The Spaces Between Us

Listening to Meryl Streep’s elegant speech at the Golden Globes last week, I am struck by a key point that she made: when people in power use their public platform to ridicule others, “it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”  In other words, it is suddenly very okay to treat people who are different from you in ways that are insulting, inappropriate and unacceptable in civilized society.  It led me to think, as I have so often done in the last weeks, about what I believe to be the naïve assumption by those in our country whom we would call the “have nots” believing that the “haves” - a billionaire and his cabinet of other billionaires, supported by a Congress of millionaires - will have sympathy for and do something about their plight.  Already, Congressional Republicans are talking about defunding Planned Parenthood, cutting health benefits and investing trillions in building a wall to keep out immigrants.  Can people that wealthy and privileged cross the great class chasm?  Interestingly, the book I just finished, Thrity Umrigar’s excellent 2005 novel, The Space Between Us, provides one possible answer.

Set halfway across the globe in Bombay, India and focusing on the lives of two characters, the novel does not pretend to speak for humanity, yet in this microcosmic look at two women from opposite ends of the class ladder, it offers a sad commentary on where sympathies often lie and the falseness of the idea that poverty is easy to escape if you just try.  Bhima is a middle-aged illiterate woman who has spent decades working as a day servant to Sera, also middle-aged but wealthy and privileged.  Bhima travels each day from her hut in the Mumbai slum to Sera’s apartment in an upscale neighborhood, where she works long hours and takes pride in the cleanliness of the kitchen and the shininess of the pots.  Over the years of working for Sera, Bhima has come to think of the Dubash family as her own, loving Dinaz, Sera’s daughter whom she helps raise, and feeling tremendous gratitude for Sera’s generosity in funding Bhima’s granddaughter’s (Maya) college education. There is little joy in Bhima’s life, however.  Physically and emotionally broken down from the years of, as the reader gradually learns, a series of traumatic events, she lives for the possibility that Maya will escape to a better life.  She is, however, despite her status at the bottom of society, a woman with dignity and self-respect.  In an early scene, she is repulsed by her need to use the communal toilet of the slums where “there will hardly be room to walk between the tidy piles of shit that the residents of the slum leave on the mud floor” (8).

Once Bhima arrives at the Dubash home, where there are indoor toilets and tiled floors, she escapes, if only temporarily from her awful life.  Sera will sit and chat with Bhima over a cup of tea (although Sera sits in a chair while Bhima must squat on the floor)  and her own sorrows occasionally leak out into their conversations, suggesting a certain friendship.  It becomes clear, early on, however, that there is, as the title suggests, a space between the two women that can never be bridged.  In one poignant episode when Bhima falls ill, Sera travels to the slum to visit her.

         Sitting on the only chair in the room, surrounded by

people sitting on their haunches. . .The generosity of the

poor, Sera marveled to herself.  It puts us middle-class people to shame. . .the thought of how she herself treated Bhima – not allowing her to sit on the furniture, having her eat with separate utensils – filled her with guilt. (133)

Yet, while she feels sympathy, she rationalizes her inability to change by telling herself that her husband would have a fit if she did.  Sera is not among the richest in her society – so my analogy to the new administration is not perfect – but her economic, social and educational status compared to that of Bhima creates a separation that makes it impossible for her to truly empathize, particularly when it means making sacrifices herself. 

Another gulf exists in the society of the book created by the gender roles that the culture has embraced leading to the imbalance of power between men and women.  Most of the men in the novel do not come off well.  They are initially charming but later abusive and demanding.  When the story begins, Sera is a widow and Bhima has been abandoned by her husband for decades.  This seems like a sad state until the flashbacks reveal the vagaries of each woman’s marriage and both the loneliness and the freedom the absence of their spouses brings.  Sera’s daughter, Dinaz, is recently married and there is hope that, Viraf, a man a generation removed from the older traditions, will be a different kind of husband. 

Not only does the author leave the reader with much to ponder, she creates memorable characters who could be real people.  Set in a society seemingly so different from ours, it would be easy to pass off the “spaces” as a reflection of Indian culture and the caste system that still lingers; however, I suspect that Umrigar is writing about us too.