'The Space Between Us,' by Thrity Umrigar
The New York Times/Book Review
January 22, 2006
'The Space Between Us,' by Thrity Umrigar
The Clash of Caste
Review by LIGAYA MISHAN
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.
January 22, 2006'The Space Between Us,' by Thrity Umrigar
The Clash of Caste
Review by LIGAYA MISHAN
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.
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