Thrity Umrigar

I listened to this on MP3 CD all day yesterday, which was eleven and a half hours. I feel like I have had an incredible experience. Smita, an American Indiana journalist rushes to her co-worker's side. She thought that she was being called to comfort her during an emergency hip replacement surgery in Mumbai. But her friend wants her to step in and finish covering a story about Hindu woman who own family burned her husband to death and badly burned her out of honor. The woman, Meena had been pulled into working away from home by her sister to support their family, She reluctantly meets with a Muslim man who declares his love for her after watching her helping others at the factory.

While at the hospital, Smita meets a Mohan, an associate of her co-worker who acts as a translater and as person with insight into the local culture, a relationship slowly and guarded develops between Smita and Mohan. Smita decides to tell Mohan about her family escape from India long ago. Mohan is from a rich glass maker family. He falls for Smita and ts to be with her for the rest of his life.

There is a child, Abu, which means Honor from the marriage of Meena and Abdul, the most tragic marriage that I have ever read about.

This is a very emotional story, one of religious prejudice, murder, joy, extreme terror. It is the best one from Thrity Umrigar that I have read and I hope that every one reads it.… (lisätietoja)

Bhima, the main character of The Space Between Us, returns as she struggles against the circumstances of class and misfortune to forge a new path for herself and her granddaughter in modern India.
Poor and illiterate, Bhi a had faithfully worked for the Dubash family, an upper-middle-class Parsi household, for Marie than 20 years. Yet after courageously speaking the truth about a heinous crime perpetrated against her own family, the devoted servant was cruelly fired. Bhi a must now find some other way to support herself and her granddaughter, Maya.
Bhima’s fortunes take an unexpected turn when her path intersects with Parvati, a bitter, taciturn older woman. The two acquaintances soon form a tentative business partnership, selling fruits and vegetables at the local market. As they work together, the two women seemingly bound by fate grow closer, each confessing the truth about their lives and the wounds that haunt them. Discovering her first true friend, Bhima pieces together a new life, and together, the two women learn to stand on their own.… (lisätietoja)

Class divisions lay at the core of Thirty Umrigar's powerful novel “The Space Between Us.” Those divisions in modern India have eased somewhat in the sequel, “The Secrets Between Us” (2018), yet as the title suggests people remain separated, partly by the secrets they try to keep hidden and the pride that prevents them from speaking about them.

After being forced to leave her longtime position as a servant for an upperclass woman in the earlier novel, Bhima now works for two other women and still lives in a slum while trying to save enough money to pay for her granddaughter's college education.

Through a series of circumstances, she finds herself forming a business partnership with a bitter woman named Parvati, even older than she is. Though impoverished, Parvati turns out to be educated and has a good business sense. Bhima is illiterate, but is more able-bodied. Together they begin making money selling vegetables in the open market.

Parvati's secret is that she was sold into prostitution by her father when she was a little girl. Once a great beauty, she was the pride of the brothel, where she kept the books, as well. Eventually she married a police officer, one of her most faithful clients. He turned brutal, however, and his death left her in poverty. "...Without my secrets I am nothing," she says at one point.

As for Bhima, her secret was told in the previous novel. Her husband and son abandoned her years before. She raised their daughter, who died of AIDS, living the granddaughter, Maya, in her care. The reasons behind her firing in the other novel are also a secret she wants to keep hidden.

Gradually these very different women reveal their secrets to each other and begin to draw close, no space at all between them.

Umrigar draws her characters beautifully, making them real and their actions understandable. The novel's last line may be one of the most moving you will ever read: "Although it is dusk, in Bhima's heart it is dawn." I have revealed the ending, but you won't cry until you have read the rest.… (lisätietoja)