THE world-wide dispersion of South Asian peoples from countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is now a sociologically acknowledged phenomenon known as the South Asian Diaspora. Multiple migrationfrom South Asia to Europe, and from Africa to Europe and the United Statesand multiculturalism is an essential fact of dispersion of such magnitude and dimension.

Voices of the women of the South Asian Diaspora, hitherto silenced by the reconfiguration of patriarchal systems in the new land, are now being heard loud and clear in the 1990s. Two such voices are those of Divakaruni and Kamani. Their collection of short stories Arranged Marriage (1995) and Junglee Girl (1995) provide a platform not only for students of literature, but also for anthropologists and ethnographers who can use the narratives and the narrative voice as the basis for the study of life as it really exists. All the stories are vividly narrated and palpitate with the rhythm of fresh lived experience.

Young, avant-garde, provocative, and born in India, Divakaruni and Kamani both live in the United States and they both use English as their first language. This paper will focus on the way each writer develops brief succinct images of women caught between the old world and the new world values, how women cope with cross-cultural sexual relationships, and how women ultimately try to achieve selfesteem and autonomy denied to them within their own somewhat insular and bigoted community. The attempt to find and fuse a viable self-image within the mainstream United States culture is a crucial factor in the short stories.

Arranged Marriage contains eleven stories out of which I am selecting five stories which deal with women who have traveled to the United States either to live as the spouses of men already living there or as students flying off from India to study in the various American colleges and universities. Most of these stories are first-person narratives and this is what gives them the quality of immediacy and interaction with the reader; we are bound to become involved in the lives of these women. The prose in Divakaruni's prize-winning volume is lucid and penetrating and it takes us effortlessly into the heart of the matter.

"Clothes" is the story of one arranged marriage, between Mita

and Somesh Sen who lives in California and owns a 7-Eleven stores there. It opens on a magical note: "The water of the women's lake laps against my breasts, cool, calming. I can feel it beginning to wash the hot nervousness away from my body I close my eyes

and smell the sweet brown odor of the ritha pulp my friends Deepali and Radha are working into my hair so it will glisten with little lights this evening. They scrub with more vigor than usual and wash it out more carefully, because today is a special day. It is the day of my brideviewing" . Mita dreams of a handsome prince who will take her to his kingdom beyond the seven seas, and her father shows her on the globe where California is situated exactly. Back in the States, living in one cramped apartment with her inlaws, Somesh and Mita secretly dream of living the American dream once Somesh has made enough money to finish off paying the loan on his shop and strike out on his own and be totally independent. In the meantime, Mita maintains the status quo and remains the meek, submissive daughter-in-law. But "Late at night I stand in front of our bedroom mirror trying on the clothes Somesh has bought for me and smuggled in past his parents. I model each one for him . . . just like the models on TV, while he whispers applause. I am breathless with suppressed laughter (Father and mother Sen must not hear) and my cheeks are hot with the delicious excitement of conspiracy . . . I'm wearing a pair of jeans now, marvelling at the curves of my hips and thighs, which have always been hidden under the flowing lines of my saris. I love the color, the same pale blue as the nayantara flowers that grow in my parents' garden. The solid comforting weight. The jeans come with a close-fitting T-shirt which outlines my breasts The

T-shirt is sunrise-orangethe color, I decide, of joy, of my new American life".

Mita's joy and her honeymoon comes to an abrupt end, however, when one night Somesh is killed at his store by a gunman in an act of robbery and random violence. We then see the other Asian women dress Mita all in white and hear the sound of glass bangles shattering as Mita is quietly and absolutely transformed from a glowing bride into a mourning widow, now forever the property of her in-laws who will now go back to India. But Somesh had wanted Mita to go to college, choose a career and this makes Mita rebel against tradition and make her own choice as to her future path in life; she takes her fate

into her own hands: "I know I cannot go back. I don't know yet how I'll manage, here in this new, dangerous land. I only know I must. Because all over India, at this very moment, widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings . . . I straighten my shoulders and stand taller, take a deep breath . . . I tilt my chin, readying myself for the arguments of the coming weeks, the remonstrations. In the mirror a woman holds my gaze, her eyes apprehensive yet steady. She wears a blouse and skirt the color of almonds" .

