THE SARI SHOP

A somewhat aimless first outing about the daily life of a poor shop-clerk in India.

In the Old City of the Punjabi metropolis of Amritsar, the Sevak Sari House is well known for carrying the finest ladies’ apparel in town. Young Ramchand has worked there for several years, doting on the imperious, well-to-do women who come to buy saris and chunnis and to organize their daughters’ trousseaux. Orphaned at six, Ramchand is now a quiet and solitary bachelor in his late 20s whose entire life revolves around the rhythms of his work. But an unexpected shift in his routines arrives when he’s sent to the Kapoor house to help Rina Kapoor (daughter of a wealthy merchant) choose saris for her wedding. Ramchand deals with rich customers every day, but he has never before been inside one of their homes, and the experience of seeing such people in their natural habitat sets off a strange change within him. He becomes more careful about his grooming, he buys textbooks, and he begins to teach himself English. But this isn’t quite a case of social-climbing or ambition: Ramchand, for the first time in his life, begins to look at the world around him with a critical, inquiring eye rather than accepting it on its own terms as he had always done before. Eventually, this all culminates in a small crisis. When the drunken wife of one of Ramchand’s colleagues is murdered for insulting the Kapoor family, Ramchand tries to bring the killers to the attention of the authorities—only to find that India’s notorious social boundaries are just as impermeable as he had always feared.

An intriguing and controversial portrait of modern India, but far too loosely constructed—so much so that at times it seems quite meandering.