One Amazing Thing (Divakaruni)

One Amazing Thing 
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 2010
Hyperion/ Everywoman's Voice
220 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401341589


Summary
Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain.

—A punky teenager with an unexpected gift.
—An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating.
—A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11.
—A graduate student haunted by a question about love.
—An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption.
—A Chinese grandmother with a secret past.
—Two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair.

When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive.

There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self- discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself.

From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival—and about the reasons to survive. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—July 29, 1956
• Where—Kolkata, India
• Education—B.A., Kolkata University; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas and San Jose, Calif.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the author of the bestselling novels Queen of Dreams, Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, and The Vine of Desire, and of the prizewinning story collections Arranged Marriage and The Unknown Errors of Our Lives. Her writings have appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.

Divakaruni was born in India and came to the United States at 19. She put herself through Berkeley doing odd jobs, from working at an Indian boutique to slicing bread in a bakery. She lives in Houston, Texas, and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Extras
Excerpts from a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• During graduate school, I used to work in the kitchen of the International House at the University of California, Berkeley. My favorite task was slicing Jell-O.

• I love Chinese food, but my family hates it. So when I'm on book tour I always eat Chinese!

• I almost died on a pilgrimage trip to the Himalayas some years back—but I got a good story out of it. The story is in The Unknown Errors of Our Lives—let's see if readers can figure out which one it is!

• Writing is so central to my life that it leaves little time/desire/need for other interests. I do a good amount of work with domestic violence organizations—I'm on the advisory board of Asians Against Domestic Violence in Houston. I feel very strongly about trying to eradicate domestic violence from our society.

• My favorite ways to unwind are to do yoga, read, and spend time with my family.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her answer:

Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. I read this when I was in grad school, and it really made me examine my own role as a woman of color living in the U.S. It made me want to start writing about my own experiences. It made me think that perhaps I, too, had something worthwhile to write about. ("Extras" from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews 
The appeal of these life stories, like that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, is that they throw the spotlight onto varied lives, each with its own joys and miseries. Together, the stories show how easy it is to divert young lives into unforeseen and restrictive channels, and how hard it is for people to realize their early dreams. Their shared experiences and fears form the frame that holds together this compendium of short stories into an absorbing novel....At the end of her novel, her readers are fully engaged in what will happen to those nine people.
Washington Post

The plot of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new novel could be ripped from the horrifying headlines about Haiti in a strange case of art imitating life.... One Amazing Thing, which was written well before the Haiti earthquake, is receiving high praise.
USA Today

Masterful storyteller Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni examines such stories in an apropos novel for our times. Her suspenseful tale of nine souls who suddenly don't know if they will live or die is a tribute—on many levels—to hope and survival. But it is also, most successfully, a ringing rebuke to rushes to judgment. It's an adult, literary version of The Breakfast Club, with dire circumstances. 'Hell is other people,' Uma thinks as she looks at one of her fellow distraught victims. But redemption can be other people, too, Uma and the others soon understand.One more amazing thing we've learned from Divakaruni.
Miami Herald

In a soggy treatment of catastrophe and enlightenment, Divakaruni (The Mistress of Spices) traps a group of nine diverse people in the basement of an Indian consulate in an unidentified American city after an earthquake. Two are émigrés who work for the consulate; the others are in the building to apply for visas. With very little food, rising flood water, dwindling oxygen, and no electricity or phone service, the victims fend off panic by taking turns at sharing the central stories of their lives. Oddly, the group spends little time brainstorming ways to escape, even when they run out of food and water, and sections of ceiling collapse around them. They wait in fatalistic resignation and tell their tales. Some are fable-like, with captivating scene-setting and rush-to-moral conclusions, but the most powerful are intimate, such as the revelations an accountant shares about his impoverished childhood with an exhausted mother, her boyfriend, and a beloved kitten. Despite moments of brilliance, this uneven novel, while vigorously plumbing themes of class struggle, disillusionment, and guilt, disappoints with careless and unearned epiphanies.
Publishers Weekly

