book reviews, Volume 3 number 8, August/September 2001 Tales from India and Tales of the Working Poor Mirrorwork Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard When the British vacated the Indian Subcontinent in 1947, they left behind a multitude of influences: modern cities; one of the world’s great railways; parliamentary democracy; mind-boggling bureaucracy; a small but thriving community of Christian converts. But the most significant legacy of British rule was English, now the most widely spoken language in India. Although English narrowly lost out to Hindi as the official language of government, it is the lingua franca of a nation with more than one hundred languages. It was inevitable that a rich and vibrant Indian-English literature would emerge. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence, Owl Books published Mirrorwork, an anthology of more than thirty Indian authors, edited by Salman Rushdie (famous, unfortunately, for more than just his mercurial writing) and Elizabeth West. The essays, short stories, and novel excerpts which comprise this collection shed light on this intriguingly foreign culture. The collection is erratic, but the best pieces shine. In her bittersweet memoir, Nayantara Sahgal (niece of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru) recalls the early days of independence, her last meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, and the funeral procession where her stunned nation grappled with the assassination of its founder. Kamala Markandaya’s heartbreaking piece, “Hunger,” explores the effects of famine on a small community where human cruelty is only amplified by the crisis. Through small but telling details, Mukul Kesavan captures perfectly the atmosphere of Connaught Place, New Delhi’s commercial center. The partition of India and Pakistan prompted the largest migration of humanity in history, accompanied by epic bloodshed as Muslims fled west and Hindus east. Most refugees flowed through the Punjab where long-simmering hatreds led to countless massacres. Bapsi Sidhwa hauntingly writes of the destruction of Muslim villages by Sikh hordes. Sectarian conflict has defined much of India’s history and is explored in various ways by several authors. Vikram Seth examines the gulf between religions in a brief extract from his mammoth bestseller, A Suitable Boy. On a more peaceful note, Amit Chaudhuri’s “Sandeep’s Visit” is a beautiful story set in Calcutta, in which nothing happens but daily life. Famed film director Satyajit Ray’s “Big Bill” is a lighthearted story with a hilarious ending. Rushdie himself is represented by an excerpt from his masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, the novel that put India on the literary map. In his introduction to the collection, Rushdie acknowledges his debt to an obscure author named G. V. Desani. This influence is immediately obvious when reading Desani’s “All About H. Hatterr,” a send-up of India’s propensity to manufacture gurus of questionable virtue, told in highly inventive language. While the overall quality of this collection is uneven, there is plenty here to demonstrate the depth and quality of literature coming out of India these days (although billed as a retrospective of the past fifty years, most of this material saw publication since 1980). Readers are left with a sizable list of authors worthy of further exploration. One such author, Kiran Desai, contributes an excerpt from her debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, which has since been published in the United States. The story concerns Sampath Chawla, a twenty-something slacker who, upon losing his job in a local post office, climbs a nearby guava tree intending to sit there until he decides just what to do with his life. Having spent his time as a postal worker reading other people’s mail, he possesses plenty of intimate details of the lives of his neighbors. When they come to witness the spectacle of the young man in the tree top, he promptly reveals this information and is just as promptly declared a holy man. Soon people from near and far are flocking to the orchard to hear the lad dispense nuggets of simple-minded wisdom. Sampath’s exasperated and unscrupulous father sees money to be made. His mother is blindly devoted to her son. His precocious sister makes plenty of trouble for the whole family. This deceptively lighthearted book pokes keen fun at Indian society. Desai is a born story teller with a clear love for the English language. Her tale unfolds at a deliberate pace. Along the way she imagines a complex and quite believable little town where something extraordinary happens. Her language is at once poetic and humorous. Not yet thirty, she shows tremendous promise in this entertaining and well-written first effort. Nickel and Dimed When Congress passed sweeping reforms over the nation’s welfare laws, the virtual guarantee of life-long assistance to struggling and impoverished Americans became a limited-time offer. The idea was to push welfare recipients into jobs, but no program for monitoring their fate was created. How have unskilled, poorly-educated individuals, entering or returning to the workforce in our recent go-go economy, fared? In Nickel and Dimed, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich finds out by going undercover as a low wage worker. Passing herself off as a divorced mother of grown children reentering the labor market in various cities around the country, she worked as a waitress, maid, food service worker in a nursing home, and “associate” at a Wal-Mart. She simultaneously attempted to locate housing affordable on her wages, averaging roughly $7.00 an hour. Ehrenreich’s report is a grim yet comical tale of the trials faced by people of limited means working to establish themselves. From the petty indignities suffered by wage slaves, to her sometimes frightening experiences with barely affordable substandard housing, to the effort expended in simply feeding herself, she learned that for many workers, just making ends meet is a full time battle. As a waitress and a maid, Ehrenreich was often forced to perform tasks off the clock. It was physically demanding work even for her (she describes herself as a well-conditioned workout nut), leading her to ruminate on the ills suffered by workers lacking health insurance and sick leave. At her job with The Maids, International, she and her fellow employees were cajoled by the franchise holder (the only man in the entire operation) to “work through” injuries and sickness. A coworker severely injured on the job (probably a broken bone) only takes one day off, never seeks medical help, and never files a workman’s compensation report. The boss, needless to say, takes no steps to rectify this situation. The book, which grew out of a pair of articles in Harper’s, provides lengthy descriptions of life on the front lines of the service industry. From the invasive drug and personality tests applicants must undergo, to the tyrannical power trips of petty middle managers, to the sheer exhaustion which comes from being on one’s feet up to eleven hours a day, this is a world most of Ehrenreich’s readers will never experience. Ehrenreich views much of what is done to employees as part of a general attempt by management to assert complete dominance over their lives, an authoritarian system designed to break the will of the individual, bending people to the needs of the corporation. During her time at a Minnesota Wal-Mart (which comes across as an Orwellian nightmare), she finally snaps: “Wherever you look, there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices. Even the woods and meadows have been stripped of disorderly life forms and forced into a uniform made of concrete. What you see—highways, parking lots, stores—is all there is, or all that’s left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized, paved-over, corporatized everything.” She begins spreading the union gospel, but knows it is a hopeless cause. Workers, frightened for the security of their jobs and lacking anything to fall back on, are unlikely to rock the boat. In the closing pages Ehrenreich takes stock of her experience. She came closest to getting by in Portland, Maine, but only by holding down two jobs (forcing her to work seven days a week) and arriving in the off season when rents were lowest. As she notes, the major obstacle for the working poor is housing. The turbo-economy of the last decade has driven up rents much faster than wages. Ehrenreich, who offers little in the way of solutions, seems unwilling to admit that welfare was a well-intentioned failure which created a culture of dependency. The answer does not lie in a return to the old system (something she does not suggest, but seems to imply). A better approach would include a system of housing and child-care assistance to poor working families, a reinvigorated labor movement held to strict standards of democratic accountability, and successful living-wage campaigns. Still, her book is a timely reminder that the poor, all but forgotten by the mainstream media, are still among us. Abandoned by a once-generous Democratic Party and despised by Republicans, the economically disadvantaged have not been lifted by our recent boom. With a recession on the horizon, their status is only going to deteriorate. If conservative Christians (who pushed hard for welfare reform) truly cared about the poor, this would be the subject of the best-selling Left Behind series.
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