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Thrity Umrigar: An emphatic novelist
Indian author Thrity Umrigar lends her X-ray vision to dissect the multifaceted human condition bound by so many layers of social stratifications and power structures
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Thrity Umrigar (Photo courtesy of Robert Muller/-)
I
ndian author Thrity Umrigar lends her X-ray vision to dissect the multifaceted human condition bound by so many layers of social stratifications and power structures.
Readers in Indonesia had their first introduction to Umrigar’s work when her novel The Space Between Us ( 2006 ) was translated into Indonesian and subsequently published by PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama in 2007.
The novel tells the unforgettable tale of a steely woman named Bhima, who works as a servant in the house of another woman, Sera Dubash.
Being a servant, Bhima has to endure horrible treatment from her employers, especially the highly temperamental Sera.
Despite being separated by blood and class, however, she and Sera share the same terrible fate as the employer turns out to also suffer beneath her wealthy façade; she has become victim to her husband’s domestic violence for years, while handling all child-rearing responsibilities by herself.
When a tragedy befalls Bhima’s beloved granddaughter, Maya, their lives are forever changed.
The poignantly told novel was a finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins award.
In July 2018, 12 years after the novel was published, Umrigar surprised readers by releasing the sequel to that novel, titled The Secrets Between Us.
She said the decision to write the sequel came to her as an epiphany.
“One of the minor characters, Parvati, a desperately poor vegetable vendor, kept haunting me over the years [although] I never knew her back story. […] One day, I suddenly ‘saw’ her entire life story. Once I did, I was very interested in exploring her story against the backdrop of a fast-changing India,” Umrigar told The Jakarta Post in an email, adding that Parvati’s friendship with Bhima became a common thread between the two novels.
A Parsi child born in 1961 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, Umrigar came to the United States when she was 21. Upon attaining a master’s in journalism, she worked for several years as a reporter, columnist and magazine writer. In 1999, she joined a one-year Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard.
She expanded into fiction with her debut novel Bombay Time in 2001. She also wrote a memoir called First Darling of the Morning ( 2004 ).
Between writing The Space Between Us and The Secrets Between Us, she has expanded her topics beyond the social classism in India but has started to cover how geopolitical divides corrupt human relationships as well.
For instance, in The Weight of Heaven ( 2009 ), she depicts a grieving American couple that goes to India upon one of the spouses’ work assignments as a metaphor depicting the geopolitical balance of power between the United States and India, as well as the balance of power between big corporations, governments and the less-powerful indigenous peoples.
Umrigar’s fascination on how power tended to corrupt human relationships started from an early age.
“I grew up as a middle-class person in Bombay, a city with great poverty. It was like winning a life lottery because we were a tiny island in a sea of poverty. From a young age, I was attracted to the poor. It made no sense to me why we had material goods and they didn’t even have a roof over their heads,” Umrigar, who is also an Armington professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said.
“I could see with my own eyes that they worked very hard but didn’t get the rewards of their labor. So, I used to listen to the people I came in contact with and asked them questions and maybe because I was a child, they let down their guard with me and told me their life stories,” she added.
She added that since then, she had been developing a habit of interacting with as many people as possible while listening intently to their stories.
“This empathetic imagination, this ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, is a lifeblood of being a writer. So this is a basic, entry-level job requirement,” she explained.
Another distinguishing aspect of her novels is her acuity in presenting the many facets of human personalities – the good and evil sides that every human possesses, as well as arrogance and vulnerability coupled with lurking insecurities.
Umrigar said various writers’ works had helped her to make sense of the world, including: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as well as the novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf.
“I read a lot because that’s how I improve as a writer,”
Writing is a solitary job in nature; but whenever she is not putting her writer’s hat on, Umrigar rejuvenates herself with various social activities.
“Walking and hiking are great stress relievers for me. I also love having friends over for dinner because good conversation stimulates me in the same way and gets me out of my own head,” she said.
