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The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
Biography
A journalist for 17 years, Thrity Umrigar has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and other national newspapers and regularly writes for the Boston Globe’s book pages. She teaches creative writing and journalism at Case Western Reserve University. The author of the novel Bombay Time and the memoir First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood, Umrigar was a winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University. She lives in Cleveland, OH
Tell us a little bit about your growing up years.
Well, I was born in Bombay and lived there until I was 21, when I came to the U.S. I was raised in a joint family, which meant I grew up around very loving aunts and uncles. And since I was an only child, it helped to have all those extra adults in my life, for love and guidance. I've always had many sets of parents and even today, have a knack for "adopting" parents.
What do you remember most about growing up in Bombay?
I have two overriding childhood memories or impressions: One, was always being excruciating aware of the poverty around me. Now, as a middle-class kid, you're not supposed to be that aware of--or certainly not supposed to be tortured by--the poverty around you. It's a defense mechanism of sorts, to be able to ignore it. For whatever reason, I was never able to ignore it and to some extent, it really affected my childhood, made me a hypersensitive child.
Two, I always wrote. Writing was my way to make sense of the world outside and inside my home. Despite the recollections of the adults in my life, I don't think I was a terribly articulate child. Writing was a way to give wings to the inchoate emotions and feelings inside of me.
When did you know you were a writer?
Well, I was writing poems at a very young age. As a child, I would write 'anonymous' poems to my parents whenever I felt wronged by them and then secretly pin them on their closet door. So I learned early on that writing was a good way to get rid of pent-up feelings.
All through my teen years I wrote poetry and short stories and essays. I think I knew I was a writer--not that I was necessarily a good writer, just that I was a writer--one evening when I was 14 or so. I remember sitting in my living room and writing this long poem called The Old Man that came out of me as if someone was dictating it. It was a terribly sappy poem but I felt compelled to write it and when I was done, I was exhausted but I knew something about myself that I didnt before.
Why did you decide to come to the U.S.?
I've never had an easy answer to that question. In some sense, my whole life prepared me for moving to the U.S. I was a product of an educational system that was very colonial and very Western in its orientation. I still remember my fourth-grade composition teacher telling the class not to create characters who were blond and blue-eyed. Her statement came as a shock because that was all we knew, you know? When I was a child, I read everything ever written by the British children's writer Enid Blyton and later, the Billy Bunter and William series of novels. And as I got older, all I was reading was Western literature. American pop culture was a big influence, also. I mean, until I picked up Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, I had hardly ever read a novel by an Indian writer. Rushdie was a revelation for me.
So that's the "sociological" answer. But of course, there were also a hundred personal reasons--wanting to travel, wanting an adventure, wanting to be independent, wanting to get away from certain aspects of my life, not knowing what the heck to do with myself after I'd finished college. I remember the day when it occurred to me very clearly that if I lived in India, I would never be totally independent and would never discover who exactly I was as a person. I wanted to live in a place where I would rise or fall based on my own efforts and talents. And I was very lucky to have a father, who, despite his immense sadness at having me so far away from home, always encouraged me to reach for my dreams and never held me back. . . But I'm not even sure it was this complicated. Remember, I was 21. Weird as it may sound, not much thought went into it.
So you came to Ohio State? Why Ohio State?
Well, that's a funny story. It's indicative of how so many major decisions in my life have been made. I was sitting in my living room in Bombay, checking off a list of American universities that offered a M.A. in journalism, when my eyes fell on "Ohio State University." There was a Joan Baez record playing on the turntable and right then, her song, Banks of the Ohio, came on. I looked up and thought, "It's a sign", and decided to apply there.
Hmmm. Well, I hope the experience there was worth it.
Oh, OSU was a blast. Two of the happiest years of my life. Within days of being there, I made friendships that have lasted till today. Those two years taught me that one can make new families at any point in one's life. I had such positive experiences there that it made me want to live in the U.S. forever. That one line in Bombay Time, where Jimmy Kanga feels like he loved Oxford so much he felt he could've gone to war for it, thats what it used to feel like to me. I'll always be grateful.
After OSU, I worked for two years at the Lorain Journal, a small but feisty little paper near Cleveland. It was a grueling experience, long hours, all that, but when I left there, I knew I could tackle anything that daily journalism threw my way.
So you came to the Akron Beacon Journal when?
In 1987. The Beacon had the reputation of being a real writer's paper and had just won yet another Pulitzer. It was a great paper to work at. Still is.
