The struggle of life in new India’s lower-middle-classes allows the fragile to collapse

Rupa Bajwa’s second novel came quite a few years after her first, The Sari Shop. Eight years later and her second story begins with Rani, a young and single beautician in Amritsar, from a family constantly struggling to better their lives, though disillusioned and tired of the daily grind. Tell Me a Story might remind us about India’s burgeoning socio-economic inequality through the eyes of one family but it is also about love lost and the emotional wreckage caused when dreams collapse in the process of fighting deprivation.

This novel is not about hope or even change or progress, personal or otherwise, but focuses on the course of events during one year in which lives change. It is not about a globally successful India that its lesser developed South-Asian neighbours might envy, because that progress is altogether absent in the lives of Rani and her family. We learn right at the beginning that Rani’s father, Dheeraj, used to work as an accountant in a store until a new supermarket on the same premises made him redundant although “he spent 32 years there, carefully going over figures with a ledger and fountain pen”; her brother Mahesh’s dreams of studying as an electrician ended when Dheeraj lost his job and Mahesh slaved as a daily wager at a local cloth mill, with his discontent wife Neelam balancing the household budget: “Mahesh shared his bitter disappointment only with Satish [his childhood friend]… they had grown up playing together… Both had looked forward to working together… But it had remained Satish Electrical Works and Mahesh had plodded on his bicycle past it to the old, dingy factory everyday, his heart heavy with unfulfilled wire-and-motor-dreams.”

Bajwa has a way with language. She writes with ease and impeccable fluency, her character descriptions flawless as she eases the reader into the lives of various protagonists for the first hundred pages or so. But that’s where she stops. She draws a perfect picture of never-ending poverty, of never having enough money for small luxuries but not giving up, of the life of a young woman who even enjoys her work at a local beauty salon, occasionally dreaming about Indian movie stars while reading old editions of Filmfare on her days off. There is sadness and pathos that Bajwa portrays expertly. You just might want to read about Rani’s daily schedule at the beauty salon, with careful details inserted, as if Bajwa observed her for hours, watching her boss Asha’s moods, placating angry clients whose arched eyebrows don’t match or whose hair isn’t styled perfectly; but this narrative structure doesn’t prepare the reader for the actual twist in the plot (so far there isn’t much of a plot unless it’s about the family fighting about money shortages; about Dheeraj loosing his savings to a conman and then dying broken-hearted). Rani’s earnings don’t amount to much for the household but she cares for Dheeraj when her family castigates him and pushes him away, encouraging him to live life without regrets.

There is strength in Rani’s character which overrules the others but it’s the women in the novel that survive despite their inner struggles. Then a sudden shift in the storyline quickly takes the reader on a train ride to Delhi, brings in a host of new, often clichéd characters into the novel — Sadhna, an uninspired novelist, Vina, her domestic servant, and other contemporary urban characters. This happens when Rani finally succumbs to her sister-in-law Neelam’s taunting behavior, leaving her home and her job for the life of a domestic servant in a palatial house rented by a struggling writer who has broken her leg.

Here Bajwa’s sardonic tone could easily shock these classier, privileged characters. Drawing a scathing picture of Delhi’s upper middle class through Rani’s witty observations, it evident that she resents them for what she believes is their hypocritical stance at India’s economic conditions (in an interview she said she doesn’t hang around in India’s contemporary literary circle).

Rani, at first bewildered not only by her life in a city away from the familiarity of her home town, is driven to anger when she learns about how socialites spend their money on luxurious parties with tiny, expensive h’orderves and excessive alcohol so that they might mingle for the short duration of a few hours. Sadhna’s friend Sasha organises a party at her house to network with the literary lot and invites the who’s who from the Indian media (Nina Chowdhary, a print journalist comes in “wearing raccoon-like eyeliner, dressed in a Fabindia kurta, a white churidaar and a dozen thin silver bangles” and for a split second between serving snacks to the guests “Rani thought of all the women she had ever helped get dressed and made up… and had to admit that these people were somewhat unusual”) Could Bajwa have made Rani a bit more savvy perhaps about her situation and more able to contend with realities? Or is she so protected that she is unaware of the obvious class disparities she experiences in Delhi?

Rani feels disgust at “all the guests who had drifted in casually, relaxed, chatted and left, with no inkling of the dark rooms that souls could get lost in, for as trivial reasons as a bill of Rs 18,500.” This is a reference to Rani’s past troubles in Amritsar: “Rs 18,500 was the exact, the precise amount that had been spent when their home had been flooded. Had Papaji had the amount, he would have escaped untold suffering… she felt an intense hatred surge in her heart, a heart which had hardly known hatred before.” Rani’s inner trauma is recognised by Sadhna, who learns that the young woman has the ability to tell a good story and so she inspires her own writing. It is here where Bajwa might have ended her story — with hope even for those who haven’t experienced India’s new consumerist voice shouting out progress — but she seems impervious to Rani’s sadness and inflicts more pain, which is something that makes this novel’s epilogue strangely incomplete.

The reviewer is a staffer at the monthly Herald

Tell Me a Story (NOVEL) By Rupa Bajwa Picador, India ISBN 144721773X 214pp. Rs499