I discovered Thrity Umrigar last year when I read “The Space Between Us“. It’s a wonderful novel about what the title states, the space between us, us being a well-educated Parsi mother and widow Sera Dubash, and her poor, illiterate housekeeper, Bhima.
Both live in Bombay, India. Both are mothers and have been wives. Such similarities do little to bridge the economic gap and social gape between the two women. This is where emotions and family come in as so often life deems.
I loved the book. And Bhima will endure in my heart and mind forever as a person I met through Umrigar’s deft writing and character creation and evolution in the context of her novel.
If you’ve ever pondered just how much the space between you and a person with whom you have worked or mingled for years can hold, the amount of unspoken things that go unnoticed and held in permanent silence, then The Space Between Us will leave even more for you to consider, and perhaps why we say so little to those who stand so near.
Perhaps it is that we are afraid of what we might discover within ourselves along with what we have ignored or refused to see in others. As for Umrigar’s writing style, I am thoroughly impressed with the way she tells such timeless stories and in such a simple way.
Umrigar does not use large words and yet her characters convey such heavy emotions, feelings that have been with humanity since eternity and that will continue to haunt us as do the dilemmas each generation faces as the one behind it steps up to the plate in their attempt to run the bases and run home.
Yet in Umrigar’s stories–I recently finished If Today Be Sweet–all the characters, rather the younger generation, are not so much trying to return home. Rather they are struggling to find home in a day and age where home has become less of a physical place and more of what we sift from life and carry in our heart.
But in the shifting of physical addresses less literal to those abstract the heart yearns for a place to settle.
Umrigar offers characters as in If Today Be Sweet for whom words of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam create a space large and flexible enough to carry not only a generation but also a lifetime of memories that one can take with them into the phase of life that comes after life had rendered one a widow and who also must forge a new life in a new land where culture and custom are resolutely different.
Umrigar writes of Parsis, people on the Indian sub-continent who descend from Iranian Zoroastrians who, over 1000 years ago, emigrated from Iran and settled in Western India. These are her characters. And while their history may stand in stark contrast to Americans who live in a country barely 200 years old, their stories speak to the ages held within our hearts.
Ever wonder how the intentions and desires of family members trying to do their best get so entangled creating a maelstrom of emotions?
Read Thrity Umrigar and not only find people with whom you can identify, but those who also call on you to expand your compassion for others and self.
I can’t wait to read her latest work, The Weight of Heaven
Have you read Thrity Umrigar?
If so what are your thoughts?