A WIFE'S STORY
by Bharati Mukherjee, 1988

Published in Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, "A Wife's Story" has been anthologized in a number of feminist and world literature collections of short fiction. The story, like many of Mukherjee's works, chronicles the complex and often contradictory experiences of immigrants from South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) to life in the United States. It also deals with the reactions of Americans, some only a generation or two in the United States, and other immigrant groups to these South Asians, whom Mukherjee calls "the new pioneers."

"A Wife's Story" is told from the first-person perspective of Panna Bhatt, a middle-aged woman who has left India and her husband for two years after their son's death to study on scholarship for a doctorate in special education in New York City. She interacts with three other non-American characters, each of whom profoundly challenges her sense of self. With her fellow graduate student, the Hungarian expatriate Imre Nagy, she sees a performance of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, which, with its ethnic slurs and stereotyping of Indians, offends her. Urging her not to take the play so seriously, Imre is playful, even flirtatious, with her, and he readily laughs and dances in the street, unlike the staid, predictable Indian men—lawyers, businessmen, and engineers—Panna is used to.

Panna's roommate is Charity Chin, a Chinese immigrant who works at Macy's and is a successful "hands" model. She has had her eyes fixed to look Caucasian, and out of gratitude she sleeps with her plastic surgeon every third Wednesday. Charity seeks Panna's advice about relationships. Her current dilemma is whether to reconcile with her American husband, Eric, who is living in an Oregon ashram run by the followers of the Indian guru Rajneesh, or to continue her liaison with Phil, a flutist who waxes the apartment floors and bakes them pumpernickel bread, activities that Panna finds childish, even womanly. Panna secretly resents what she perceives as Charity's "lurid" sex life and career drive, and she finds some small solace in imagining how Charity would fare in India: "Here, she's a model with high ambition. In India, she'd be a flat-chested old maid." Moreover, Panna feels that Charity is actually being mean-spirited by asking her for advice about love, for Charity knows well that Panna's marriage was a traditional one arranged by her parents; all Panna needed to do was to learn what her prospective groom liked to eat.

In spite of serious labor unrest at the textile mill he manages, Panna's husband comes to New York to visit. (In keeping with the tradition that a good Hindu wife does not refer to or address her husband by his first name, he remains unnamed throughout the story.) To meet him at the airport, Panna changes out of her cotton pants and shirt—things she would never wear in India—into a sari and some of her best jewelry, especially her marriage necklace. Because Charity has left the city for two weeks, Panna and her husband have the apartment to themselves, affording them more privacy than they ever had in India. Over several days Panna watches him react to the United States, with its abundance of food and consumer products such as hair rinses and diet powders and with its street vendors and store sales.

When Panna arranges an evening out with Imre and her husband, the difference between the two men is shown by each one's choice of entertainment. Imre wants to see an avant-garde French film, her husband the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. The husband is also preoccupied with spending money, for he has paid steep prices on the black market in India for American dollars. On the lookout for small electronic gadgets to smuggle into India, he is trying to figure out how to return with a microwave oven so that he can then get rid of the family cook.

On the 10th day of the visit the husband plans a sight-seeing tour, carefully determining which company provides the most sites for the least amount of money. He sends Panna alone into the tour office to buy the tickets, for he realizes that Americans do not understand his accent. The ticket seller, possibly a Middle Easterner, crudely propositions Panna. Her husband, suspecting something of this nature, shows his own racial prejudice and chauvinist thinking, which blames the woman rather than the man for such incidents, by chiding her, "I told you not to wear pants. He thinks you are Puerto Rican. He thinks he can treat you with disrespect." Presumably, if she had been wearing Indian clothing, the incident would not have occurred. On the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, the husband wants her to take a picture of him with the World Trade Center in the background. When she is unable to get the camera to work, she is approached by a bearded man who offers to help. He, too, is an immigrant, a photographer, and while snapping the picture, he offers to buy her a beer, which she politely refuses.

Both are disappointed with the outing, for the Statue of Liberty is closed for repairs, and the snack bar is dirty and expensive. With other tourists milling about amid the pigeons, her husband wants to know what the photographer had said to her. As she improvises an answer, he cries out in a pained voice that he wants her to return with him to India immediately, exclaiming that he has seen how men look at her. She reminds him that she cannot go back just yet because of her studies, though to herself she admits that she will never use the degree. Their intense exchange is interrupted by a little girl who kicks a bottle cap at the husband and by the scuttling pigeons' cries. Quickly changing the subject, he says that they have been bilked, for this tour charges extra for the ferry trip, whereas one of the others does not. He concludes that New York is as full of cheats as Bombay.

Late that night they get a telephone call. He hands the phone to Panna, complaining, in what is one of the most ironic and humorous statements about the language of Indian immigrants in the Mukherjee oeuvre, "I am not understanding these Negro people's accent." He is oblivious, of course, of his own accent and of his typically Indian misuse of the English present progressive tense. The message is a cable from his boss in India telling him to return home immediately because of new outbreaks of labor violence at the textile mill. When he decides to leave the next day, Panna reminds him that it is not his mill and that he is on vacation. Touched by her worry over him, in spite of her having rejecting his wish that she return with him, he pulls her to him and begins to undress her. He asks her to wait a minute and then rushes to the bathroom to administer the "American rites: deodorants, fragrances." She decides that she should make up for her absence and the labor trouble half a world away; she wants to pretend with him that nothing between them has changed. As she waits, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror—naked, shameless, "free, afloat, watching somebody else."

Panna's story in "A Wife's Tale" is exactly the opposite of the story of Dimple Basu, the compliant, clingy, and eventually mad émigré spouse in Mukherjee's 1975 novel Wife. Panna is an intelligent, initially sad woman who, over the course of the story, comes to disconcerting insights about herself, her marriage, and her life in general. She is honest with herself about why she has come to America; rather than mourn her son's death, she occupies herself with doctoral studies for which she is doubtlessly qualified but with which she seems only peripherally interested. She also realizes that her marriage is more polite than passionate, and, in spite of her protests otherwise, she may be envious of Charity's romantic involvements. Panna also understands that some of the cruel stereotyping of Indians in Mamet's play is, to an extent, true. Feelings of frustration, anger, and rage roil beneath the surface of her controlled, well-bred, convent-educated personality. These feelings are fighting to come to the fore, but she represses them.

At the same time Panna has developed a sense of confidence and self-esteem that she did not possess in India. Unlike Dimple Basu in Wife, Panna has learned how to live and cope successfully in one of the most complex cities in the world, around which she squires her spouse. The one outing he plans on his own proves unsatisfactory. She has come to realize her competence and, with it, a sense of power and independence. But this realization poses additional questions. Will she be able to retain these qualities when, and if, she returns to India, or will she relinquish or lose them, as she feels is required of a good Hindu wife? Will she, in fact, return to India and to her husband at all, or will the trip to the United States become an immigration? The dilemma posed in the story, then, is that of choice and options. Will she make a choice? Will she actualize her options? These questions form the nucleus of this story and of many others by Mukherjee that deal with the immigrant experience.

—Carlo Coppola