Past, present and future intertwine in "The Tree Bride"

Destiny binds the characters in Bharati Mukherjee's "The Tree Bride" (Hyperion, 293 pp., $23.95), the second engaging installment of a trilogy begun with 2002's "Desirable Daughters."

Tara Chatterjee, introduced in the previous book, is the primary character of "The Tree Bride." In researching her personal past, Tara discovers connections to history. She finds the "future of the past" and learns that "nothing in the world is lost and everything in the world is somehow connected." There are no coincidences, only convergences.

In earlier novels ("Jasmine" and "Wife") and short stories (the National Book Critics Circle winner "The Middleman and Other Stories"), Mukherjee dealt with the immigrant experience and the need for cultural assimilation. In "The Tree Bride" she is working with larger themes and grander schemes.

In press materials for the book, Mukherjee says that in her work she is "consciously playing with the American literary tradition of roots-retrieval, mixing memory with imagination."

While it would have been easy to write another novel of assimilation and cultural retention, Mukherjee takes the next step toward dramatizing what she calls the "two-way transformation." Tara is the "Hindu immigrant whose world view accommodates without conflict ghosts and breakthrough Information Technology (and by extension the world views of New Americans who are coming from places other than Protestant Europe)."

Now 30 years old, Tara is living in a rental on Haight Street in San Francisco with her ex-husband, Bish, a Silicone Valley guru. His computer techno-wizardry made him wealthy with an integrated communication system called CHATTY. In a wheelchair after a bombing of their home, Bish is working on a book titled "The Natural History of Coincidence."

While Bish works on his book, Tara is seeking information about her ancestral heritage. She is trying to figure out what a 5-year-old child proxy-married to a tree in the late 19th century (her groom-to-be dies, so to avoid the misery of lifelong widowhood her father marries her to a tree) could have to do with a vibrant, independent woman of the 21st century. She sees the tree bride, her great-great-aunt and namesake, as a "point of light from the remotest, darkest galaxy" of her life.

The novel tells three stories as it moves back and forth in time and over several continents. There is the story of Tara and her husband as they move toward reconciliation; the story of Tara and her newly conceived child and the relationship with her new OB-GYN, Dr. Victoria Treadwell-Khanna; and the history of the title character and her fated relationship to the other characters. It appears to be merely a coincidence that Dr. Khanna's husband taught computer engineering to Tara's husband at Stanford. Tara soon learns, however, that she, too, bears a telling historical relationship to her gynecologist.

Dr. Khanna passes on a cache of "moldering papers" in a duffel bag which details the history of the Treadwell family and its connection to Tara Lata Gangooly, the tree bride. The bulk of the novel slowly uncovers the modern day Tara's connection to the woman who was a freedom fighter for India's struggle for independence.

The narrative thread is sometimes lost for the sake of historical discourse. For instance, there is a lengthy essay-like chapter on Thomas Babington Macaulay and his "Minute on Education," the "nineteenth-century utilitarian's rationale for twenty-first-century globalization." The whole second part of the novel traces the genealogy from 1820 to 1874 which provides the foundation for the birth of the tree bride. This includes a swashbuckling tale of piracy and mutiny on the high seas, a mute orphan and a colonialist with a hidden past. The years of the Second World War detail Britain's involvement with India and the tree bride's clashes with the established regime.

With all of this history and politics intertwined, Mukherjee wisely grounds the novel in the present by focusing on the personal relationship between Tara and Dr. Khanna. "The Tree Bride" is a stunningly intricate genealogical historical novel that deconstructs the past in order to reconstruct the present and the future. The spiritual cleansing that concludes the novel presumes a purification that leads naturally to the final installment of the trilogy.