Overview:
This debut novel has a gentle charm of a particularly Sinhalese-Sri Lankan flavour.
“She loved fine things and she had no doubt she deserved them.”
This is the opening sentence of the novel, and one which made me smile. A good, provocative opening sentence to reel the reader right in. This sentence alone encapsulates the protagonist’s personality and priorities, which is to shape her motivations, actions, and subsequent situations. Given a society like the Sri Lankan one with its rigid and hierarchical class structures and gender dos-and-don’ts, combined with the telling title, it was clear from the outset that our protagonist was going to break some rules, get into some trouble, and defy some societal norms.
Freeman is deft enough in her sketch of class differences between mistress and maid, of the chasm between the upper classes and the serving classes, using her skill with detailed observation and depiction to highlight class markers in materials as mundane as bars of Lux soaps and Sunlight block and flake soaps. Freeman refines the juxtapositions by going beyond a simple comparison of which soaps can be afforded by which class, and instead shows how each type of soap is invested with particular meanings and associations by Latha in her imagination, and therefore how they come to flagpost concrete and telling social differences in status.
This theme of class difference between mistress and maid, the more painful because lived in constant and close proximity, has been worked through by quite a number of South Asian authors in the past (e.g. Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us, Tahira Naqvi’s Dying in a Strange Country, Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence, Anita Nair’s Sister to the Real Thing in Ladies Coupe; and by Sri Lankan authors too; Elmo Jayawardena’s Sam’s Story, Romesh Gunasekera’s The Reef, Isankya Kodithuwakku’s How Mrs Senarath Called a Marriage for Mala in The Banana Tree Crisis). That said, Freeman’s addition to this discussion is a welcome one, far from being hackneyed.
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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