The conclusion of "The Ultrasound" is not as definitive or as positive as the conclusion of "Clothes." Although it defies closure, it leaves us nevertheless with a sense of unease as to the ultimate fate of Arundhuti. The story is narrated by Anju and she traces the different routes that her and Runu's life take as they grow up together in Calcutta. Both without father's, but with hard-working, struggling mothers, their lives take different courses because Anju's father had left his wife money and property in the form of a bookstore in a prime College Street location, whereas Runu's father, dying after a long illness had left only debts and "Protima-auntie, like most genteel Bengali widows, was always struggling to make ends meet. Runu never had new dresses and shoes like me, or large plush teddy bears or wind-up dolls from America that could dance and say hello. Or, later, silk saris or gold earrings with matching bracelets for the birthdays. But she wouldn't let me give her any of my things Somehow

she never did as well academically either, though I believed she was quite as intelligent as I was. Encouraged by my mother to be competitive, I went on to win spelling bees and debate contests, and later in college to grapple with Chaucer and Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats in my English Honors classes. I browsed through our bookstore and the USIS library, reading Hemingway and Kerouac and Willa Cather and longing to visit the places they wrote of. Runu took up Home Science, which everyone admitted was the major that the dullest girls chose. She seemed to enjoy it, though So maybe it's fitting that

Prajapati, the winged and capricious god of marriage, set us down in such different placesme here in San Jose with Sunil, and her in provincial Burdwan, the eldest daughter-in-law of a large, traditional brahmin family".

Anju keeps up with Runu through long-distance phone calls

to her own mother and sometimes to Runu herself at her place in Burdwan, and it seems like an act of mercy and an act of god certainly when both become pregnant at the same time. They eagerly await the results of their respective amniocentesis tests, but when it is revealed that Runu's fetus is female her husband and her in-laws want her to go for an abortion and try later for a male child. Naturally, Runu runs away from home, and Anju, aghast at the criminal form of prenatal female infanticide being perpetrated on innocent victims vow to try to bring Runu to America at all costs. She ends: "Tomorrow I'll ask Sunil about sponsoring Runu, maybe getting her a student visa. I know he'll fight it at first, give me a hundred reasons why we can't do it. Why we shouldn't. But I'll fight back. Already I am learning how. I'll use what I have tomy pregnancy, even. It's worth itfor Runu and, yes, myself. I'll get my way. I know I will, I say to myself, and smiling, I drift into sleep" The reader, however cannot retreat safely or securely into this somnolent daze with Anju, because we know, as Divakaruni knows, that visas and immigration take time and money and patience and Runu back in Calcutta has none of these things at her disposal. Who will take care of her in the meantime? What will become of her? Will Anju be able to save her? We can only hope and pray.

The protagonist-narrator of "The Word Love" has her own deep problems with her own widowed mother back in Calcutta. The nameless protagonist, a Ph.D. student at Berkeley, has fallen in love with an American and is living with him, but she loves her mother fiercely too and is terrified of her finding out that she is living in sin and living for love, for her mother would never understand, would never forgive. To forestall any event of her mother ever finding out she has given strict injunctions to her lover never to answer the phone. "'It isn't you,' you'd said, gathering up the books guiltily, smoothing the covers. Holding them tight against you. 'I'd have the same problems no matter who it was.' You tried to tell him about your mother, how she'd seen her husband's face for the first time at her wedding. How, when he died (you were two years old then), she had taken off her jewelry and put on widow's white and dedicated the rest of her life to the business of bringing you up. We only have each other, she often told you. 'She lives in a different world. Can't you see that? She's never traveled more than a hundred miles from the village where she was born; she's

never touched cigarettes or alcohol; even though she lives in Calcutta, she's never watched a movie . . . I love her, Rex'".

