What lies at the bottom

People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget — the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us

Class divisions lay at the core of Thirty Umrigar's powerful novel The Space Between Us. Those divisions in modern India have eased somewhat in the sequel, The Secrets Between Us (2018), yet as the title suggests people remain separated, partly by the secrets they try to keep hidden and the pride that prevents them from speaking about them.

After being forced to leave her longtime position as a servant for an upperclass woman in the earlier novel, Bhima now works for two other women and still lives in a slum while trying to save enough money to pay for her granddaughter's college education.

Through a series of circumstances, she finds herself forming a business partnership with a bitter woman named Parvati, even older than she is. Though impoverished, Parvati turns out to be educated and has a good business sense. Bhima is illiterate, but is more able-bodied. Together they begin making money selling vegetables in the open market.

Parvati's secret is that she was sold into prostitution by her father when she was a little girl. Once a great beauty, she was the pride of the brothel, where she kept the books, as well. Eventually she married a police officer, one of her most faithful clients. He turned brutal, however, and his death left her in poverty. "...Without my secrets I am nothing," she says at one point.

As for Bhima, her secret was told in the previous novel. Her husband and son abandoned her years before. She raised their daughter, who died of AIDS, living the granddaughter, Maya, in her care. The reasons behind her firing in the other novel are also a secret she wants to keep hidden.

Gradually these very different women reveal their secrets to each other and begin to draw close, no space at all between them.

Umrigar draws her characters beautifully, making them real and their actions understandable. The novel's last line may be one of the most moving you will ever read: "Although it is dusk, in Bhima's heart it is dawn." I have revealed the ending, but you won't cry until you have read the rest.