How did the novel come about? Were you writing it in Akron?
I had started the novel a few years ago under a very different plot structure. The first incarnation of the novel was much more 'plot-heavy'. Then, I arrived at a crossroads in that I had to decide between finishing the novel or my Ph.D. dissertation (while working full-time as a journalist) and I opted to finish the dissertation. The novel was discarded but not forgotten. Then, in 1999 I won the Nieman fellowship, which allows journalists a year of study at Harvard. When I found out I'd gotten the Nieman, I promised myself that I would pick up the novel again and I did. I salvaged odds and ends from the abandoned manuscript and wrote some new chapters during the first semester.
But it was during the second semester that the novel really took off. I went home to Bombay during the Christmas break and was struck by how many people there led such sad lives. I remember lying on the couch in my father's apartment one afternoon and vowing to finish the novel. I felt a desperate , burning urge to tell the story of the people I'd grown up around.
I kept that promise to myself when I returned to Cambridge. I was actually grateful for jetlag, because it was easy to wake up at 4 a.m. I would write each morning for a few hours before starting my work day. On some days, the writing flowed so easily--almost compulsively, you could say--that I would skip school and write for eight to 10 hours straight. The bulk of the novel was written in less than two months. I liked having the lonely, solitary experience of writing juxtaposed against the socially hectic and busy life I had as a Nieman fellow. I worked hard and partied hard during this period and that balance was somehow very important.
What's Bombay Time about?
Good question. I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Basically, it's a story about this group of middle-aged people who are residents of an apartment building in Bombay. All the characters are Parsis or Zoroastrians, - which is the religion I was raised in. Parsis are members of a small ethnic minority who came to India as political refugees from Persia over 900 years ago, and who went on to become one of India's most affluent and Westernized ethnic communities.
So, against the backdrop of a wedding reception, I tell the life stories of the individual residents--who they were in their youth, what has made them who they are today--and ask the question of how does one live a middle-class existence in a city of so much poverty? That's it, in a nutshell. Hopefully, the novel is more interesting than my summary of it.
What was the inspiration for Bombay Time?
Growing up in India exposed me to many stories of startling pathos and tragedy. Daily life for so many people seemed like an endless struggle and yet, I watched these people live their lives with a typically Bombay brand of humor, with bravado and courage. I wanted to commemorate their lives with my novel. I am also fascinated by the insider-outsider status of the Parsis of India. I wanted to examine their love-hate relationship with Bombay, torn as they are between disdain and a helpless love for the city of their birth. In a sense, you can say that that's the story of the middle-class in any city around the world that's besieged with corruption and violence and poverty.
Who are your favorite authors?
I draw inspiration from everywhere. I'm one of those people who even reads cereal boxes. But my favorite authors are Salman Rushdie (I recently re-read Midnight's Children and wept in awe and gratitude), Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid. But influence is a hard thing to account for--I think Bob Dylan and Emily Dickinson have probably influenced my writing--in terms of making me crazy about words--as much as anybody.
So how hard was it finding a publisher? It happened during your Nieman year, right?
Although my friends tell me how lucky I was to find a publisher, I tell them that that wasn't the miraculous part. Because that was the result of effort, a cause-and-effect kind of thing. The truly miraculous part was finding an agent.
What happened was, I was attending a lecture at Emerson College in Boston and asked the speaker a question. Based on my question, my agent-to-be approached me and asked me if I was writing anything. Believe me, my question was not terribly brilliant or clever or anything. My agent has since told me that she has tried analyzing why she approached me instead of the other people who asked questions that evening but has been unable to come up with an answer. She says it was just a hunch. Anyway, I started mailing her chapters as fast as I wrote them and pretty soon, we had a book.
What are your hopes for the book?
I'm still so thrilled to have found a publisher for it. I'm so glad Picador/St. Martin's Press, bought it. But my hope is that I've written an emotionally honest and culturally truthful book about a group of people that many Americans know nothing about. For my Parsi and Indian readers, I hope they find some piece of their lives reflected in this book. For my American readers, I hope they can see past the superficial cultural differences and see that the hopes, sorrows and fears of my characters are not so different than those of ordinary Americans. I mean, this is a novel that deals with troubled marriages, dashed hopes, the unfairness of getting old, and above all, the importance of friendship and community. None of us are strangers to these themes.
So what comes next? What are you working on now?
