Idaho Commission for Libraries

In Bombay (some now prefer Mumbai) 65 year-old Bhima, a low-caste (but not an “Untouchable”) illiterate Hindu cleans house and cooks for the well-to-do Sera Dubash, a Parsi woman, whose daughter is pregnant and apparently happily married. Bhima’s granddaughter, whose college education has been paid for by Sera, is pregnant out of wedlock, and her hopes for an improved lot in life appear doomed as a result. Umrigar deftly oscillates between Bhima’s and Sera’s worlds, and she vividly depicts their variant life-styles and class conflict, but she also suggests important parallels. Both Bhima and Sera are widows, in effect, and through flashbacks we learn that both suffered from spousal abuse, though in very different ways. In her comments about the novel at the end, Umrigar indicates that Bhima is “real,” that she was “a shadow flitting around our middle-class house,” a “nebulous presence in our home, our world, our lives.” Like Sera’s daughter Dinaz, however, Umrigar admired Bhima and “could sense her essential goodness and dignity and stoic heroism.” In some ways this novel is a tribute to Bhima, but Sera also emerges as a sympathetic sister protagonist. In addition to her detailed description of conditions in the slums of Bombay, Umrigar refers to various Indian foods, and she sprinkles words in Hindi throughout the text, creating a powerful sense of verisimilitude and giving readers an intimate familiarity with the setting.

India and its culture
Reviews

*Cover reprinted with permission from HarperCollins 

Author Information

Born in Bombay, India, in 1961, Thrity Umrigar took her bachelor’s degree at Bombay University, a Catholic university in the predominantly Hindu nation; like Sera Dubash in her novel, Umrigar grew up as a Parsi, a religion that evolved from ancient Persian Zoroastrianism. At age 21 she immigrated to the United States, where she pursued her master’s degree in journalism from Ohio State University, working as a journalist in Akron for about fifteen years. Umrigar is now a U.S. citizen. She wrote her first novel, Bombay Time (2001) while at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship for mid-career journalists. The success of that book enabled her to change careers in 2002; she now teaches creative writing and minority and ethnic literature at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Umrigar holds a doctorate in English literature from Kent State University. Her memoir, First Darling of the Morning, was published in 2004, and was followed by the bestselling novel The Space Between Us (2005). Her most recent novel, If Today Be Sweet, was released in June 2007 and concerns a Parsi family living in Cleveland, where she currently resides. In a blog posted on the Powells Books website (May 5, 2006), Umrigar asserts that as the only child in a family of businesspeople, literature literally “became a kind of religion” for her: “Books taught me about love and honor, acts of kindness and selflessness, about good and evil, about the paradoxes of human behavior. I learned about the largeness and smallness of the world from books.”

* Photo reprinted with permission, copyright Marion Ettlinger

Discussion Questions

1. Perhaps the cardinal achievement of this novel is Thrity Umrigar’s ability to cause readers to feel compassion for the stoic, downtrodden Bhima even though most of us have little choice but to identify personally with the upper-middle-class Sera. The task may be easy enough as middle-class Americans do tend to side with the underdog. But how does Umrigar go about making Sera a sympathetic character? What traits does she possess that complicate her character, even as those traits make her more credible or more “realistic”? Do you feel pretty much the same about Sera at the end of the novel as you did through the first two-thirds of it?

2. Throughout this novel much is made of education as the potential salvation of the poor. Even marginal literacy grants a certain status to Bombay’s slum-dwellers, and Bhima’s total illiteracy costs her deeply. But does this novel suggest anything about the nature of education that you haven’t thought of before? How admirable are the best educated of the characters in the novel? Consider in particular Feroz, Freddy, Dinaz, and Viraf.

3. One might argue that any novel in which overt villainy plays a key role may tip in the direction of melodrama. To what extent, if any, is that the case here? Who are the villains of this novel? Melodrama tends to polarize good and evil and most often to reward good at the end, to assure the reader (or movie viewer) that justice prevails. Does Bhima strike you as a melodramatic heroine, too good to be true (or credible)? Is she an Indian version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom?

4. What important roles do minor characters play in this novel? Consider the Afghan balloon-seller, the doctors, Aban and Pervez Driver, and the Muslim Hyder. To what extent might you regard Bombay itself as a “character” in the novel? And what do you make of Umrigar’s portrayal of her native city, current population about 18 million and expected to replace Tokyo as the world’s most populous city by 2020? Where does she show Bombay at its best and at its worst?

5. Do you find the sprinkling of Hindi words in this novel to be valuable, or do you find them distracting? Why do you think Umrigar uses so many words like ghatis, janu, jaado, bai, agyari, and chalo? While the meanings of most of these may be apparent from the context, some are not, and some you may find yourself having forgotten when you come across the word later in the novel without that context. Would an index be advisable, or do you find yourself sort of skipping over those foreign words?

6. Setting aside matters of social class or caste in this novel, what do you make of the gender issues? The significant negative characters in the novel, with just one or two exceptions, are males and the most admirable are females. What are those exceptions (positive and negative, male and female)? Are the flawed male characters pretty much all cut from the same cloth? Do you think Umrigar is unfair to men in this novel?

7. If we read The Space Between Us as a novel of social class conflict or of gender conflict, it could be argued that we avoid the vital matter of personal agency. The question here is whether Umrigar’s characters are in a position to make personal choices. Are they constrained or limited by their lot in life as it pertains to gender and class? Does Umrigar seem to suggest there is greater hope for the next generation, that of Maya and Dinaz?