On her little bit of ivory, Bajwa inscribes a haunting tale
The Sari Shop
By Rupa Bajwa
Norton, 241 pp., $23.95
Novels about India are typically described as lush, sweeping, exotic, but there is another, perhaps truer tradition. Writers such as R. K. Narayan or Manil Suri who observe the everyday world of unremarkable people have more in common with Jane Austen than with the Bollywood extravaganza. Now Rupa Bajwa joins this illustrious company of Indian miniaturists with her first novel, "The Sari Shop." A depiction of ordinary life in the city of Amritsar, this is also a modern novel of perception in the best 19th-century sense, one that presents the human condition without sanctimony; a small book with a great heart.
"Just a brief story, told in very few words," Bajwa's hero, Ramchand, concludes toward the end of "The Sari Shop" when the murder of a woman he knows is coldly described. The 26-year-old shop assistant is literate in his own language but illiterate in English, the language of advancement, and when we meet him Ramchand still believes that words are the key to comprehension. With the right words, therefore the right ideas, he might impose order on his confusing world. "He imagined he could glimpse some reality. . . . that if he really concentrated, really thought, he would be able to reach some sort of a final truth."
On the face of it, the reality that confounds Ramchand is all too ordered. Amritsar society is rigidly stratified by wealth and caste, a fact that Bajwa establishes by gracefully describing the sealed worlds inhabited by her characters -- Mrs. Gupta and Mrs. Sandhu, the bourgeois wives of influential businessmen; Mrs. Sachdeva, the university professor, and Mrs. Bhandari, wife of the police commissioner, who style themselves social activists; Mr. Kapoor, the wealthy industrialist, and his pseudo-intellectual daughter, Rina. Beneath their line of sight exist Ramchand and his fellow assistants at the Sevak Sari Shop, invisible to the customers they serve.
In plain language, maintaining a neutral tone, Bajwa sets these small worlds spinning in their separate orbits. Mrs. Gupta relaxes in her bedroom, contemplating her furnishings; Mrs. Sachdeva and Mrs. Bhandari shop for saris while they discuss social change; Rina Kapoor assembles her bridal trousseau and talks on her cellphone; Ramchand returns to his bare rented room each evening and stares down into the courtyard, observing his landlord's happy family at leisure.
The harsh randomness of life has delivered Ramchand to the Sevak Sari Shop -- Bajwa sketches his childhood in a single, wrenching chapter -- but now two errands for his employer propel him briefly into two very different worlds. Dispatched to the Kapoor mansion with a selection of wedding saris for Rina to examine, an exhilarated Ramchand realizes "he had just got into a rut -- shop, room, shop, room, shop, room. . . . Once you got out of that rut, it was easy to see that there were endless possibilities in the world."
Stopping at a secondhand bookstall, he warily peruses such titles as "Medical Dictionary, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Fat to Fit in Thirty Days, Wuthering Heights. No, none of this made sense to him." Ramchand buys a dictionary, "The Complete Letter Writer," and "Radiant Essays" and dedicates himself to self-improvement. His nightly struggle to comprehend a letter inviting a friend on a "motor tour" of Wales or alerting a member of the "Victoria Tennis Club" to an overdue subscription is comical but never coarse or sentimental. Ramchand is an innocent, not a buffoon, as his second errand for his employer demonstrates.
When Chander, a morose colleague, fails to appear one morning, Ramchand is sent to the man's house. This journey, however, is a descent into squalor. Chander, drunk, mumbles excuses at the door of his hovel while Ramchand glimpses Chander's wife huddled and crying in a filthy corner, her mouth bleeding.
The second half of "The Sari Shop" tells the story of Chander's wife, Kamla, whose childhood resembles Ramchand's in its pathos but whose tragedy, when partially revealed to Ramchand, shreds his innocence. Again, Bajwa is measured in her depiction of a woman destroyed by casual as well as institutionalized cruelty. Eschewing any crude feminist message, she makes it clear that Rina Kapoor and her friends cause as much misery indirectly with their narcissism as Kamla's husband does with his fists.
"I will do something," Ramchand announces toward the novel's end, echoing countless heroes who become inflamed by injustice and ennobled by struggle. Ramchand, however, is temporarily paralyzed by the reality he has finally apprehended through Kamla. "For the first time in his life, he realized that it was only weakness that kept people strong. Strength weakened you. And so, in the first moments of complete strength and clarity he had ever known, he felt debilitated, helpless, defenceless." This hero glimpses his "final truth," but it is one devoid of either justice or mercy.
Manil Suri, author of "The Death of Vishnu," has praised "The Sari Shop" as capturing "the very soul of India." Certainly, Bajwa's descriptions of Amritsar's streets, mansions, slums, and extreme weather are vivid and intense. But her portrait of Ramchand's wounded mind and of human suffering and indifference is even more enduring.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times.