Nine people of diverse backgrounds trapped by an earthquake in the basement of the Indian consulate in an unidentified American city—that's the situation Divakaruni (The Palace of Illusions) sets for herself here. The thoroughly American Uma immigrated with her parents as an infant and is now a graduate student. She tries to concentrate on reading Chaucer while waiting to apply for a visa to visit her parents, who have moved back to India, but spends more time speculating about the people around her. When the earthquake hits, African American army veteran Cameron takes charge, while Uma encourages each of these modern-day pilgrims to share a story of "one amazing thing." The pilgrims range from a young Muslim man hoping that he can visit his parents' ancestral home to an upper-class Caucasian couple planning a trip to the Taj Mahal. As the stories unfold, they tell as much about the diversity of Indian culture as they do about the American "melting pot," which lets some groups Americanize more successfully than others. Verdict: Writing with great sensitivity, Divarkaruni presents snapshots that speak volumes about the characters, so unexpectedly drawn together. Highly recommended. —Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll.
Library Journal

After the glorious complexity of The Palace of Illusions (2008), Divakaruni...presents a wise and beautifully refined drama.... A storyteller of exquisite lyricism and compassion, Divakaruni weaves a suspenseful, astute, and unforgettable survivors’ tale. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

A diverse group trapped in the aftermath of a disaster shares tales of love, loss and desire. Divakaruni's latest (The Palace of Illusions, 2008, etc.) harkens back to her earlier collections of short stories more than it coalesces as a convincing novel. Seven visa applicants wait for the services of two bureaucrats in the basement-level visa office of an Indian consulate somewhere in America. "It was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different races thrown together," Divakaruni writes. "Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini UN summit in here. Whatever were all these people planning to do in India?" Suddenly, a massive earthquake strikes, trapping them in the dark and forcing them to confront each other. An angry young man named Tariq Husein seethes as Cameron Grant, an African-American veteran, assumes leadership of the trapped group. Mr. Pritchett, who had hoped a trip to India would lift his wife's depression, endangers them all by trying to light a cigarette despite a gas leak. Malathi, a clerk at the consulate, stands up to him when he takes away Mrs. Pritchett's medication. Jiang, an elderly Chinese woman injured in the quake, tries to protect her granddaughter Lily. In the midst of their ordeal, Uma, a grad student first glimpsed reading "The Wife of Bath's Tale," comes up with the idea of having each person relate an incident from his or her life. "Everyone has a story," she says. "I don't believe anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing." The individual tales are engaging, but the mechanical setup and the lack of resolution in the primary narrative make it difficult to fully embrace all that follows. Compassionate stories, many of them inspired, suspended in half of a novel.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. If you were to tell the story of one amazing thing that had happened in your life, what would it be? Would it be a memory of a gift, an experience, a person that you met, or an event that you witnessed? What made it amazing, and how did it change your life?

2. Would the experience of reading One Amazing Thing have been different had the narrative been from the point of view of just one person, or if the story was told by an outside figure removed from the events in the book?

3. If you were trapped in a similar dangerous situation as the characters in One Amazing Thing, how do you think you’d react? Was there an action or behavior by a character that resonated with you?

4. Out of the nine people in the visa office, did you identify with any in particular? Which one(s) and why?

5. Why was each character’s “one amazing thing” remarkable?

6. The book begins and ends with Uma Sinha, the graduate student. Why did the author choose Uma’s story to “bookend” the novel in this way? What about Uma set her apart from the members of the group, in your mind?

7. Which character’s story did you find the most unexpected? Conversely, were you able to predict what was to happen in any of the stories?

8. Refresh your memory with the stories of the female characters in the book. Did these stories have anything in common?

9. “Apologize to a woman and she would gain the upper hand. Mangalam knew better than to let that happen” (pg. 55). What did you first think of Mr. Mangalam, and did this change after you learned his story?

10. Discuss Mr. and Mrs. Pritchett. Were you surprised, as their stories unfolded, to discover their reasons for going to India?

11. Almost all of the characters experience or perpetuate some kind of cultural misunderstanding. What did you learn about some of the cultures and religions explored in the book?

12. What did you think of the book’s ending? What do you think the group’s fate was? Why did Uma’s story end where it did?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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