Thrity Umrigar’s Space Between Us

Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us (©2005, Harper Perennial 2007)

Bhima is a domestic servant in Mumbai – or Bombay, as she calls it. She has been with the same Parsi family for decades. She can’t sit on the family’s furniture, and physical contact is avoided, but she and the woman of the house – Sera, whom Bhima cannot think of without the respectful suffix ‘-bai’ – have formed close bonds. Bhima is the only person in whom Sera has been able to confide about her husband’s violence, and Sera has paid for the education of Bhima’s granddaughter, Maya.

When the novel opens, Bhima is living with teenage Maya in a hut in the slums. We gradually learn that Maya’s parents died of AIDS when she was seven years old, that Bhima’s husband left her decades ago in tragic circumstances, that Sera’s husband has recently died. In the present, Sera’s daughter is pregnant and her relationship with her charming husband is a bright spot in everyone’s lives. To Bhima’s shame and fury, Maya is also pregnant, and the action in the novel’s present revolves around the father’s identity.

It’s Thrity Umrigar’s tribute to ‘the real Bhima’, who was a servant in her wealthy Parsi childhood home in Mumbai. But having established the bonds of affection and mutuality between the two families, the book turns, and becomes a brilliant study of the way relationships can be close and strong but in the end tragically vulnerable to social norms and structures.

I read this book after The Secrets Between Us, a sequel published 13 years later. This isn’t something I’d recommend. On the one hand it was interesting to see passing mention of Parvati, a major character in the second book, to have the stories of Bhima’s husband and daughter dramatically realised, and to come to a fuller understanding of the ending of the second novel. But the major thunderclap reveal of the identity of the man who got Maya pregnant comes as no surprise, and it was odd to know better than all the characters when there was very little foreshadowing.

A strong point in both books is the way they enact the fine detail of changing culture. Sera, like Thrity Umrigar, is Parsi, and the book’s version of traditional Parsi culture probably didn’t win it any friends among older Parsis. In one of the book’s many flashbacks, soon after Sera marries, she and her new husband move in with his parents, and what follows is a classic mother-in-law nightmare. Banu Dubash, the mother-in-law, insists on traditional Parsi practices, specifically those built around the idea that a woman is impure when he has her periods. Reluctantly, Sera accepts that she must eat meals in her room until her periods are over. Although she is Parsi herself, she has no idea of the extent of her assumed impurity, and walks through the room where Banu is praying, provoking a deafening shriek and a torrent of abuse. Freddy, Sera’s kindly father-in-law, comes running in from the dining room. This is on page 76:

‘Oh, Freddy, thank God you are here,’ Banu said dramatically. ‘help me, darling, help me.’
Freddy looked distraught. ‘Banu, what is it, will you speak? Is it your heart?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Just that this whole house will have to be purified now. Sera walked across the room while I was praying and she is having her monthly cycle, you see. Still, without any consideration, she interfered with my prayers.’
Sera blushed. Before she could speak, Freddy raised his voice. ‘You and your superstitious vhems and dhakharas. Crazy woman, you are. Harassing this poor child, scaring her for no good reason.’ He grew even more angry. ‘And worst of all, you’ve ruined my enjoyment of my music. A new Mozart record I’d just bought, and now your hysterical faras has made me miss the best part.’ He flung a sympathetic look at Sera and then stomped out of the room.
Banu narrowed her eyes and flashed Sera a look that made her heart stop. ‘See what you’ve done, getting my Freddy all upset?’ she said, careful to lower her voice so that it didn’t carry into the next room. ‘Is that why you entered my house, to create friction between my husband and me?’
Sera felt dizzy, as if she had drunk four beers one after the other. She took a step toward Banu and reached out to touch her hand. ‘Banu mamma, I don’t know what happened–’
‘She touched me,’ Banu screamed. ‘Deliberately, on purpose, she touched me with her impure hands. ‘Oh, God, what kind of daakan has entered my house, to make me miserable in my old age?’
This time, Gulab, the Dubashes’ servant, came into the living room. She took one look at the situation and pushed Sera toward her bedroom. ‘Baby, you go in your room for a while,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Go on, I will calm Mummy down.’

I love the way the non-English words are given without italics or explanation. I couldn’t find ‘vhem’, ‘dhakara’ or ‘faras’ with a quick web search, and I’m happy to have them be untranslatable – or rather to be left to make my own rough translations: ‘panics’, ‘idiocies’ and ‘ruckus’, perhaps? And I love the way that each of the four people in this scene are in a different relationship to traditional religious practice. The pragmatic Gulab is probably, like Bhima, Hindu. Freddy is European in his musical tastes. Sera is part of the modern world and completely unprepared for Banu’s fanatical attachment to – in her understanding – antiquated practices. But mostly what I love is the vividly realised drama of the moment, the brilliant use of dialogue.

I came across these books thanks to the Emerging Artist’s practice of plucking books with non-Anglo author names from the shelves of our local library. It’s a life-enriching practice