ORBITING Born in Calcutta, India, on July 27, 1940, into an upper middle-class Hindu Brahmin family surrounded by servants

and bodyguards: Indian-American novelist Bharati Mukherjee. The second of three daughters of Sudhir Lal, a chemist, and Bina (Banerjee) Mukherjee, she lived with nearly 50 relatives until the age of eight, when she discovered the beauty and power of Russian novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. From an extraordinarily close-knit and intelligent family, Mukherjee and her sisters were always given ample academic opportunities and have all pursued academic endeavors in their careers. In 1947, Mukherjee's father accepted a job in England, and he brought his family to live there until 1951, providing Mukherjee an opportunity to develop her English language skills. One night, as her father entertained a group of American scholars over dinner, he asked, "I want [my] daughter to be a writer, where do I send her?" They told him to send her to the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. So, after being graduated with a B.A from the University of Calcutta and an M.A. in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961, she came to the United States of America, where she took advantage of a scholarship from the University of Iowa. She planned to study there to earn her Master's of Fine Arts before returning to India to marry a bridegroom of her father's choosing in her class and caste. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1963 and her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1969. While attending the university, she met a Canadian student from Harvard. She impulsively married Clark Blaise, a Canadian writer, in a lawyer's office above a coffee shop after only two weeks of courtship. She received her M.F.A. that same year, and then she went on to earn her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the University of Iowa in 1969. Mukherjee emigrated to Canada with her husband and became a naturalized citizen in 1972. Her 14 years there were some of the most trying of her life, as she found herself discriminated against and treated, as she says, as a member of the "visible minority." She has spoken in many interviews of her difficult life in Canada, a country that she sees as hostile to its immigrants and one that opposes the concept of cultural assimilation. Although those years were challenging, Mukherjee was able to write her first two novels, The Tiger's Daughter (1971) and Wife (1975) while working up to professorial status at McGill University in Montreal. During those years, she also collected many of the sentiments found in her first collection of short stories, Darkness(1985), a collection that in many stories reflects her mood of cultural separation while living in Canada. Tired of her struggle to fit into Canadian life, Mukherjee and her family moved to the United States in 1980, where she was sworn in as a permanent U.S. resident. In 1986, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. After holding several posts at various colleges and universities, she eventually settled in 1989 at the University of California-Berkeley. Because of the distinctly different experiences she has had throughout life, she has been described as a writer who has lived through several phases of life. First, as a colonial, then as a National subject in India. She then led a life of exile as a post-colonial Indian in Canada. Finally, she shifted into a celebratory mode as an immigrant, then citizen, in the United States. She now fuses her several lives and backgrounds together with the intention of creating "new immigrant" literature.

Known for her playful and well developed language, Mukherjee rejects the concept of minimalism, which, she says, "is designed to keep anyone out with too much story to tell." Instead, she considers her work a celebration of her emotions and herself a writer of the Indian diaspora who cherishes the "melting pot" of America. Her main theme throughout her writing discusses the condition of Asian immigrants in North America, with particular attention to the changes taking place in South Asian women in a new world. While the characters in all her works are aware of the brutalities and violence that surround them and are often victimized by various forms of social oppression, she generally draws them as survivors. Mukherjee has been praised for her understated prose style and her ironic plot developments and witty observations. As a writer, she has a sly eye with which to view the world, and her characters share that quality. Although she is often racially categorized by her thematic focus and cultural origin, she has often said that she strongly opposes the use of hyphenation when discussing her origin, in order to "avoid otherization" and the "self-imposed marginalization that comes with hyphenation." Rather, she prefers to refer to herself as an American of BengaMukherjee's works focus on the "phenomenon of migration, the status of new immigrants, and the feeling of alienation often experienced by expatriates" as well as on Indian women and their struggle (Alam 7). Her own struggle with identity first as an exile from India, then an Indian expatriate in Canada, and finally as a immigrant in the United States has lead to her current contentment of being an immigrant in a country of immigrants (Alam 10). Mukherjee's works correspond with biographer Fakrul Alam's catagorization of Mukherjee's life into three phases. Her earlier works, such as the The Tiger's Daughter and parts of Days and Nights in Calcutta, are her attempts to find her identity in her Indian heritage.

