But this time Kamla resists, and as a result is sexually assaulted with a police baton. Ramchand discovers her alone at home and bleeding when he is sent by the shop manager to find out why Chander hasn't shown up for work.
Needless to say, the book's quiet, ironic tone makes the horrors when they arrive all the more shocking. It's as if you're reading a novel by a Victorian lady novelist, only to find yourself catapulted into a 21st century society lurching towards change, but still mired in traditional cruelties on every hand.
The affluent characters, however, only perceive the sufferings of the poor as "filthy goings-on," which they, as the "respectable classes," don't wish to hear about. Simply to know such people is sufficient to deny anyone entry into their circle. The attitudes are, of course, close to those that were characteristic of the newly rich in the fast-developing West in the 19th century.
In essence, Ramchand aspires to upward social mobility, yet his experiences bring him ever more in touch with the fate of his fellow employees. The plot's pressure forces him towards a choice, details of which it would be unfair to reveal.
Ramchand is also friendly with a family of Sikhs whose two sons, by an unlucky chance, fell victim to the Indian army's assault on Amritsar's Golden Temple in June 1984. This comes over as an event that merely adds to the sense of a tragic fate for ever waiting to overtake vulnerable areas on life on the subcontinent.
There are also some incidental, quietly ironic insights. An extract from an essay on the police Ramchand is struggling to read states: "A policeman is a very useful and important public servant ... He guards our life and property. He helps in tracing out the culprits and getting them booked." The slightly incorrect English Bajwa introduces here ("tracing out") subtly displays the satirized writer's double incapacity -- he's as ill-educated as he is blind to social reality, she suggests.
In addition, the novel Rina Kapoor pens features a village girl with almond-shaped, kohl-lined eyes, jasmine in her hair and a bewitching smile, plus an old sadhu who helps a young man (a character she's patronizingly based on Ramchand) win her hand with the aid of magic herbs. This is clearly Rupa Bajwa's parody of the species of fiction, wilfully blind to the realities of Indian life, that is the opposite of the kind of novel she herself is writing -- sensitive, intelligent and very alert to the hypocrisies and injustice that, in her view, and despite the new prosperity, still pervade modern Indian society.
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