. (6) Maximum City Suketu Mehta Viking 4. (2) Discovery of Destiny Robin S. Sharma Jaico 5. (4) Who Will Cry When You Die Robin S. Sharma Jaico OTHER INDIAN BOOKS IN THE TOP 20 FICTION NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER 7. (15) Magic Seeds V..S. Naipaul Picador 11. (10) The Inscrutable Americans Anurag Mathur Rupa 14. (16) Transmission Hari Kunzru Hamish Hamilton 18. (-) Paradise and Other Stories Khushwant Singh Viking NON - FICTION NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER 8. (8) Through the Corridors of Power P.C. Alexander HarperCollins 9. (13) Indian Muslims Rafiq Zakaria Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan 11. (-) Holy Cow Sarah MacDonald Bantam 12. (11) Governance Arun Shourie Rupa 15. (-) Husband of a Fanatic Amitava Kumar Penguin Participating bookshops: Delhi: Faqir Chand; Mumbai: Shah Book Stall, Danai Book Shop; Bangalore: Fountainhead, Gangarams; Hyderabad: Walden Book Links, The Book Point; Kolkata: Oxford Books, Modern Book Depot, Family Book Shop; Chennai: Fountainhead

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