The clash of Caste

Thrity Umrigar's novel highlights the futility of the Indian caste system, by Ligaya Mishan

The space between us

By Thrity Umrigar.

William Morrow/ HarperCollins

€24.95

In the classic upstairs-downstairs story, you always have a sneaking suspicion that downstairs, freed of corsets and etiquette, the servants are having a lot more fun than their prim, monocled masters. But no such palliative exists in the world of Thrity Umrigar's second novel, which examines the class divide in Bombay (as Umrigar continues to call Mumbai) through the relationship of a mistress and her servant.

In a city where the densest slums have a population of one million per square mile, "downstairs" is fairly grim. It's hardly surprising, then, that Bhima, the longtime housekeeper of a middle-class Parsi widow named Sera, has had a life of woe: her once loving husband was crippled in an industrial accident, took solace in alcohol and eventually absconded with their only son; her daughter and son-in-law both died of AIDS. At the novel's start, her orphaned granddaughter, the first in the family to get a proper education, has dropped out of college because she's pregnant.

Fortunately, Bhima's employer is generous. Sera has sponsored Bhima's granddaughter through school, and she now proposes to help the girl obtain an abortion. (Which, Bhima muses, is preferable to the way "some other" Indian grandmothers might deal with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy: "a quick shove down an open well, a kerosene can and a match, a sale to a brothel.") Meanwhile, Sera's friends tease her for treating Bhima "like she is the Kohinoor diamond" and warn that her charitable efforts will end badly. ("Did you see that story in last week's Times of India?... Poor woman, stabbed in her bed by her own servant.")

But Sera is well aware of the limits on her relationship with her housekeeper. In Sera's home, Bhima drinks from a special glass "that is kept aside for her," and she squats on the floor rather than use a chair. "The thought of Bhima sitting on her furniture repulses her," Sera admits to herself. When she spies her daughter hugging Bhima, she must "suppress the urge to order her... To go wash her hands."

The irony is that Sera herself has been shunned in the past for being "unclean". As a young woman, she married a seemingly urbane Parsi who became a viciously abusive husband. While living with his parents, she was forced to abide by her mother-in-law's rule that a menstruating woman must be quarantined, using separate utensils and eating meals alone in her bedroom. Now, years later, she fails to recognise the parallel between her mother-in-law's superstition and her own physical aversion to Bhima, whom she imagines to be covered in a "sheen of dirtiness".

Umrigar is a perceptive and often piercing writer, although her prose occasionally tips into flamboyant overstatement. (Walking to visit Bhima in the slums, Sera can't avoid "the flies, thick as guilt".) Umrigar's last book was a memoir about growing up in a well-off Parsi family in Bombay, and her portrait of Sera as a woman unable to "transcend her middle-class skin" feels bracingly honest. But Umrigar never makes a similar imaginative leap with Bhima. The housekeeper seems exaggeratedly ignorant and too good-hearted to be true.

Yet this novel does allow for one moment when Sera and Bhima close up the space between them. In a flashback, Bhima sees the results of a savage beating the young Sera has received from her husband and, without making any explicit reference to the assault, gently rubs medicinal oil over her mistress's bruises. At first, Sera recoils from Bhima's touch, then tearfully submits. It's a powerful scene, with an uncomfortable echo of the age-old way the social classes have come together: furtively, in silence, in the dark.

Ligaya Mishan

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