The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar

This book is an examination of social class (not caste) in India, and also serves as an example how social classes, especially classes with wide gaps in lifestyle and perception, interact, overlap, and separate in ways that resonate around the world.  The book layers the most beautiful writing over a layer of serious scrutiny, criticism and questioning about worlds orbiting side-by-side.  The novel centers around two women. One is Bhima, who is Parsi, and works as a servant in a middle-class home, and is mothering her pregnant, college-age grandchild in a slum. The other key character is Serabai, the middle-class woman who has survived an abusive mother-in-law and a physically and emotionally abusive husband and who has her daughter and son-in-law living with her.  Relationships seam the story together.  Each woman has survived her own type of traumas, but those traumas do not bring the two women together by the end of the book, although they have experienced brief moments of understanding.

The most poignant passages and understanding relate to people of similar class status. One that is especially powerful and that will stay with me after finishing the book relates to a memory Bhima holds of an  Pathan balloonwalla (a balloon seller) originally from Afghanistan who works at the seaside:

Bhima marvels at the paradox: A solitary man, an exile, a man without a country or a family, had still succeeded in creating dreamworlds for hundreds of children, had entered the homes of strangers with his creations of color and fantasy and magic.  A man who would never again touch or kiss the sweet faces of his own children brought smiles to the faces of other people’s children. Like a musician, the Pathan had learned to make a song out of his loneliness. Like a magician, he had learned how to use sheer air to contort limp pieces of rubber into objects of happiness. Empty-handed, he had built a world. (Umrigar, 2005, p. 314)

Bhima’s and the Pathan balloonwalla’s life and work as well as similarly situated lives and labors receive recognition at the center of this novel.

Reference

Umrigar, T. (2007). The space between us. NY: Harper Perennial.