The Space Between Us By Thrity Umrigar, HarperCollins, Rs 350

One of the most compelling presences in Middle India is the domestic help ? ?maidservant? to the vast majority of households yet to wake up to the charms of political correctness. She is anything between eight and eighty, married or unmarried or widowed or abandoned or separated. She may have to travel for three hours on all possible forms of transport to reach her place of work, or she may live in the slum two blocks away from the highrise of her employers. She is at once witness to the most sordid of family dramas and keeper of her mistress?s secrets. But if there is anything that is constant in these variables, it is that the domestic help is never allowed to forget her station in life.

Nor does Bhima, whose life, and its many points of intersection with that of her affluent Parsi mistress, Sera Dubash, is captured in Thrity Umrigar?s second novel. The Space Between Us is set in the new-millennium Mumbai, which, for all its state-of-the-art additions, continues to wear the largest slum in the continent like a badge on its chest. Bhima lives in one of the many shantytowns that dot the city with her 17-year-old granddaughter, Maya. Maya has been her grandmother?s responsibility ever since her parents died of AIDS in Delhi. Bhima?s once-caring husband took to the bottle after losing three fingers in a factory accident and absconded with their son, unable to face her and the familiar world.

In a world which has let Bhima down time and again, her employer?s home is her sole oasis. Sera Dubash is a good mistress, sticking to Bhima even when her friends fill her with horror stories of servants murdering or swindling their employers. Sera?s generosity is not confined to paying for Maya?s college education. When Maya gets pregnant, it is Sera who pays for an abortion at a private clinic and even accompanies the young girl there. Bhima registers every little kindness, but life has taught her not to take them for granted.

Sera?s life has been far from a smooth ride. For the most part of her married life, she has been tormented, both psychologically and physically, by her mother-in-law and her husband. While the world outside is not privy to her sufferings, every blow to her body and mind is picked up by Bhima without so much as a word being exchanged. The most moving moment in the novel comes when, after a particularly bad dose of violence from her husband, Sera?s bruises are tended to by Bhima in an act of utmost generosity and selflessness.

The relationship between Sera and Bhima defies all attempts at naming it. Sera knows that no one understands her better than her maid of 25 years, and yet, she cannot explain her resistance to letting Bhima sit on the sofa or drink tea from cups used by the Dubash family. Bhima?s little box ? containing a soap dish, Pond?s talcum powder (her mistress has marvelled many times at her odourlessness), a comb with a tooth missing, a metal glass to drink from and her tobacco tin ? seems to mock at the fact that it does not take Bhima even fifteen minutes to walk to her employer?s house. For the universe they inhabit are more than lightyears away.

Bhima is alternately a mirror image of her mistress and a perfect foil to her. When Bhima?s marriage to Gopal seems to be working out beautifully, Sera fights the twin demons of her mother-in-law and husband. But when Feroz Dubash dies, and Gopal leaves Bhima, both women awake to a feeling of being released from their individual cages. Perhaps this is Umrigar?s answer to the question, what is a bigger reality in the lives of women in India ? gender of class?

One other truth that the novel lays bare is that the Bhimas of modern India cannot bank on the benevolence of the state. Bhima is repeatedly betrayed by the state ? by the hospital when her daughter and son-in-law die, by Gopal?s factory which refuses to take responsibility of his accident, and so on. Private generosities, like Sera?s, is all that Bhima can count on. The final betrayal shatters Bhima because it comes from within Sera?s family, when Bhima discovers that Maya has been impregnated by none other than Sera?s son-in-law, her own favourite Viraf baba.

Empathy is this novel?s greatest virtue ? reason enough for the situational clich?s and the forced Indianness of the English dialogue to be excused. Perhaps the book will soon be available at a theatre close to your home.