A Real Durwan and This Blessed House: Who is telling the story?

From the beginning, Lahiri fixes the camera eye on Boori Ma: “Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell, had not slept in two nights.” We watch her perform intimate gestures: she shakes the mites from her bedding; she places her hand on her swollen knee; she struggles her way up the stairs. Lahiri establishes Boori Ma as the central figure and we follow. We follow Boori Ma from her “bed” in the basement as she moves through the building, stopping to sweep, lingering to tell stories to her neighbors, until finally she is on the roof. This is a very effective strategy that links place and setting: we know from the get-go that Boori Ma’s limited geography is critical to her character.

However, on page 71-72, the narrative shifts to omniscient, focusing on how her neighbors perceive her: “Whether there was any truth to Boori Ma’s litanies, no one could be sure” (72). We are then given a series of clues: she has a distinct accent, she changes her story often, particularly the perimeters of her former estate, and the contents of her almari and coffer boxes. Then we are told flat-out: “So she garbled facts. She contradicted herself. She embellished almost everything. But her rants were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not easy to dismiss her” (72). The reader is thus placed into the position of the neighbors: holding both stories at once, unable to discern which is truth. The reader, like the neighbors, never knows definitively whether Boori Ma once lived a life as luxurious as she claims.

But the reader is offered a perspective that the neighbors do not have, especially once they’ve focused their sights on accumulating greater shows of wealth. Early in the story, Boori Ma appears respected and cared about (if sporadically) by her neighbors, so much so that they “honor” with the role of a real durwan – though, of course, not the salary. One afternoon,

Mrs. Dal stumbles upon Boori Ma shaking out what she believes to be mice and appears dismayed, perhaps even a little offended, that Boori Ma has not asked her earlier: “Do you think it’s beyond us to provide you with clean quilts?” (75).

However, as the neighbors begin to compete with each other for status by upgrading their appliances, they lose perspective on Boori Ma. She is an inconvenience; she cannot even clean the building, because there are too many other workers occupying the stairs. While the narrative continues to track Boori Ma and her travails (sleeping on a bed of newspapers, being pickpocketed in the market), the neighbors quickly turn on Boori Ma at the first opportunity: “the residents practically carried Boori Ma up the stairs to the roof, where they planted her on one side of the clothesline and started screaming at her from the other” (81). Without any evidence, they accuse her of informing the robbers, neglecting their (unpaid and uncommunicated) expectation that she should guard the gates at all time, and betraying their trust so completely that they throw her out of the building. While the neighbors lose empathy and respect for Boori Ma once they have more wealth, the narrative does not stray or leave Boori Ma behind. We may never know whether her stories about luxury and decadence are true, but we know her struggles are. For a story that is about what cannot be said/known and by whom, Lahiri’s shifting of perspectives is masterful.

                                                            ***

This Blessed House, on the other hand, is completely immersed in the (very limited) vantage point of Sanjeev. Here, it is Twinkle who moves about the house and Sanjeev is the one who does not follow. We only know about Twinkle through Sanjeev, and mostly through his judgments and anxieties about the Christian icons she insistently displays throughout the house. We also learn about Twinkle through his vague memories of their courtship just four months earlier – we are offered glimpses into their initial attraction, but in an almost cursory way: we learn that they talked on the phone, then started seeing each other more often, and then they acquiesced to marriage “at the urging of their matchmakers” (143). Even the reader is excluded from virtually all of the details about what drew them to each other (besides their “persistent fondness for Wodehouse novels and dislike for the sitar”). It is clear they do not know each other/

Even in the final scene, Sanjeev reminisces about the thrill he used to feel at the anticipation of her arrival. It seems meaningful to me that he does not remember being thrilled by her, only by the joy and pleasure he expected she would bring. Such is true with Sanjeev’s conceptions about love: he does not know love, but expected it would bring him happiness.

Most importantly, the reader does not get to know Twinkle. We become intimately acquainted with Sanjeev’s judgments about Twinkle, but we are very much excluded from what is going on in her head. Whether she is angry about Sanjeev’s responses, whether she is intentionally punishing him at the party by doing exactly what he is most afraid of (showing his guests all of the tacky Christian paraphernalia), and whether she loves him. Like Sanjeev, we do not know Twinkle at all.

While Lahiri’s use of third person limited effectively captures the couple’s inability to communicate and how dramatically they do not seem to know each other, I also found it a little too “on the nose” in This Blessed House: Sanjeev is having difficulty relating, and so the story is exclusively told from his perspective. Also, Twinkle read a little bit like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl – whimsical, impulsive, charming – and I felt disappointed she didn’t get to be a more fully developed character. It raises an important question: what to do when you know that your character’s limited perspective keeps important characters from inhabiting their full complexity? Personally, I felt like A Real Durwan negotiated multiple characters by shifting perspectives in more complex, powerful ways.