The inevitable happens nevertheless, the phone is one day answered by Rexand the relationship between mother and daughter is torn asunder. The mother willfully changes her phone number and moves to a new location, and all of the daughter's letters are returned to her unopened, address unknown. The mother is righteous in her anger and cruelly disowns the daughter for her act of sacrifice. The daughter, on the other hand, cannot accept this separation, this yawning gulf, this denunciation and her guilt in turn destroys her relationship with Rex. But she does not give up altogether. She vows to make a new life for herself and to make it on her own: " . . . you will pack your belongings. A few clothes, some music, a favorite book, And a word

comes to you out of the opening sky. The word love. You see that you had never understood it before. It is like rain, and when you lift your face to it, like rain it washes away inessentials, leaving you hollow, clean, ready to begin".

Divakaruni makes us realize that all human relationships are in fact a gamble, a throw of the dice, a matter of chance and destiny. Arranged marriages are no more or less so than the ones made out of love and choice. All marriages, it is said, are made in heaven, but we cannot begin to realize what powerful urges and inchoate emotions makes the wife in "The Disappearance" turn her back upon her own arranged marriage and quietly disappear in the urban jungles of the cities of America into a selfmade exile. She even leaves her son behind and takes only her wedding jewelry, only the pieces given to her by her own parents. It is a complete renunciation of her alliance with her husband and total disavowal of her parenthood. Was she so unhappy, trapped in a loveless marriage? or was she mentally unstable? We never find out, for she is never found, even though her husband puts up a reward of $100,000 for any information leading to her whereabouts. The man's widowed mother shuts up her small flat back in India and is delighted to come and keep house for her son and grandson in the new country: "As the year went on, the husband stopped thinking as much about the wife. It wasn't that he loved her any less, or that the shock of her disappearance was less acute. It was just that it wasn't on his mind all the time. There would be stretches of timewhen he was on the phone with

an important client, or when he was watching after-dinner TV or driving his son to kiddie gym classwhen he would forget that his wife was gone, that he had had a wife at all. And even when he remembered that he had forgotten, he would experience only a slight twinge, similar to what he felt in his teeth when he drank something too cold too fast. The boy, too, didn't ask as often about his mother. He was sleeping through the nights again, he had put on a few pounds (because he was finally being fed right, said the grandmother), and he had started calling her 'Ma,' just like his father did" .

A marriage can fall apart for many reasons, tangible like marital infidelity or intangible like the oft-quoted "irreconcilable differences" of American divorce cases. Divakaruni presents us with one case where the cause of the breakup is a visitor from India. In "Doors," Preeti, living in the United States since the age of twelve marries Deepak, a man straight out of India, and receives a giant culture shock when his friend Raj comes to Berkeley to stay with them while he does his Master's there. The men carry the buddy-buddy thing too far and encroach upon Preeti's privacy. Raj especially is a lout and a boor as well as a bore, but Deepak is delighted to have him in the house and relive their schooldays and look at endless videos of Kishore Kumar songs. Much to Preeti's chagrin, her private space is violated one day when her bedroom door is thrown open by Raj who walks in to share a piece of good news. Like Deepak, Raj too is from the old country where there is little use for closed doors and privacy in a large traditional family. Raj is simply bewildered by Preeti's extreme reaction and decides to leave her house. Simultaneously, Preeti, too decides to leave her marriage: "Preeti would shut the study door before settling down with her Ph.D. dissertation. When in the garden, she would make sure the gate was securely fastened as she weeded. If there had been a door to the kitchen, she would have closed it as she cooked. Deepak was puzzled by all this door shutting. He had grown up in a large family, and although they had been affluent enough to possess three bedrooms . . . they had never