What comes next? Well, obviously the world tour, the appearance on Oprah and the house with the swimming pool. (Laughs.) No, seriously, I'm hoping to get cracking on my next novel. It deals with domestic servants in India and explores the relationship between a servant and the woman she works for. Also, I'm looking forward to the Italian version of Bombay Time. We just sold the Italian rights to Saggiatore. And I'm happy about that.
http://www.umrigar.com/interview/#thrity |
A Conversation with Thrity Umrigar
How long did it take you to write The Space Between Us?
Well, I wrote the book—or at least, a solid first draft—in about six months in 2003.
But as I always say, I’ve been writing this book forever.
What do you mean?
I grew up in a middle-class home in Bombay where we always employed servants. And even as a child I was always aware of what a complicated, emotionally charged relationship it was between the mistress
of the household and the domestic servant—who was almost always a woman. I mean, it is impossible to have two human beings work and live in a contained domestic space all day long and not form some kind of a bond or human connection. And I thought that this was rich literary territory to explore. So in some sense—in the sense of being aware of these issues and thinking about them, I’ve been writing this novel at least since I was a teenager.
The whole issue of employing servants is so alien to most contemporary Americans. Can you talk about this some?
Sure. The first thing to understand is that, unlike, say, the aristocrats of England or something, in India, you don’t have to be terribly rich to have servants. Almost every middle-class home employs someone to come
in to help with the cooking, washing, cleaning, etc. Sometimes it’s more than one person. And the reason for this is simple—labor is cheap in India. And until very recently, most people didn’t have washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners—all the labor-saving devices that we take for granted in the West.
So the way it works is that someone comes into your home early in the morning and basically spends the day performing household chores. And if the mistress is a housewife like Sera Dubash, if she’s not a working woman, she will work alongside the servant. For instance, she may cook while the servant is chopping up the vegetables or washing the dishes. And the women talk. Often, the servant may unload her burdens onto the mistress—tales of wayward husbands, children who refuse to attend school, oppressive mothers-in-law—you know the normal things that women all over the world talk about. And the servant is in the home for seven, eight, nine hours a day—she is a witness, she observes everything that happens in the home. She knows the family secrets, all the hidden things about relationships, problems, things that even the family’s neighbors or friends may be unaware of. And so a kind of unlikely friendship, a trust, an unspoken language of understanding, springs up between the women. But there is always the elephant in the room, and that elephant, of course, is class. There is always a formality, a ritualized “space” that can never quite be bridged. Each woman is governed and restricted by class divisions.
In the novel, Sera won’t let Bhima sit on the furniture or drink out of the family’s glasses. Is that because of the caste system that one hears about in India? Is Bhima an untouchable?
Sera Dubash is a Parsi, not a Hindu. And the caste system that you refer to—you know the system where there are four different castes and each caste is governed by its own rules and traditions—is something that’s unique to the Hindu faith. And no, Bhima is not meant to be an untouchable—that is, a member of the lowest caste.
I don’t think this is a book about caste at all. Rather, it’s a book about class divisions. All the things that you noticed—Bhima not being able to use the family dishes, sit at the table—are simply manifestations of how class issues have polarized people in India and how those polarizations have gotten codified into traditions. Do you know what I mean? In that sense, it’s not so different from the American South fifty years ago, when the black maid always had to enter from the back door and took all her meals in the kitchen. I was doing a book reading in California earlier this year when a woman who grew up on the Upper West Side in New York said the book reminded her of how her family treated the nanny who had raised her. So these strange, dehumanizing traditions are not unique to India.
How have Western audiences reacted to the book?
You know, when the book came out, my biggest concern was that Western readers would read The Space Between Us as a book about a distant, faraway, alien culture with weird customs—you know, the usual
“exotic East” syndrome—and not get that the themes of the book are universal. At its most basic, The Space Between Us is a book about what brings us together and what divides us as human beings. So it has
been particularly gratifying to have smart, thoughtful, insightful readers make their own connections and apply the themes of the book to their own conditions and lives. So many of them have talked about their own encounters with the kinds of issues that Bhima and Sera face.
My Indian editor, Nandita Agarwal, coined a fantastic phrase—she said the novel was about the “Indian apartheid.” She was referring to this unfortunate attitude that middle-class Indians have toward domestic help that allows them to not see and to marginalize the people who sweat and work in their homes. And at each book reading we talk about this and I ask the inevitable question: what is the American apartheid—what biases, prejudices do we suffer from, what are the areas of our society that we refuse to face? And almost always, people tell personal stories or talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and how that exposed unpleasant truths about our own culture in America.
