Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [0]
“Dazzling … [A] sharp look at the 1960s’ legacy of eroded idealism and scarred kids … Mukherjee gives Devi a hip, snappy, ironic voice to describe a world in which nature—and destiny—transcend nurture and no one feels remorse or responsibility.”
—New York Daily News
“Immigration and loss of identity are provocative and abiding themes in the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee.… She brings the pieces of myth and modern story together, each enriching and deepening the other.… Mukherjee writes with power, letting her sentences roll out like wild streamers in a high wind.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A psychedelic journey through the meaner side of San Francisco’s free-loving past … Leave It to Me challenges us to sympathize with an angry young woman whose overwhelming sense of entitlement leads her to play judge and jury, devouring all in her quest for a new identity.”
—People
“With poignancy and wit, Mukherjee makes present-day San Francisco the setting for the age-old story of the foundling in search of her parent and herself.”
—Booklist
“Engaging.”
—Kirkus
ALSO BY BHARATI MUKHERJEE
The Holder of the World
The Tiger’s Daughter
Wife
Darkness
The Middleman and Other Stories
Jasmine
WITH CLARK BLAISE
Days and Nights in Calcutta
The Sorrow and the Terror
A Fawcett Columbine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1997 by Bharati Mukherjee
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
http://www.randomhouse.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96385
eISBN: 978-0-307-79229-7
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
v3.1
For David Fetchheimer,
unraveler of myth and mystery
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Three
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Prologue
In Devigaon, a village a full day’s bus ride into desert country west of Delhi, old Hari tells of times before the “long ago” of fairy tale, when celestials battled demons and the Cosmic Spirit revealed itself in surprising forms to devotees. The story that children beg him to repeat at twilight—that smoky quarter hour most full of menace—is of Devi, the eight-armed, flame-bright, lion-riding dispenser of Divine Justice. They know that the Cosmic Spirit (assuming the appearance of gods) continually makes, unmakes and remakes the world they live in. They know that it also created goddess Devi and endowed her with the will to save and the strength to kill, and that it charged her with the mission of slaying the Buffalo Demon who had usurped the throne in the kingdom of heavenly beings.
And in this village, named after the serene slaughterer of a demon king, the children already know the story’s ending. Before twilight blackens, Devi will blow the conch-shell call, and brandish in her many arms a lasso, a trident, a fire-tipped spear, a demon-splitting disc, a bow and arrows, a death-dealing staff, a thunder-sparking axe, a pitcher of water and a necklace of blessed beads, and will lead her soldiers on lionback. The Buffalo Demon, inheritor of the brute strength and physical appearance of his buffalo mother and the deceit and rage of his demon father, cunning, and magical powers, will vanquish her men. Some of Devi’s soldiers the Buffalo Demon will gore to death; others he will stomp, still more fell with the tempest