| Many Lives in One Building in Bombay |
October 17, 2009
I spent yesterday immersed in Bombay amongst the neighbors of a lively middle-class building, passing with them through the momentous day of the wedding of one of their own. From the opening moments of daylight arriving, the book Bombay Time by Thrity Umrigar captivated me completely. With its freshness, its wisdom, its honesty, and its breadth, Bombay Time is a realistic, full-bodied novel about a community of people made up of individual stories, and Umrigar is their master story teller. She understands that in focusing in on the individuals, she is capturing all people, that in describing one day, she finds all of life: "A day, a day. A silver urn of promise and hope. Another chance. At reinvention, at resurrection, at reincarnation. A day. The least and most of our lives."
Thrity Umrigar is to Bombay what Maeve Binchey is to Dublin but even better; she is the bard of lives lived out of the limelight of fame or spotlight of poverty. She gives testament to the people of the middle class, every day people who dream, plan, fight, love, and regret like all the rest of us; as we are significant to ourselves, they are significant to themselves -- and Umrigar makes them significant to us. She does so in language that is straightforward yet lyrical, magical yet realistic. She revels in the uniqueness of each of her characters, the beauty and the qualities as well as the flaws, warts, and smells. She makes them as well-known to us as neighbors, and then gives us more, by letting us inside their memories , their regrets, and their hopes as they face old age, and as the next generation moves on, moves away, or comes back to begin a new cycle of life in the old building.
Bombay Time is realism of the finest sort, realism that recognizes the beauty and the pain within the every day lives of "normal" people. Umrigar isn't writing fables or fantasies, she is creating one day shared in the ordinary lives of people whose struggles take on the quality of the heroic: they are trying so hard, battling such pain. Plato said, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle" and those words could apply to each of the characters here. On the surface, they appear one way but as we get to know them, we see how different they are inside and our sympathy grows, as does our involvement in the novel.
Although the book focuses on a middle-class Parsi community, there are chilling scenes of the poverty on the outskirts of their lives: the wives of poor men who can be taken by force without recourse, the beggars waiting for the wedding party to end so that the leftovers will be distributed, the street dwellers who care for the cars owned by men in the building and use the water meant for the car for their own daily bath. The poverty of India is inescapable and the middle-class community both fears the poor and feels sympathy for them. Many among the "haves" blame the "have-nots" for their beggary, relinquishing responsibility for the subjugation and humility of the poor.
The structure of the book -- having the building dwellers meet together at a wedding at one of the children -- allows for rich reminiscences over the past and harsh realizations as to past dreams and present realities. The landscape -- a reception hall decorated and primped with food and alcohol, with the poor held outside behind gates, waiting for the remains of the feast -- provides the dichotomies of life, the shifting points of view from having everything to having nothing, and the basic truth of humanity, that no matter what we have, we too rarely grab for and hold onto happiness. And yet what is a wedding but the ultimate profession of faith in happiness? With that ceremony, everyone participating becomes part of the contract that joy is possible, love is possible, and happiness is possible. It is not a solitary contract: a wedding is a communal activity of connection, an acquiescence to the human need to congregate, make union, and hold together. And when unions break down and friendships fade, ceremonies like weddings can bring them back to possibility. Umrigar writes of the possibility; Umrigar writes of the world.
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