Vox Publica

The Sari Shop

I came across "The Sari Shop" in the "New Books" shelf at my local public library. I like reading fiction from around the world, and our library gets a fair number of books written by Indian writers for English-speaking audiences. I don't know if this is because of the demographics of San Leandro, the particular preferences of our librarians or the fact that literature - like so many technical and service jobs - has been outsourced to India. No matter, I enjoy reading these books and "The Sari Shop", a first time effort by novelist Rupa Bajwa, was no exception.

“The Sari Shop” is not as much a story as a quick glance into the lives of the fictional employees and customers of the best sari ship in Amritsar. It focuses on Ramchand, a young man who, left orphan as a child, was unable to get an education and considers himself quite lucky to have a job at a sari shop. He is painfully poor and at the start of the story he seems to be content enough with his fate, though later he gains some ambition to at least educate himself a little better. He tries hard to learn English, though ultimately this added knowledge seems useless to him. He also awakes to the plights of the people around him - only to find out there is nothing he can do to help them, cultural and class walls being too impenetrable for his simple efforts.

The conclusion, and indeed, the whole book is rather Chekhovian - though the writing style reminded me more of Agatha Christie - and the book did make me feel that India was primed for a communist revolution (though I imagine that it innoculated itself against that danger in past generations by having quasi-socialist governments). But mostly, I felt this was a story I’d been told before; setting it in an Indian context added color but I’m not sure anything else. And yet, I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing something. In a clearly self-referencing note, one of Bajwa’s characters, a rich, intelligent woman who is a main customer of the sari shop, writes a novel about a sari shop after meeting and being inspired by Ramchand. It’s clear that she doesn’t know him and that all that can go into her story are her distant impressions of a life she can never hope, and doesn’t seem to want, to understand. That she is using him, his life, his story is clear - that she is doing it while she and her class are living off the labor and misery of Ramchand and his class - seems like adding insult to injury. What is not clear to me is why, with her explicit understanding of the exploitative nature of writing about the poor, Bajwa would do it nonetheless. Though perhaps the whole book, the whole story, was nothing but silken wrapping for this point - it certainly reverberates with me days after - and if so my hat goes off to her.