SOURCE: “‘Orbiting’: Bharati Mukherjee's Kaleidoscope Vision,” in MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 91-101.

In the following essay, Carchidi asserts that in the story “Orbiting” Mukherjee reveals the manner in which American society itself is remade by the immigrant experience.

“Orbiting,” the story I discuss here, is included in a collection entitled Braided Lives. This title evokes an image of the interweaving of diverse points of view to create a new perspective that is neither wholly like nor wholly different from the elements that make it up, an image well-suited to Bharati Mukherjee's vision of America. Peter Nazareth writes that when Mukherjee claims to be a North American writer, she is affiliating herself with the “America that embraces all the peoples of the world both because America is involved with the whole world...