Bhima is a maid servant in Sera’s household and has been serving the family for several years. She was married to Gopal who lost his fingers in a workplace accident, rendering the family even poorer than they were before. Bhima and Gopal are lower class Hindus, living in the slums and trying to raise two children – Pooba and Amit. Pooba marries and leaves to live in Bombay – she and her husband have one child called Maya. Pooba and her husband die of AIDS and Bhima, the grandmother is left the sole guardian of little Maya. Sera is a wealthy Parsi wife, beaten by a husband who is still emotionally attached to his mother and both make her life miserable. They have a beautiful daughter Dinaz and she ends up marrying a handsome, successful young man called Viraf. After Sera is widowed, her daughter and son-in-law move in with her and so Bhima serves all three.
The story aims to show the futility of servant life and how the lack of education predisposes servants to being cheated and abused. Also, it shows how a type of relationship can exist between the rich and poor in India, defined in such seemingly unimportant details as: Bhima and Sera having tea together with Bhima sitting on the floor on her haunches while Sera sits on the plush cushions of her couch. The story takes a stunning turn as we learn the identity of the man who impregnated Bhima’s grand-daughter Maya and yet the story seems to end there.
This was a slow moving story….so slow that I almost put it down around the twentieth page. What moved it along was the insight it gave into India’s class system and the new Indian words/lingo I was learning e.g. baadmaash, ‘bai’ when used after someone’s name is a respectful way of addressing them and ‘seth’ – used to refer respectfully to a man. I was disappointed that when the secret of Maya’s pregnancy was revealed, the story just about ended. I could have handled another fifty pages of analysis – was Maya justified in hiding the identity of the father? Would Bhima find the strength to not only confront the father but demand some restitution? What would Sera do…in the long term, on finding out the identity of the aborted child’s father? All of these I wanted to know…and I was mad that Thrity Umrigar chose not to tell me!
Ok, I’ve calmed down now and I think I am thinking rationally in giving it a 7/10. Although there are a lot of Indian slang words and she doesn’t intentionally explain them, the context is such that it is fairly easy to understand what she is trying to say. Now I want to see Chowpatty…
