Sharing Space: Alternating Female Servant-Employer Narratives in Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 examines how, unlike Gunesekera’s and Adiga’s monologic narratives, two transnational women writers choose a different formal strategy: sharing narrative space equitably between servants and employers. Setting up a comparison between Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, it focuses on Umrigar’s alternation of the narratives and perspectives of Bhima, an aging Hindu widow, and Sera, the middle-class Parsi woman for whom Bhima works. It discusses three key aspects of Umrigar’s novel: her evocation of the micropolitics between a female servant and female employer who have built an understanding and interdependence over decades, the impact of intergenerational servitude on the servant and her family, and the ethical implications of the servant’s final betrayal. It suggests how in a novel seemingly concerned with the intricacies and intimacies of interpersonal domestic interactions, servitude becomes a national question, tied to questions of postcolonial freedom and democracy.