ABSTRACT

In Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Desirable Daughters the Bengali-born narrator and author, Tara Chatterjee, is in an implicit contest with another writer, her ex-husband Bish, a writer of software programs who enjoys semi-mythological status among Indians as the Stanford college student who, with his equally penniless friend Chet Yee, made a fortune overnight in computer bandwidth routing technology (recalling the story of Sabeer Bhatia, inventor with his Stanford friend Jack Smith of Hotmail, subsequently sold to Microsoft for $400 million). As Amitava Kumar comments, ‘It is the software writers from India rather than the fiction writers who are wired to the circuits of global production.’1 Bish’s discovery is prompted by watching a football game in which the players exploit the ‘West Coast Offense’, a tactic in which short passing plays among designated receivers replace the running game, to stretch the field and control the ball – a process appropriately invented by Bill Walsh of the Cincinnati Bengals,2 so named after a Bengal tiger in the Cincinnati zoo. The system, called CHATTY, is ‘about width, using the whole field, connecting in the flat, no interference, a billion short passes linked together’.3 It also exemplifies the method of Mukherjee’s novel. In interview Mukherjee said that

The aesthetic strategy of the book was using the width of the field – of history, geography, diaspora, gender, ethnicity, language – rather than the old-fashioned long, clean throw.4