A readable rehashing of stereotypes

This is by no means the worst of Umrigar’s novels, but it is not her best either. It is a very readable, pleasant novel, set within a Parsi community in Bombay. This novel is fairly conventional, the classic story of an immigrant who pops back to India to visit aging parents, old friends, and for whatever else they may need from India; a comfortable read, a known entity, and quite well told.

Our protagonist is Remy Wadia, golden boy, successful, good hearted, loving and loved by all; especially adored by his recently deceased father, and the adoration was mutual. The title of the book is taken from Remy’s own attitude towards India:

“India always disappointed. He had often thought of Bombay as the museum of failures, an exhibit hall filled with thwarted dreams and broken promises. The reels of red tape themselves were worthy of heir own display room” (p17).

When his American wife, Kathy, asks Remy what the happiest day of his life was, he tells her honestly,

“it was the day he’d received the letter admitting him to the MFA program at Ohio State, That letter had been his ticket out of the museum of failures and into a new world of possibility” (p17).

However, for all the poor opinion Remy holds of India, he clearly has a huge affection for Bombay, he clearly has many loves from his childhood, and he clearly is still very attached to many of its residents. Remy has returned because he and Kathy want to adopt a child. His good friends, Jango and Shenaz, have a niece who has become pregnant, unmarried. The idea is a win-win situation with Remy getting to adopt a child from someone known to him and from his own community, minus all the red tape, and Monaz finding good parents for her yet to be born baby, and avoiding the wrath of her father.

But being India, this doesn’t go to plan. At least, that’s how Remy sees it – though surely in the USA too, many things also may not go to plan? Disappointments have no monopoly in any culture or place, do they? Remy finds himself beset with problems he had not anticipated when he lands in India. Chief amongst those are that his mother has been admitted to hospital just days before his arrival, and no one had told him. The less-wealthy cousins he installed in the apartment below his mum’s, who were supposed to care for her, are doing less than a sterling job. His mother has stopped eating and speaking. The apartment is uncared for. Remy discovers a mystery when he finds a letter his beloved father left him before he died. Remy has long been estranged from his mother, but seeks to do his duty by her, struggling to provide the care she needs as well as to negotiate a new, better relationship with his difficult mother. He also finds out information about his own past, which throws all his memories into a different light, and forces him to rethink his most taken for-granted premises. To add to his complications, Monaz changes her mind and wants to keep her baby.

The plot plays out quite nicely, and it is fun reading of Bombay life as seen through Remy’s eyes. His friends are wonderful, super understanding and supportive, and extend friendship in a particularly culturally informed way:

’Anyway, listen. I just wanted to ask – any chance you’d be free some evening this week?’

Jango spoke before he could finish. ‘What about tonight? Can you come for dinner?’

Remy looked up to the sky in gratitude. ‘I’d love to. But are you sure I won’t be disturbing? Why don’t you check with Shenaz and – ‘

‘Oof. Enough of this formality, yaar. America has ruined you, I say. It’s just dinner, Remy, not a marriage proposal.’

‘Remy grinned. ‘What time’?

‘Eight? Eight thirty? What do you want the cook to make?’

‘Jango,’ Remy said happily, ‘I don’t care what we eat. I…just…I’ll be happy to see you. All I ask if that you pour me a Scotch.’

‘Done, See you soon. Come hungry.’”

There are many such instances in the novel, gently pointing to the differences between Remy’s life and expectations in the USA, and the practices in India, where he does not need to take care not to impose in quite the same way, and where there are such ample resources as a cook etc., so that dinner invitations can be casually extended at a whim, and also where spouses are equally easy going, apparently. At least amongst the upper classes who have sufficient wealth to be able to be thoughtlessly generous. In fact, Remy’s life in Bombay is very much cushioned by his wealth. He tips lavishly everywhere he goes, which smooths out a lot of the interactions and gains him a lot of extra favours from those who serve him. His friends are rich enough to have cars and drivers which he can borrow when he needs a ride. He is very insulated from the tribulations of (Bombay) life because he is rich enough to throw money at pretty much all his problems.

This may be a very narrow representation of a very select section of life for Bombayites, but it is not to say this is unrealistic or unrepresentative; for those in this echelon of society, this is indeed the lifestyle and the norm. However, the novel does not do more the scratch the surface in consider the class divides, and gulfs between people. It stays at a very superficial level. Manju, for instance, Remy’s mother’s nurse, tells Remy she has to walk, take a bus and a train, and walk some more, and it is a 2 hour commute for her, but she seems remarkably upbeat and cheerful and uncomplaining, and is no more than a prop in the story, a perpetually smiling servant, always available and always happy.

Even when the author shows the protagonist has an awareness of the superficiality of his reflections on have and have-nots, the reflections still remain cliché, conventional and lacking depth. Remy understands it is not that India is unhappier necessarily than elsewhere, or than Americans; there are unhappy people everywhere,

“every place could be considered a museum of failures. […] But Remy sensed a special brand of sadness in Bombay. You expected the poor to be burdened: the servants and the migrant workers, the farmers and the rag pickers, the masses desperate to make ends meet. But here, even his parents’ who’d had everything going for them – good looks, money, education – had seemed as miserable as those with nothing to call their own” (p73).

The trite conclusion drawn here seems merely that in every walk of life, people can be unhappy – hardly a revelation.

The protagonist’s reflections on his own positionality also remain merely at the obvious. Like most other successful immigrants to the USA, Remy knows he remains an outsider:

“Most days, Remy felt as American as Mount Rushmore, but once in awhile, these fissures reminded him that even though he had wholeheartedly embraced America, it was never guaranteed that American would embrace him in equal measure” (p105).

Remy experiences racism in America, but his privileges, Umrigar points out,

inured him from blatant racism: his education, his fluent English, his light skin, his bearing, his good looks, his American wife (p106).

Remy reflects that

despite being allowed to take a sizable bite out of the American dream, he would never completely belong to America. To any country, really. This was the eternal burden of the immigrant, the divided soul. He would always be a foreigner in America, but the irony was, he was also a stranger in India” (p106).

The feeling of not entirely belonging has been explored in depth already, and much more searchingly too, by many other novels and novelists. This seems a rehashing of stereotypes, not that rehashing stereotypes is a bad thing. Done quite well as it is in this novel, it makes for a known quantity and a comfortable read precisely because of its clichés.

So if the reader is seeking some originality, some creative insights, some profundities about wealth and poverty, or class divides, or comparisons between India and America, this may not be the best novel for those. But if the reader simply wants to read a pleasant story about family secrets with a little Indian and Parsi culture sprinkled on as pretty garnishes, this is a very acceptable read. The curious thing is, Umrigar is capable of so much better and more analytical exploration in her writing; in an early novel, The Space Between Us, Umrigar wrote a beautiful study on the relationship between mistress and servants, and the unbridgeable gulf that separates them no matter the length of time served or intimacies or trust between them. It was a powerful exploration of class, and it is strange Umrigar’s writing was so much stronger in her early work than her later novels.