observed boundaries. They had constantly spilled into each other's rooms, doors always left open for chance remarks and jokes. He asked Preeti about it one night just before bed She wasn't able to

give him an answer, 'I don't know,' she said, her brow wrinkled 'I

guess I am just a private person. It's

not like I am shutting you out. 'I've just always done it this way. Maybe it has something to do with being an only child.' Her eyes searched his face unhappily. 'I know it's not what you are reused to. Does it bother you?' She seemed so troubled that Deepak felt a pang of guilt 'No, no, I don't care, not at all,' he rushed to say And really, he didn't mind,

even though he didn't quite understand. People were different. He knew that. And he was more than ready to accept the unique needs of this exotic creatureIndian and yet not Indianwho had by some mysterious fortune become his wife. So things went on smoothlyuntil Raj descended on them".

Ginu Kamani's prose is no less trenchant and penetrating than Divakaruni's. In Junglee Girl, Kamani has two stories, one at the beginning and one at the end, which are about women of the South Asian Diaspora. The word "junglee" in Kamani's title refers to the sense of wildness that comes with freedom, sexual as well as social. The protagonists of Kamani's stories are young, good-looking, well-educated second generation Indians living in the West. They are confident about themselves, their position, their identity and their sexuality. The stories are optimistic and buoyant and Kamani's prose vividly renders this buoyancy transferable to the reader as well.

"Ciphers" is the enigmatic title of the first story. It refers to the identity of the protagonist herself which is an enigma to the Gujarati woman with whom she happens to be sharing a berth on a train while travelling in India. With her hair cut short, and in a knee-length dress, but with her dark complexion, the Gujarati woman finds it very difficult to place the protagonist. The story slowly weaves back and forth between the attempts of the Gujarati woman to pin the protagonist down as an identifiable ethnic entityBengali, Maharashtrian, Punjabi, Moslem from Delhi, or a Christian from Goaand the protagonists own definition of herself as "other, oblique" in this society where being just Indian had no meaning. Definition meant belonging to a certain class or ethnic group within the melting pot of races and she wonders if she would have been more recognizable and definable in a sari or a shalwar kameez? In the United States she is no more definable and her Indianness disappears in her chameleon like ability to be taken for any race, from Brazilian to Mexican. Towards the end of the story, the protagonist asserts that what matters is not where she comes from but the fact

that she is different because she has sexual power and she is definitely a sexual being in opposition to the Gujarati woman who is just a mother with her palloo over her head. At this point in the story the true meaning of the title is forced into our awareness as we realize that the Gujarati woman is as much a "Cipher" to the protagonist as she is to her, for here in a sudden move the Gujarati woman removes her palloo and uncoils her dark coiling hair and the protagonist is shocked at the truly strikingly sensual and sexual beauty of the woman. In a lyrical conclusion the protagonist achieves a kind of epiphany as she feels a oneness with all Indian women and literally feels a tingling in her groin and at the roots of her hair as in her imagination she sees herself being transformed with long hair which so bewitchingly frames and captures the essence of every Indian woman.

The penultimate story in Kamani's collection is a sharp diatribe against the Indian expatriate community where the elders take it upon themselves to make the lives of their Americanized daughters miserable by trying to trap them into arranged marriages with whosoever is considered suitable and is available. In "Just Between Indians," eighteen-year old Daya has her vacation spoiled as her parents and friends zoom in on her as the target for a favorable match between Ranjan, the older brother of Sahil. But Daya rebels against any such occurrence not only verbally but also insidiously by undermining the rules of her patriarchal upbringingshe quietly and secretly has sex with Sahil one night before she leaves the house. The conclusion of the story is a glorious celebration of Daya's freedom and her ability to metamorphose into a beautiful woman for any man who looks at her. This ability comes, as Kamani points out, from her Indian, South Asian origins, where so many races and bloodlines mingle and blend to give her a unique quality of indefinable mystery.

Rebecca Haque is Associate Professor of English at Dhaka University