"The Tiger's Daughter" is a story about a young girl named Tara who ventures back to India after many years of being away only to return to poverty and turmoil. This story parallels Mukherjee's own venture back to India with Clark Blaise in 1973 when she was deeply affected by the chaos and poverty of Indian and mistreatment of women in the name of tradition, "What is unforgivable is the lives that have been sacrificed to notions of propriety and obedience" (Days and Nights... 217). Her husband, however, became very intrigued by the magic of the myth and culture that surrounded every part of Bengal.; These differences of opinion, her shock and his awe, are seen in one of their joint publications, Days and Nights in Calcutta. The second phase of her writing, according to Alam, encompasses works such as Wife, the short stories in Darkness, an essay entitled "An Invisible Woman," and The Sorrow and the Terror, a joint effort with her husband. These works originate in Mukherjee's own experience of racism in Canada, where despite being a tenured professor, she felt humiliated and on the edge of being a "housebound, fearful, affrieved, obcessive, and unforgiving queen of bitterness" (Mukherjee, qtd. in Alam 10). After moving back to the United States, she wrote about her personal experiences. One of her short stories entitled "Isolated Incidents" explores the biased Canadian view towards immigrants that she encountered, as well as how government agencies handled assults on particular races. Another short story titled "The Tenant" continues to reflect

on her focus on immigrant Indian women and their mistreatment. The story is about a divorced Indian woman studying in the States and her experiences with interracial relationships. One quotation from the story hints at Mukherjee's views of Indian men as being too preoccupied to truly care for their wives and children: "'All Indian men are wife beaters,' Maya [the narrator] says. She means it and doesn't mean it." In Wife, Mukherjee writes about a woman named Dimple who has been surpressed by such men and attempts to be the ideal Bengali wife, but out of fear and personal instability, she murders her husband and eventually commits suicide. The stories in Darkness further endeavor to tell similar stories of immigrants and women. In her third phase, Mukherjee is described as having accepted being "an immigrant, living in a continent of immigrants" (M. qtd in Alam 9). She describes herself as American and not the the hyphenated Indian-American title: I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I'm ashamed of my past, not because I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here... I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen for me is that can define myself in terms of things like my politics, my sexual orientation or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race. (Mukherjee qtd. in Basbanes) Mukherjee continues writing about the immigrant experience in most of the stories in The Middle Man and Other Stories, a collection of short stories which won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction, Jasmine, and essays. These stories explore the meeting of East and West through immigrant experiences in the U.S. and Canada along with further describing the idea of the great melting pot of culture in the United States. Jasmine develops this idea of the mixing of the East and West with a story telling of a young Hindu woman who leaves India for the U.S. after her husband's murder, only to be raped and eventually returned to the position of a caregiver through a series of jobs (Alam 100). The unity between the First and Third worlds is shown to be in the treatment of women as subordinate in both countries. Her latest works include The Holder of the World, published in 1993, and Leave It to Me, published in 1997. The Holder of the World is a beautifully written story about Hannah Easton, a woman born in Massachusetts who travels to India. She becomes involved with a few Indian lovers and eventually a king who gives her a diamond know as the Emperor's Tear. (Alam 120). The story is told through the detective searching for the diamond and Hannah's viewpoint. Mukherjee's focus continues to be on immigrant women and their freedom from relationships to become individuals. She also uses the female characters to explore the spatiotemporal (Massachusetts to India) connection between different cultures. In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee tells the story of a young woman sociopath named Debby DiMartino, who seeks revenge on parents who abandoned her. The story reveals her ungrateful interaction with kind