You now live in the United States. Does that help or hurt when you’re writing about India?
I think for the most part it’s helpful. I mean, you have the inevitable worries about being accurate, getting the details right. I usually solve that by staying away from what’s current and immediate—you know, what the latest movies are, what the big hit songs are—and writing about things that are more timeless. Like the spirit and resiliency of Bombayites. Like the Arabian sea—which is as polluted and gray and beautiful as ever. Like those fabulous Bombay skies at dusk.
But I think the distance also helps me gain a certain critical perspective that’s essential for good writing. It makes it possible to be more truthful in my writing, to speak some harsh truths. And being an immigrant in
America, always having this outsider–insider thing going on, is such great training for being a writer. Because that’s what writers are—outsiders wanting to get on the inside and insiders longing to burst out.
What are you working on now?
I’m writing a novel, my first book set in the United States. It’s a story about immigration, what it means to be an outsider–insider, to belong to several worlds all at the same time.
INDIA DEALS WITH THE FIRES OF RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
In December of 1992, my family stood on the balcony of their Bombay apartment and watched as the apartment building across the street burned. Eyes wide with horror, hearts beating like fists against their chests, they watched as the flames rose higher, sheltered in the protective darkness of their own apartment from the eyes of the mad mob that danced on the street below.
I had left India many years before the outbreak of the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992. And so I was not an eye witness to the madness that briefly seized what had erstwhile been India’s most cosmopolitan, secular city. But I heard the stories in the weeks that followed and I could see that fire on the streets of my childhood as vividly as if I had been there that night. And when I visited Bombay a few months later, I could see for myself what the fire had taken. Did I imagine that my father’s index finger trembled as he pointed to the space where three tall coconut trees had once stood? Those trees, part of the burned building’s garden, had been a source of inspiration for many an adolescent poem, a vital part of my childhood landscape. Sitting on the balcony in the evenings, I would watch those trees--whom I’d always thought of as the Three Sisters--sway and rustle in the breeze. And now the Three Sisters were gone.
But other things were also lost in that fire and in the carnage of those days, things that were a little harder to define and measure. What the fire had taken: that ridiculous, cocky self-assuredness of Bombayites who believed that we had been blessedly spared the communal hatreds that gnawed like a cancer at the rest of India; that easy, nonchalant tolerance that made us celebrate Christmas and Id and the Hindu festival of Diwali with equal gusto; that swaggering superiority that made us believe that we were too smart, too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan to fall for the petty manipulations of politicians who pitted one group against the other. That Bombay was different from India. What the fire had taken: my innocence. My childhood. The city of my childhood.
The city of my childhood was a place where we swapped politically incorrect ethnic jokes with impunity because we skewered all groups equally; where it was common for a middle-class Parsi girl like myself to go to a Catholic school and have friends whose religious and ethnic backgrounds you never cared to ask about; where we were bound not by religious zeal but by our zeal for cricket and where we spoke the common language of Bollywood-speak. I can recall only one childhood incident when reality infiltrated my innocence. It was during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war and I was in fourth-grade. One afternoon, I was holding forth to some of my classmates about how India was gonna beat the pants off Pakistan etc.--blithely parroting the jingoistic rhetoric of the adults around me--when a Muslim friend spoke up. Yasmin was her name and I still recall with a shiver the clenched fury on her face as she said, “Pakistan will crush all of India, you’ll see.” There was a long, embarrassed silence as all of us groped for what to do next. This is not the way the script was supposed to go, with a fellow-middle-class Indian declaring her allegiance for the enemy. Yasmin stood waiting for me to answer, her small body heaving with passion but I was crushed, deflated of rhetoric. Compared to the red-blooded Yasmin I felt small and passionless and pale.
Luckily we were children and nobody expected us to defend our nation’s honor. Whatever differences we had were settled on the playground among endless games of hopscotch and tug-of-war. But I have never forgotten that look on Yasmin’s face and it was a look I would see many times again, in many corners of the world.
