The Indian economy, by all accounts, is at last moving along the road towards a modest prosperity. The hi-tech sector is booming, and property prices in the business area of Mumbai are now said to be the highest in the world.
It's a standard tenet of historians that social protest is most loudly heard, not when things are at their worse, but when they begin to improve. Thus Victorian Britain, when the UK's national wealth was growing fast, was awash with novels dealing with the disparities between rich and poor. Today, when a majority of the UK population considers itself middle class, such novels are rare.
If this theory is true, then you'd expect novels protesting against social conditions from present-day India. And that is precisely what The Sari Shop is, a grim tale contrasting the hard lives of employees in a shop in Amritsar selling fine cloth for women's dresses with the leisured existence of their affluent employers. It's every bit as harrowing in places as Oliver Twist or Great Expectations, though a good deal more economical. Moreover, a happy ending is no longer considered obligatory in the way it once was.
On the one hand you have the Kapoors, the Sandhus and the Guptas, elegantly accommodated business people with interests at the top end of the retail clothing industry. Prominent in the later part of the novel is Rina Kapoor, newly married into the family and a budding novelist. There are other recent brides as well, among them Shilpa Gupta, delighted to discover she is pregnant with her first child.
Strongly contrasting with them are Chander and Kamla, an assistant at the sari shop and his young wife. Chanda is a heavy drinker and wife-beater from the start, but Kamla, who we first meet as a child in a remote village, is a simple, passive girl who, however, quickly succumbs to the social and domestic pressures under which she has to live.
The book's main character, though, is Ramchand, another shop assistant who, after a visit to the Kapoor's house to show them some saris, is struggling to better himself by studying ludicrously inappropriate English phrase-books. He is central to the novel because he is the one character who crosses from one social class to the other, cycling to Rina Kapoor's wedding although not invited, and there attracting the attention of the new bride. Ramchand's education in the injustices of his home town's social system is effectively the story's central theme.
Ramchand is not the only person to see injustice, however. The gentle Kamla, after losing a baby and herself taking to the bottle, stands outside the Gupta's house and yells obscenities as its inhabitants. (Her husband has previously worked for one of their failed companies, leaving him with three months' unpaid wages). The Gupta family quickly call the police, with Mr. Gupta handing out gratuities to the officers in recognition of their prompt action.
The tone of the book is remarkably understated, even cool. "While they were having dinner," the author writes, continuing the story, "Kamla was being raped by the two policemen who had brought her in. Then one of the policemen, a married man, went home to his wife, while the other stayed back, drinking cheap rum and listening to film songs on the radio, hoping to have another go at Kamla in the morning before letting her leave."
RSS