adoptive parents and a vengeful search for her real parents (described as a murderer and a flowerchild). The novel also looks at the conflict between Eastern and Western worlds and at mother-daughter relationships through the political and emotional topics by the main characer in her quest for revenge. Candia McWilliam of The London Review of Books describes Mukherjee appropriately as "A writer both tough and voluptuous" in her works. Orbiting is part of The Middleman and other stories who was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times Book review wrote about it: A consummated romance with the American language a romance with America itself. The short story is about Renata de Marco, an Italian woman who has moved with her family to the USA. She lives in a small apartment, but which has potential. She has a brother Danny and a sister, Cindi who lives nearby and who is married with Brent. Renata remembers her ex boyfriend, Vic, who is totally different from her new one, Ro, a muslim. The story takes place on Thanksgiving Day. Renata invites her family at her place in order to meet Ro. She is nervous because it is very important for her that they like and accept him. Everything goes well and Renata starts to see in Ro a man who could even be her husband but most of all her chance to heal the world. Next in order to discuss several themes I will present 10 questions that can be put after reading this short story and of course the answers. 1) Are the two sisters different and how? Cindi`s sister seems more mature and responsible. She is married already even though she`s eleven months younger than Renata. But from another point of view Renata seems to know better how to live her life. She says at a certain point about her sister: Misery, anxiety, whatever , show on Cindi though. But for Renata is important her sister`s opinion, is important that she likes her boyfriend: I want Cindi to know him, I want her as an ally. 2) What is the relationship between Renata and her family? For Renata family is very important. She wants them to accept Ro, this means that she doesn`t want to get in conflict with them. But she also tries to make them understand that they have to adapt to the new style of living of the country in which they live. When her father asks her why she doesn`t have a dining table she says that traditions change. Overall they seem to get along very well. Her parents accept to meet her new boyfriend. Regarding her relationship with her sister, they are good friends. Cindi comes to visit her, they leave near. 3) How does Renata`s family try to adapt to the USA? First of all they start celebrating Thanksgiving which is a traditional American celebration. They gather and eat turkey. Her mom signed up for classes. 4) How did Renata change her traditions ? Renata seems more open minded. Regarding the traditions there is a paragraph in which she says a few things about how traditions change. So I don`t have real furniture. I eat off stack-up plastic tables as I watch the evening news. She lives her life the way she wants to and she likes it. She feels free and she totally enjoys it. If she had a dining table made she would feel that she`s going back to the old way of living.

5) Can you give an explanation for Vic`s way of dumping Renata? Well, one reason may be her romantic feature that is dominant. In my opinion the explanation that he gives regarding the places that he wants to see it`s in a way insufficient and it proves how immature he is or maybe he was simply afraid of assuming further responsibilities and he decided to go away. Then we can also count the possibility that he felt that he deserved more from life and that New Jersey was not the place to get it. 6) How can you characterize Ro? Ro seems to be a very direct person who doesn`t care what other people might think about him. When Renata remembers how she picked her up in a bar she mentions that he was direct and at the same time weirdly courtly. He has fled from Kabul. He wants to take classes and become an engineer, which proves the fact that he is ambitious. He`s not a jealous man. He knows how to behave> he brought flowers for Renata`s mother. Opposed to Renata he keeps his traditions alive. For example outside pork and booze, he eats everything. Renata says about him that he is cosmopolitan, he loves squash, he`s sophisticated. He is also a dangerous person: he wears a dagger in his pocket, but this is only because he feels more secure having this white weapon with him. 7) What does Ro`s scar mean? Renata compares her lover`s scar with her dad`s and Brent`s . They are proud of their scars because they`ve got it in football injuries or other accidents, meanwhile Ro is ashamed of his scars, he hates talking about them. He`s ashamed that he comes from a culture of pain. After comparing the two meaning of the scars, Renata feels more affectionate for her lover. He admires him. 8) What were Renata`s mom principles of life? Renata`s mother has many points of view regarding life in general. For example she thinks that children should do better than their parents. Then Renata`s father says that her mom thinks that a man should have an office to drive to every day. We are told that her mother refuses to learn to drive at a certain point. Renata says later that her mother believes in dressing up and that beaded dresses lift her spirits. All this show that we have a character who is more traditional than the rest of the family. 9) Can you give a meaning to the title? I think that the term orbiting refers to all the characters in the short story. It is mentioned wit Ro, when he says that he had to orbit one international airport to another. Orbiting, airports mean a chaotic way of life and not being able to settle. He has had a tough life. Then orbiting refers to Renata too. She and her family have also moved from one place to another trying to find what`s best for them. Renata has changed lovers: first Vic, now Ro, whom she tends to prefer. Renata and Ro have been orbiting one around the other until they met. 10) What does Ro mean to Renata? First of all Ro is his lover. The man she might possibly marry. But then she also something different from Vic. She sees in Ro her chance to heal the world. She wants to transform him. She sees in him everything that she wants in a man. He wants to be her hero. She wants to be his Pygmalion. For her, Ro is the only man among her dad and Brent. This is also emphasized by Ro`s background, his culture. He has been a victim, but now she wants to make him revive under another man.

I liked this short story, but I`m not sure that Renata`s plans with Ro are the best, because he seems a very sure man with a strong personality and maybe her trying to change him and make him a real American will scary him and maybe it will lead to the dissolution of their relationship.