And now, from the depths of memory, arises another, long-buried incident: It happened during an out-of-town college trip. There we were, close college friends, a motley crue of Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, Parsis, riding together on a train. I can no longer recall what the conversation was about but suddenly Shiv--slender, sweet-faced Shiv, who had acted in so many of my theater productions--turns to me fiercely and tells me that as a Parsi, I am an outsider to India, not an Indian at all because, after all, everybody knows that India belongs to Hindus. I am stunned, bewildered, concentrating more on keeping the tears from rolling down my cheeks than with coming up with a fiery comeback. So it remains unsaid: that the constitution of India establishes India as a secular nation; that it recognizes 21 languages as official languages; that although my ancestors came from Persia over a millennia ago, India belongs to me as much as it does to him. Or rather, the others say it for me, the other Hindus in our group looking at Shiv with distaste and contempt.
So, I suppose there were warnings. But these were isolated incidents, easy to brush off because there was so much other evidence to counter these brief outbursts of fanaticism. And after all, they were confined to words and although words have the power to wound, they usually do not kill. vNo, it took the fires and killings that swept like cholera through the streets of Bombay in 1992, to steal from me in some intangible but real way, the city of my birth. A few months later, over 13 bombs went off all over the city within two hours and destroyed what little was left of the talisman that had always protected Bombay from itself. The Bomb in Bombay, ticking for so long, had finally exploded and my city was gone. In its place was an impostor city where people glanced worriedly around them before telling an ethnic joke and crowds took to the streets to celebrate India’s successful nuclear testing and even sensible, educated people talked about the need to ‘restrain’ Pakistan in fateful, apocalyptic terms.
And yet, no death is final. America may have mastered the art of reinvention. However, India still is the master of reincarnation. And so Bombay reincarnates itself daily. Like a weed that refuses to die, like a wily child that refuses to cry ‘Uncle,’ Bombay staggers to its feet over and over again. The riots have lowered the voices of Bombayites. But they have not silenced them. It is impossible to bomb this city into submission.
Cities like San Francisco and Paris are monuments to beauty that you love for their wealth. Cities like Bombay you love for their poverty because within the heart of that poverty are valor and resourcefulness and the indomitable human spirit. To me, Bombay has always been an epic city, full of melodrama and chaos, as dazzling and contradictory and larger than life as a Hindi film. If there is a way to eke out a living, no matter how meager, chances are a Bombayite has thought of it. People here earn a living removing wax from other people’s ears. Or selling four sorry-looking heads of cauliflower a day. Life may be cheap in Bombay but the living is hard. And it is this aspect of the city of my childhood--the daily struggles, the desire to get ahead, the search for joy among abject misery, the plain, never-say-die hardiness of its citizens--that will survive a hundred riots and bombs.
The city that I still love and recognize is the city where strangers will come to your help for no good reason; where, when the monsoon rains brings life to a screeching halt, a spirit of camaraderie springs up; where children in slums display a bright-eyed sense of joy that would be the envy of more affluent parents everywhere; where a cricket test match binds together young and old, poor and affluent; skyscraper and slum.
Perhaps it is the disease of the immigrant, this desire for your homeland to be constant, to stand still, even as you change. But what I love most about Bombay are the things that have not changed--the bindaas, carefree attitude of its citizens, their can-do spirit, as constant and unchanging as the gray, muddy waters of the Arabian sea that frame the city. Sometimes, when the noise and heat and pollution and crowdedness of Bombay get too much for me I go and stand before the wide, heaving sea and stare at its foaming waters until I feel my heartbeat slow down. Then, the sea talks to me and tells me what I need to hear: that some things stand outside time; that the human spirit is eternal; and that despite the permanent scar left on the body of Bombay by the 1992 riots, the patient is alive and kicking and lives to face another day.
--The Memphis Flyer
May 11-17, 2000
http://www.umrigar.com/reviews/essays/index4.shtml
THE SPACE BETWEEN US by Thrity Umrigar
 Bhima is real.
She worked in the house I grew up in, year after year, a shadow flitting around our middle-class house, her thin brown hands cleaning furniture she was not allowed to sit on, cooking food she was not allowed to share at the family dining table, dusting the stereo that mainly played American rock and roll, music that was alien and unfamiliar to her, that only reminded her of her nebulous presence in our home, our world, our lives.
