Wife

Nora D.S. Robins is co-ordinator of Internal Collections at the
University of Calgary Libraries.

Wife is the story of Dimple Dasgupta who had her heart set on marrying a neurosurgeon but who dutifully obeys her father and marries an engineer. Dimple is a young Indian woman of good family whose very traditional values have been only partly modified by the pop culture of modern Calcutta. When she and her husband move to New York City she is overwhelmed. Her attempts to reconcile the Bengali ideal of a perfect passive wife clash with the demands of real life. Dimple takes refuge in her apartment and spends her days watching television. It is not long before she loses the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, with tragic consequences.

Wife is a tightly-crafted story of a woman trapped between two cultures. It is told with wit, perception, and a fine ear for dialogue.

Bharati Mukherjee is the author of The Tiger’s Daughter and Darkness. She is the co-author (with her husband Clark Blaise) of the memoir Days and Nights in Calcutta. Wife was first published in l975.