FICTION
When `losers' win
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`Rupa Bajwa has a great deal going for her — a sound instinct for storytelling, an unconstrained relationship with the language and a flair for detail.'
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THE Sari Shop is a fine debut by a writer who has a great deal going for her — a sound instinct for storytelling, an unconstrained relationship with the language and a flair for detail. Beyond craft, Rupa Bajwa has a Narayan-like fascination for the ordinary individual in the face of odds, the harried man with a minor mission. Through that fascination emerges a sensitive calibration of an "ever-changing yet never-changing" life in a small city.
Yet through the fate of its central character, Bajwa's novel differs from those of R.K. Narayan's. Narayan's characters often draw on hidden personal resources to dodge the blows of fate or are able to reinvent themselves to take on those blows with greater equanimity or deeper irony. Bajwa's sari shop salesman is not always allowed irony or surprise, and this causes a note of disingenuousness to creep into the novel now and then.
Twenty-six-year-old Ramchand leads a humdrum life, living alone in a one-room house and selling saris to the female high society of Amritsar. Unlike his colleagues in Sevak Sari House though, Ramchand possesses an inner life. The shallowness of his existence is heightened by loneliness and he recalls with painful precision the parents he lost at an early age. He is in the grip of a vague, objectless ache, a sense of waiting for something "in the same way as a man who has a tumour in his brain, or a hole in his heart waits." A rent in this grey world appears in the shape of a sari-selling visit to the house of a rich industrialist whose daughter is getting married. Ramchand is inspired enough by this deviation in his sordid routine to start on a new life, or at least a less irresolute version of his old one, and the central ingredient of this turn is his determination to teach himself English.
But Ramchand's growing grasp of English, despite his problems with the alien British idiom of the "Complete Letter Writer", is not anti-dote enough to the depressing reality of Amritsar's working class world. A dhaba owner tells him in unsparing detail the story of how his sons were killed during Operation Blue Star. A colleague in the sari shop brutally mistreats his wife, and Ramchand finds himself laid open once again to the horror and helplessness of his old life.
Parallel and in every way contradictory to Ramchand's world is that of the Amritsar's gilded rich — snooty housewives, obedient daughters-in-law, pampered sons, girls with artistic pretensions. Complementing them are morally hollow intellectuals who only appear, as Ramchand discovers, to stand for values different from those of the single-minded upper classes. Though Bajwa is a careful observer of this world, this aspect of the novel is less engaging than Ramchand's story. Stylistically, these sections of the novel are somewhat over-written. Since she has decided to mock at the rich, there are no surprises in store and often their exchanges are little more than that play at talk which masks envy and boredom. Neither is this portrayed with especial originality. Trite conversations on the lines of: "Maybe she [Mrs. Bhandari] is insecure. Only a daughter you know. And still unmarried" or "I am glad you are not marrying into one of those business families... a girl like you does need a more cultured atmosphere to explore her potential", keep hammering the point, long after it has already been established, that such characters are all soap opera and no nuance.
It is in the depiction of her central character and of the small-time salesmen, drunkards, mahajans, mistreated women and other "local losers" as Bob Dylan would say, that Bajwa's strengths are evident and there is tenderness and realism in her depiction of Ramchand's compulsive spying on his landlord's wife, or the story of Kamala, his colleague's wife whose suffering petrifies Ramchand. Her convincing portrayal of the confused angst of someone who does not always possess the means to articulate his misery even to himself, whose vision of a better life is as vague as the sadness which keeps him imprisoned in this one, is the strongest achievement of the novel. Bajwa might have done well to explore this further, take Ramchand deeper into himself, and leave the familiar hypocrisies of the affluent to form the backdrop to the novel. Drawn into Ramchand's world, we wait to be shown more than just that the powerless individual is powerless. Even if Ramchand is to return to the emptiness from which he started, one would have liked his story to fill out with more of the comi-tragic dilemmas and moral shabbiness that Bajwa observes so closely and so well.
The Sari Shop, Rupa Bajwa, Penguin, 2004, p.241, Rs. 295.
ANJUM HASAN
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