Cartography of Desire: Heterotopias in Chitra Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart and The Vine of Desire

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of my Heart and its sequel Vine of Desire tells the story of two cousins, Anju and Sudha, the former free-spirited and vibrant, the latter submissive and vulnerable. Fairy tales, myth-making, dreams, letters and assignments create heterotopic spaces that often provide a disturbing access to the psyche of the two women. The Foucaudian heterotopic worlds apparently seem to reflect lived reality through these discursive spaces, though they actually threaten the placid exterior of the smooth flowing, linear narrative with disturbing revelations. This paper reads Foucault’s elaborations on heterotopia in both the texts to show how Divakaruni uses space to navigate and reveal intricacies of her characters. Cultural and social differences that diasporic movements bring on play a seminal role as they hark back to a home left behind as one struggles to survive and thrive in a new world. Memory comes back to haunt the characters but in “every remembering is a [subtle] forgetting,” to quote Mahmud Darwish, as the characters move on. Different forms of linguistic styles create a rich pastiche as direct authorial narration jousts with literary interventions (such as letters) and the individual verbal nuances of different characters that betray their inner thoughts.