The Space Between Us: A Novel (P.S.)

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar's poignant novel about a wealthy woman and her downtrodden servant, offers a revealing look at class and gender roles in modern day Bombay. Alternatively told through the eyes of Sera, a Parsi widow whose pregnant daughter and son-in-law share her elegant home, and Bhima, the elderly housekeeper who must support her orphaned granddaughter, Umrigar does an admirable job of creating two sympathetic characters whose bond goes far deeper than that of employer and employee.

When we first meet Bhima, she is sharing a thin mattress with Maya, the granddaughter upon whom high hopes and dreams were placed, only to be shattered by an unexpected pregnancy and its disastrous consequences. As time goes on, we learn that Sera and her family have used their power and money time and time again to influence the lives of Bhima and Maya, from caring for Bhima's estranged husband after a workplace accident, to providing the funds for Maya's college education. We also learn that Sera's seemingly privileged life is not as it appears; after enduring years of cruelty under her mother-in-law's roof, she faced physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband, pain that only Bhima could see and alleviate. Yet through the triumphs and tragedies, Sera and Bhima always shared a bond that transcended class and race; a bond shared by two women whose fate always seemed to rest in the hands of others, just outside their control.

Told in a series of flashbacks and present day encounters, The Space Between Us gains strength from both plot and prose. A beautiful tale of tragedy and hope, Umrigar's second novel is sure to linger in readers' minds. --Gisele Toueg

Product Description

Poignant, evocative, and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India, it is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage, and Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. A powerful and perceptive literary masterwork, author Thrity Umrigar's extraordinary novel demonstrates how the lives of the rich and poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and how the strong bonds of womanhood are eternally opposed by the divisions of class and culture.

Customer Reviews: Read 94 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

"It was all a waste, just an endless cycle of birth and death; of love and loss" February 2, 2006
59 out of 67 found this review helpful

Using turbulent India, with all its social, environmental and economic problems as a background, author Thrity Umrigar tells a very humanistic tale of love, loss and ultimately betrayal. Two very different women who, in their struggle to cope with their heartache and sorrow, discover an inevitable commonality, a spiritual unity, even though they are divided by the seemingly insurmountable gulf of money, opportunity and class.

Sera Dubash is a wealthy educated Parsi, who lives a privileged upper-class life in Bombay. Her married life fraught with violence and brutality, she ached for a marriage that was different from all the "dead sea of marriages she saw all around her," a marriage begun with such high hopes that fizzled out. Now she is widowed and lives happily with her daughter and son-in-law, looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild.

Bhima is poor and illiterate, forced to eek out an existence on the edges of Bombay, enduring the stench and fifth, the open drains with their dank pungent smell, the dark rows of slanting hutments, the gaunt and open-mouthed men. Bhima has worked for years as Sera's domestic housekeeper, and has built up a trustworthy relationship with her employer's family; Sera's the only person who treats her like a human being, has been steadfast and true to her, and never despised her for being ignorant, or illiterate or weak. Sera even promises to financially help Bhima's granddaughter Maya go to college. But no one - least of all Bhima - expects the seventeen-year-old Maya to get pregnant.

Bhima is convinced that only education is the key to success, an escape from the back breaking and menial labor that has marred the lives of her mother and her mother before her, and aware that a child will end Maya's chance at a better life, she tells her granddaughter she must have an abortion. Bhima seeks Sera's help; both convinced that terminating the baby is only way to ensure Maya will be able to break the hold poverty has had on the family.

Bhima, however, has had her own demons to contend with. Her daughter and son-in-law are dead, stricken by an incurable disease; the elderly woman talking herself into believing that this unborn child is but a "demon growing in her granddaughter's belly." Her emotions run the gamut of anger and fear, fear for this stupid innocent pregnant girl; yet she holds onto the unacknowledged hope that the child's father will perhaps step forward to assume his responsibility, to marry and build a life with the woman who would bear his first child.

Through their shared experiences, Sera and Bhima are inevitably bound; and it's almost as though Bhima has an eyeglass to Sera's soul, feeling exposed under the x-ray vision of Bhima's eyes. But they are divided by a hypocritical society that perpetuates discriminative caste differences, and looks down upon the poor: Sera is kindhearted and concerned for Maya's welfare, but during lunch, Sera always sits at the table, whilst making Bhima squat on her haunches on the floor nearby, forced to use separate utensils. Sera is secretly disgusted at the foul odor of the tobacco that Bhima chews all day long, the woman almost embodying everything that is repulsive about the slums just a short distance away.

Umrigar writes of a jolting, momentary world that is full of illusion and false hope, where Sera and Bhima - both disappointed by the men they loved - are obliged to make the best of any given situation they land themselves in. Sera often resorts to tears and frustration, determined to shut out the realities of the evil that lurks within her family, whilst Bhima is left to pick up the pieces, to soldier on, cloaked in anger and misery. Each wound penetrating deeper and deeper, as she feels the old familiar yearning of what she has left behind.

