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A Novel
by Thrity Umrigar
Book Reviewed by:Set in modern-day India, The Space Between Us is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and Bhima, a stoic illiterate who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years.
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.
Chapter One
Although it is dawn, inside Bhima's heart it is dusk.
Rolling onto her left side on the thin cotton mattress on the floor, she sits up abruptly, as she does every morning. She lifts one bony hand over her head in a yawn and a stretch, and a strong, mildewy smell wafts from her armpit and assails her nostrils. For an idle moment she sits at the edge of the mattress with her callused feet flat on the mud floor, her knees bent, and her head resting on her folded arms. In that time she is almost at rest, her mind thankfully blank and empty of the trials that await her today and the next day and the next . . . To prolong this state of mindless grace, she reaches absently for the tin of chewing tobacco that she keeps by her bedside. She pushes a wad into her mouth, so that it protrudes out of her fleshless face like a cricket ball.
Bhima's idyll is short-lived. In the faint, delicate light of a new day, she makes out Maya's silhouette as she stirs on the ...
When The Space Between Us was first released, Umrigar was concerned that Western readers would think of it as a book about a distant "exotic" culture and miss that the themes she draws on are universal. She points out that The Space Between Us is not a novel about caste (Sera Dubash is a Parsi not a Hindu, and the Parsi's do not hold to the caste system) but the more universal system of class divisions - what brings us together and what divides us...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Parsis are Zoroastrians, most likely descended from Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to Indian from the Middle-East to escape Muslim persecution. Zoroastrianism is both a religion and philosophy based on the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster (c.1200 BCE) who proclaimed Ahura Mazda to be the one divine authority and creator of all. Zoroastrians pray to Ahura Mazda to help them in the ongoing battle between Spenta Mainyu (the Bounteous Spirit) and Angra Mainyu (the Destructive Spirit). Traditionally, after death the body of a Zoroastrian is laid out naked in a tower to be devoured by vultures, and the soul is judged and passes either to a heaven or hell-like region.
Unlike Christianity, ...
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