Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay,
leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's
house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in
which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not
permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not
allowed to drink. Yet despite being separated from each other by
blood and class, she and Sera find themselves bound by gender and
shared life experiences.
Sera is an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent
surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive
marriage. A widow, she devotes herself to her family, spending much
of her time caring for her pregnant daughter, Dinaz, a kindhearted,
educated professional, and her charming and successful son-in-law,
Viraf.
Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and
loss, has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty
years. Cursed by fate, she sacrifices all for her beautiful,
headstrong granddaughter, Maya, a university student whose
education -- paid for by Sera -- will enable them to escape the
slums. But when an unwed Maya becomes pregnant by a man whose
identity she refuses to reveal, Bhima's dreams of a better life for
her granddaughter, as well as for herself, may be shattered
forever.
Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The
Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet
familiar world. Set in modern-day India and witnessed through two
compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives
of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly
removed from each other, and vividly captures how the bonds of
womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and
culture.