Big Heart, Crowded City

But these are the contradictions of middle-class lives. When Sera’s husband beats her up, Bhima massages Sera’s body with herbs and oil; when Bhima’s grand-daughter has to get an abortion, Sera accompanies her to the clinic. And yet there remains this great divide between the lives of the two women. A divide that Bhima reflects on when she contemplates Sera’s daughter’s pregnancy — a child that is nurtured with warmth and good cheer — while her grand-daughter’s unborn child is “extracted as easily as a tooth”.

And it’s this lack of space — in every sense of the word — that is one of the reasons for the tragic collapse of the divide between them.

There are many problems with Umrigar’s storytelling, not least of all the cliched motifs and predictable plot turns — the basti fights, the teenage pregnancy, the violence of husbands, the accident at the factory, the women’s solidarity, the water-sharing moment with the sensitive Muslim. The narrative is often disjointed and moves at an uneven pace. At places, the sentences are so predictable that one can form the lines in one’s head even as one reads on. The AIDS scenes are particularly trite — the former truckdriver now dying of the disease, the crowded hospital, the moment of shock — “Nobody lives from this wicked illness… exactly like a curse, didi.”

And yet there’s much compassion in these pages for the people who are trapped within these cliches. For Sera’s struggle with her batty mother-in-law; for the Parsi way of life, with much good-humoured joking about honesty, charity and dreams of returning to Iran; and for Maya, whose college education is cut short by the tragic turn of events.

And finally there is compassion and empathy for the courageous Bhima, whose name evokes the strength of the strongest of the Pandava brothers. All of us have known Bhima. She is the Bai who scrubbed our dishes as we grew up; she fed us, washed our clothes, polished our keds and made us cups of tea — even as her own life was lived precariously from day to day. Mumbai lives on the efforts of hundreds of thousands of women like Bhima. This novel is a moving, if imperfect, tribute to them all.