and his rootedness in the community; the Billi-
morias’ marriage devolving from great romance
to misery; the tragedy of Tehmi Engineer; and the
betrayal of Soli Contractor. The novel emphasizes
how a close-knit community supports individuals
through their travails. It also demonstrates how an
ethnic minority develops strategies for survival in
a changing nation.
Umrigar’s second novel, The Space between Us,
examines the class divisions between Sera, a mid-
dle-class Parsi woman, and Bhima, her maid. Sera
and Bhima develop a close relationship despite
their economic differences because as women
they suffer through betrayal, domestic violence,
and tragic loss. But when Sera’s son-in-law se-
duces Bhima’s young granddaughter and gets her
pregnant, their relationship unravels and both
women have to choose between family and loyalty
to a friend.
In First Darling of the Morning, Umrigar tells
us of her upbringing in an extended middle-class
family surrounded by a loving father, doting aunts,
and a loving uncle. This loving family, however, is
challenged by her mother’s unbridled anger and
verbal and physical violence toward her sister-in-
law and daughter. Umrigar describes her survival
in such an abusive relationship, the economic ups
and downs endured by the family in their business,
and the formative friendships in school and in the
neighborhood. We learn of the tragic death of her
uncle, her intellectual and political development,
and her decision to leave India to escape her dys-
functional mother.
Umrigar explores the supportive role of fami-
lies, the dysfunctionality within families, the
preoccupation with class divisions in India, the
postcolonial middle-class sensibilities, and the
construction of masculinity and femininity in
middle-class India, especially in the Parsi commu-
nity. Umrigar’s fiction is rooted in the Bombay of
the 1960s to the 1980s, and the city becomes more
than simply the setting of the novel. Through her
portrayal of Bombay, we see the development of
postcolonial urban India and the many divisions
based on religion, language, class, and gender in
this developing democratic nation.
Bibliography
Umrigar, Thrity. Bombay Time. New York: Picador,
2001.
———. First Darling of the Morning. New York:
HarperCollins, 2004.
———. The Space between Us. New York: Harper-
Collins, 2006.
Nalini IyerUng, Loung (1970– )
Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Loung Ung was
five years old when the communist Khmer Rouge
force defeated the Lon Nol army and invaded
Phnom Penh in 1975. Since her father, Sem Im
Ung, was a military police captain in the Lon Nol
government, Ung’s family joined the rest of the
city’s population in a mass exodus from the capital
to the countryside. The Ungs settled in the village
of Bat Deng, where Ung’s extended family lived.
They were able to hide their past and work with
local villagers and farmers until December 1976,
when two Khmer Rouge cadres came to their hut
and asked for their father’s assistance in helping to
push their oxcart out of a mud pool. This was the
last time Ung saw her father alive. Deciding it was
safer to separate the family, Ung’s mother sent her
children off to separate labor camps.
Ung lost her parents and two sisters before the
Khmer Rouge regime fell in January 1979, when
Vietnam invaded Cambodia. In 1980 Ung and
some of her remaining siblings hid on a boat trav-
eling from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Thailand.
Five months later, they were resettled in Essex
Junction, Vermont, through the sponsorship of
a church organization. A therapist whom Ung
consulted for post-traumatic stress disorder en-
couraged Ung to write her experiences in a diary,
which ultimately led to her memoir. In 1993, after
graduating with a degree in political science from
St. Michael’s College in Vermont, Ung began work-
ing at a domestic shelter in Maine. In 1995 she
returned to Cambodia for the first time and was
deeply moved by the deaths and injuries caused
by land mines. Although accepted to ColumbiaUng, Loung 299