The author excels in vividly bringing to life the sights, sounds and smells of Bombay, the street urchins, the stray dogs, the impoverished nut vendors, and the hollow-eyed slum dwellers, a city mad with greed and hunger, power and impotence wealth and poverty, where the weak and vulnerable are elbowed out of the way, and where the poor treat the middle class like royalty, when they should actually hate their guts.

Gorgeously imagined, this intimate and sensuous tale is constantly fraught with tension, the human condition this author's specialty. It is impossible to imagine more frightening circumstances than those conditions that Bhima must endure at her age, her heart broken by the people around her with their deceit, their treachery, their fallibility, and their sheer humanity. Through the course of the story, Bhima learns that none of the old rules, the old taboos apply, hers is a fragile existence, a world constructed of sand - shaky ambiguous, and ultimately impermanent. Mike Leonard February 06.

5 out of 5 stars

I highly recommend this book April 12, 2006
19 out of 23 found this review helpful

It is so beautifully and masterfully written I would forget I was reading, and instead felt I was walking alongside either Bhima or Sera as they lived their intertwined lives of love, deceit and such spirit, I won't soon forget them. This is a book you'll keep picking up at every chance and never want it to end. I envy Ms Umrigar's students. What an inspiration she must be. I will always be on the lookout for more of her work.

4 out of 5 stars

Just short of sublime May 27, 2007
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

The earliest chapters were pleasant, but not totally enthralling, so it took me a while to finish this book. But I was eventually pulled in and drawn along by prose and storytelling of the highest quality. The interplay between the upper class Sera and her poor servant Bhima is well told, as are the many surrounding subplots. Both the similar and the different challenges faced by very different social classes are illuminated in the telling of parallel lives. Central to the story is how Sera and Bhima form an intimate relationship without every overcoming the separation of social class that prevents a friendship between them.

The novel is driven by the unfortunate pregnancy of Bhima's granddaughter, Maya, which thwarts the college education both Bhima and Sera want for her. After many a subplot and flashback develops the history of the protagonists, there is a sudden revelation that upsets everything. Up to this point there is little to criticize.

The short denouement following the revelation is more problematical. While fitting with the class divisions illuminated throughout the novel, it is harder to reconcile with the personalities of the protagonists created by the author. I was left at the end feeling that the last few pages didn't quite ring true.

I don't want to spoil the story by discussing more detail because I do think this book is well worth reading. Take the opportunity and form your own opinion about the ending.

3 out of 5 stars

At Times, The Writing Is Utterly Beautiful, BUT.... July 14, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

I was immediately drawn into this book which, at first, seemed so promising. Found Bhima's plight to be very compelling. Sera's situation was awful also, but I was still interested in their stories. I think that, for me, the story fell apart when the truth of Maya's predicament unfolded. I don't really know why, but I simply stopped caring.... This was Bhima's & Sera's story and should have remained as such. Again, the writing -- especially describing Bhima's entire story [the hut, the hospital scenes, etc.] -- was, for me, very real & beautifully rendered. However, the ending was unconvincing, in my humble opinion. Extremely disappointed given such a beguiling & goregous beginning!! [I probably would have rated this book a 2 Star read if not for the writing, as well as for Bhima's story [initially a 4 star which unravelled into soap opera].

4 out of 5 stars

An Interesting Story about Life in Bombay (Mumbai) November 17, 2006
9 out of 11 found this review helpful

Set in Bombay (now Mumbai), this book takes in some 36 characters but focuses on women of two ethnically different families - lower-class Hindus and higher-class Parsis. Written with plenty of heart, twists, richly drawn characters and places, the story is fully credible and gives a sense of what it just might be like to be there. The core of this story, to a western mind at least, is the difficulty of forming relationships between people of similar and different ages and genders in India's hierarchic social scale, the `caste system'.

But the story goes further than that. There are glimpses of a young generation rationally questioning the practical value of a class system that limits its prospects and interactions solely on the basis of birth and customary stratification. This book's universal themes of family dissolution, social mores, ambition and exploitation stretch beyond India and so serve to reduce the space between East and West. At its furthest reach, this tale makes us reconsider the validity of class divisions wherever they preside.

The author doesn't shy from expressing the range of opposing thoughts, emotions and considerations that deluge a person when life suddenly knocks one sideways. Umrigar pulls no punches. She gives us the whole messy picture and it is this that makes it easy to relate to the dreams, heartbreak and spirit of a very old woman whose home is a Mumbai slum. (This intimacy with a character is reminiscent of Antonio Tabucchi's up-close depiction of an editor in "Pereira Declares".)

This is not a perfect book. Without a glossary of the Hindi words used to clarify a speaker's emotional state, I was left to guess at the strength of an insult and even wondered if a word was, in fact, a compliment or a friendly jab in the ribs. It was like listening to an articulate person tell you how she feels while she's wearing a mask.

Second, I would have appreciated a short summary on the place of Parsis in modern-day India and how they came to become part of the Hindu caste system.

Finally, we don't know what men think of the caste system for we're not provided their thoughts on it even though we see them act within it.

Overall, as a book examining women's lives and perspectives, it's very good to read.

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