I wrote about Bhima and that stereo in another book—told the story of that glorious day when, after a year of cajoling, wooing and seducing Bhima, after trying to excavate her life and story bit by bit, I finally tasted success. I was an earnest, well-meaning teenager and I loved Bhima for reasons that today make me proud as well as make me cringe, for reasons that were vain as well as honorable: I loved her because even at 15, I could sense her essential goodness and dignity and stoic heroism. I loved her because she was amused by me and my eager, puppy-dog need to prove to her that I was different; that unlike the adults around me, I was uneasy being a card-carrying member of the middle class. I loved her because she cooked me rice everyday, even if it meant defying the authority of my aunts and mom. I loved her because I had just declared myself a Socialist and Bhima was my own private laboratory, my personal experiment, on whom to try out my newly discovered theories of social justice and the proletariat and the revolution.
And on one breakthrough day it all came together, the day when Bhima and I were alone at home and she plopped down next to me on the forbidden couch and demanded that I replace the music I was listening to—it was The Beatles’ Let It Be—with an old Marathi folk song that I had played the previous day. And the authority in her voice thrilled me, made me feel that we were equals at last, that the cursed roles of servant and mistress had shattered for one fragile, shimmering instant.
And yet, even in the midst of my adolescent disdain for the middle-class adults in my life, I saw enough complexity in the transactions between servant and homeowner to soften that disdain, to make me realize that reality is always harder than caricature. I saw servants trusting their meager savings to their mistresses as a way of protecting their money from the grasping hands of drunken husbands; I saw Bhima and the females in my household working peaceably together in the kitchen in a kind of domestic shorthand; I watched as my aunts cooked an egg for Bhima every morning while she was recovering from malaria.
Above all, I was fascinated by this intersection of gender and class—how the lives of women from the working class and the middle-class seemed at once so connected and so removed from each other.
Thus was Sera born—kindly, well-meaning Sera, who must nevertheless choose between the bonds of gender and the divisions of class.
It is a theme that has interested me—haunted me, even—for as long as I can remember. One of the reasons I have always loved Bombay is because it is a city riddled with contradictions and paradox. In an apartment in a small corner of the city, I grew up experiencing a microcosm of this larger paradox—this strange tug-of-war between intimacy and unfamiliarity; between awareness and blindness.
THE SPACE BETWEEN US is an attempt to understand, through the illuminating searchlight of fiction, paradoxes that I could never make sense of in real life. I began the novel in the spring of 2003. But in fact, I have been writing this book forever
MUMBAI MIRROR INTERVIEW
Mumbai milieu
Nitish S Rele catches up with Mumbai-born author Thrity Umrigar, on her newest release The Space Between Us
Nitish S Rele
A journalist for 17 years, Mumbai born and Cleveland (Ohio) based author Thrity Umrigar's second and recently released novel, The Space Between Us, uses the backdrop of Mumbai to sketch a portrait of a woman and her maid. "When I was growing up in India, I was always fascinated by the closeness shared between mistresses of households and the servants who worked for them," Umrigar explains. "It seemed like a very rich, emotionally complicated relationship - women who were linked by working side-by-side daily, often sharing the bonds of gender but whose lives were also divided by issues of class."
The novel, which has already gone into a second printing in India, is doing well in the USA and was the No. One pick this month for BookSense, the largest association of independent booksellers. Umrigar has also authored the novel Bombay Time and a memoir entitled First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood. Her next book, she divulges, "is set in suburban Ohio and it is the story of a middle-aged Indian woman."
Umrigar has written for the Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer and other national newspapers, and regularly writes for The Boston Globe's book pages. Having lived in Mumbai until the age of 21, Umrigar's book is based on her observations of the customs in her own household. While the plot of the novel is completely a work of fiction, the main character of Bhima is based on a woman who used to work in her home when she was growing up. "I was very close to her and admired and respected her a great deal for her stoic heroism, for her courageous response to adversity and mostly, for her dignity," expresses Umrigar. "I wanted to capture these qualities in the character of the fictional Bhima."
Delving into some vivid childhood memories, Umrigar muses, "As a kid, I loved the monsoons. When the streets would get flooded, I loved how the city came together, with everybody pitching in, people helping strangers," she says. She enjoyed that same sense of camaraderie during cricket test matches, when strangers walked up to one another and asked the score. "And I still miss those amazing twilight Bombay skies, when the whole city was bathed in orange and golden light," she articulates. She recalls how she loved going to the seaside in the evenings, where it seemed like all of Mumbai had turned up there for some much-needed interaction with nature. In fact, she expresses, "I write about this in The Space Between Us - how the sea restores the spirits of Mumbaiites, how it feeds their souls."
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