A story well told

Ramchand works as a shop assistant at the Sevak Sari House, in a bustling bazaar in the older part of Amritsar. It's a monotonous, largely undemanding job with an unchanging set of co-workers "" some of whom double as movie-watching companions for matinee shows on Sundays, when there's not much else to do.

But Ramchand is beset with memories of a briefly happy childhood, cut short when his parents died in an accident, and he can't quite escape the feeling that his life isn't all it might have been.

Paralleling the humdrum daily routine of the shop assistants is the lives of upper-class families in a more upmarket part of the city "" the Mrs Guptas and Mrs Sandhus, whose daily dealings involve games of one-upmanship centred mainly on which of them gets to organise the best wedding for her children.

Saris are in high demand at such times, and thus the two storylines converge: Ramchand is sent to the palatial "Kapoor House" to display his shop's best wares.

Here, he encounters the bride-to-be, Rina, who seems somehow different from her family "" she talks on the phone with her fiance about escaping her stagnant life "" though this doesn't preclude her referring to Ramchand as a "stupid sari-wallah".

The world is full of possibilities, concludes Ramchand after his visit; it's a lot bigger than the shop-room-shop rut he's got himself into.

His attempts to improve his lot begin with buying books to hone his half-baked knowledge of English "" there are traces of understated humour in his earnest effort to study letter-writing from an Anglo-centric guide (where words like Phyllis, Wales and Chepstow give him no end of trouble) and in his brainstorm that he should be able to learn "all English" by mugging up the complete dictionary.

But in his efforts to breach the language divide, Ramchand hasn't accounted for the immutable nature of the communication gap between the classes.

First-time author Rupa Bajwa depicts that communication gap with felicity. The basic inability of the upper strata to even recognise lower-class people as human beings is nicely brought out, as in this unobtrusive but perceptive exchange between Ramchand and one of the women shoppers:

"Can you see that man at the opposite end?" he said, pointing towards Chander.
"I see no man there," she said.
"The shop assistant, madam, the tall one."
"Oh, him," she said, nodding.

But lack of communication doesn't apply only to class divisions. Through the sad (though admittedly over-dramatic) story of Kamla, the wife of one of Ramchand's coworkers, the author gives us the darkest corners of a dog-eat-dog world that's completely lacking in empathy and understanding.

Ramchand's efforts to help Kamla lead to the final breakdown of his idealism in a passage where the lower-class man is decisively and savagely shown the boundaries he must not cross.

The Sari Shop has many little observations that generally manage to steer clear of India's "poor" cliches. The characterisation isn't faultless "" given the types of people he has spent his life around, Ramchand is a little too sanctimonious (he scrupulously avoids Sunny Deol's Pak-bashing movies and admonishes his friends for barracking indecently in the theatre) "" giving us a protagonist so easy to sympathise with indicates laziness on the author's part.

But on the whole we get nice little sketches of the shop's other employees as well as of the women who come sari seeking.

There's also a subtext that gives this book an uneasy added dimension. Rina Kapoor's interest in Ramchand's life, we learn, is simply to provide her material for her first novel "" a lightweight book that has nothing at all to do with the hard realities of the sari seller's life, merely using the superficialities of his existence as fodder for creative inspiration.

Like Rina, Rupa Bajwa herself is a young, Amritsar-based woman writing her first novel. While the differences in the real book and the one within the story are obvious "" The Sari Shop is a deeply felt look at hopeless lives "" there is also perhaps an element of cold, detached self-analysis at work here.

The implication is that the division between India's rich and poor is so unbreachable that even the well-intentioned among the former can only define the latter in cliched terms, without ever really understanding the squalor of their lives.

This view fits in with the abject hopelessness of the ending, where "" for all of Ramchand's hopes and dreams "" everything stays exactly as it has always been and his books gather dust on an out-of-sight shelf.

The only real narrative weakness here is that the shift in perspectives is erratic; for the most part, we stay with Ramchand and see events through his eyes, but only occasionally "" a chapter here, another there "" we leapfrog to get under another character's skin, which leads to a muddled pastiche.

One occasionally gets a sense of the author straining to overreach her canvas instead of working within it.

But this is compensated by the book's unpretentious readability. The current season has already thrown up a morbidly over-rated debut novel by an author who we're told is the literary sensation of the year. The Sari Shop is a less heralded, less ambitious but far more readable first book that tells an engrossing story well, with only the odd awkward passage here and there.

THE SARI SHOP

Rupa Bajwa
Penguin Books India
Pages: 241
Price: Rs 295