The Space Between Us
Thrity Umrigar
Harper Perennial

The space between us is never as distant as we think it is.

This is the major theme of Thrity Umrigar's novel, The Space Between Us. Umrigar is a Cleveland writer who was born in India, and she chose her native land as the backdrop for this book. In fact, India's history and culture are felt on every page of this novel that is rich with the vibrations of the human spirit, and the spirit of India.

Umrigar was always aware of the poverty of Bombay, even though she lived a comfortable life there. "Writing was my way to make sense of the world outside and inside my home," she states on her website. She describes herself as being a product of a colonial and western educational system that prepared her for moving to the United States. She had never read an Indian writer until later in her education when she picked up Saman Rushdie's Midnight's Children -- Rushdie was a revelation to her. While the poor shared public baths and lived in lean-tos, Umrigar's family had a maid.

Relocation to the United States almost seemed inevitable. She says “I remember the day when it occurred to me very clearly that if I lived in India, I would never be totally independent and would never discover who exactly I was as a person. I wanted to live in a place where I would rise or fall based on my own efforts and talents.”

Her father encouraged her to reach for her dreams, so she came to Ohio State because there was a Joan Baez record playing on the turntable and the song “Banks of the Ohio” came on—she saw it as a sign. After she finished her M.A. in journalism at Ohio State, she worked for the Lorain Journal for two years. In 1987, she started writing for the Akron Beacon Journal. During that time, she began Bombay Time and had to decide between finishing the novel and her PhD dissertation while working full-time as a journalist. She finished the dissertation, but in 1999 she won the Nieman fellowship, which allows journalists a year of study at Harvard. She took the opportunity to finish the novel.

Umrigar has also written First Darling of the Morning and If Today Be Sweet. The latter book was about the culture of the Parsis, the group of Zoroastrians who fled persecution in Iran and ended up on the shores of Sanjan, India, seeking political refuge. There was no room for them, but the Zoroastrian head priest drops sugar into a milk of glass and dissolves it, not spilling the milk, and the message is that the culture of India will be sweetened but not disrupted by the Parsi infusion.

Umrigar’s own Parsi background, her sense that the poor are not so different than the rich, her tender feelings about her native India, her western background, and a father who encouraged her to reach for her dreams are at the fore throughout The Space Between Us. The lives of a well-kept Parsi matron, Sera, and her maid, Bhima, are intimately entwined, yet the maid is not allowed to sit at their table.

Their lives are so connected that the maid’s granddaughter’s college education is being paid for by her generous boss. Their lives seem remarkably different -- one is wealthy, the other poor, one is independent and the other a virtual prisoner of economic conditions, one has a brutish husband while the other has a warm and tender husband. The women represent the people of India, where the rich are rich and the poor are very poor and where women have traditionally had limited choices. The story is told in present-time India with altering points of view and flashbacks by each woman to earlier in their lives.

In this story, the women share the shame of losing their husbands, one spiritually, the other physically. Not long after she marries, Sera, who was brought up in refined living, wants to explain everything to her new husband, “how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriage she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua.”

Although she expresses it by telling her husband she loves him and he responds to that, she realizes that she is not able to say what she intended to say because her husband would not have understood and loneliness sweeps over her. Umrigar shows the reader how Sera feels.

Bhima, whose college-attending granddaughter is pregnant by an unnamed man, is resentful that Sera’s married daughter is to “have a child of their own, a child who will never know what it is to have adults plot its death.” Although the world is unfair, Bhima carries on while being “tired of this endless cycle of death and birth, tired of investing any hope in the next generation, tired and frightened of finding more human beings to love, knowing full well that every person she loves will someday wound her, hurt her, break her heart with their deceit, their treachery, their fallibility, their sheer humanity.”

This passage tells us that Bhima is feeling her own weariness because humankind is fallible; it’s not just the people she knows. Alone in the world, Bhima only has Maya, who is loved by both women. Orphaned Maya’s shame is increased by her grandmother’s blame and the secret harbors she harbors, while Sera and Bhima pressure her to have an abortion. The pregnancy means the end of a path to a better life for Bhima and Maya. Their lives are unwound and out of rhythm until Bhima discovers how good the sea is for them. “As they approach the water, they can hear the ocean pounding the rocks, and as a faint mist rises from the rocks, it kisses their faces in welcome. Maya grins, a sudden, effortless grin that reminds Bhima of the seven-year-old she had brought back from Delhi.”

And then Bhima begins to tell the stories of her life to reveal her own secrets. Healing is allowed to begin.

Once upon a time, when she was young and her two children were near, Bhima had asserted to Sera that her husband Gopal would not physically harm her the way Sera’s husband had from their early marriage, yet “Time had proven Bhima wrong, had shared of her confidence in her husband and left a raw, splintered woman in its wake. They were alike in many ways, Bhima and she.” Umrigar describes the beatings Sera’s husband inflicts as “a banquet that included punches, slaps, and an occasional kick”; he somehow delights in them. In a flashback, Bhima sees the result of a savage beating the young Sera received and without making any explicit reference to the assault, gently rubs medicinal oil over her mistress’s bruises. Sera recoils, then submits, a powerfully uncomfortable echo of the age-old way the social classes come together, furtively, in silence, in the dark. In that moment, the space between them exists only in their hearts.

Umrigar depicts and captures India’s social problems by telling the story of these two women. The human story, well told in The Space Between Us, will be long remembered.

In an India Currents Interview by Jeanne Fredriksen on Umrigar’s website, Umrigar says, “This is the story about the rich and the poor and the imbalance between them... we have our own caste systems in America. And if I had a wild hope, it would be that this novel would make readers examine their own areas of prejudice and discomfort.” Umrigar achieves that in The Space Between Us.

Umrigar has written for the Washington Post, The Plain Dealer, and other national newspapers, and contributes regularly to the book pages of the Boston Globe. She teaches creative writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University. Visit the author online at http://www.umrigar.com.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Claudia J. Taller ctallerwritesATwowway.com
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