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    The Secrets Between Us: A Novel
    The Secrets Between Us: A Novel
    The Secrets Between Us: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Secrets Between Us: A Novel

    Written by Thrity Umrigar

    Narrated by Sneha Mathan

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    More than a decade since her bestselling novel, The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar continues Bhima’s unforgettable story in this stunning sequel.

    “The women at the heart of this novel inhabit the harsh world of the urban Indian poor, and struggle separately and together for dignity and survival. Thrity Umrigar has written a moving human tale that vividly brings to life both the women and the city of Mumbai.”—Salman Rushdie

    Bhima, the unforgettable main character of Thrity Umrigar’s beloved national bestseller The Space Between Us, returns in this triumphant sequel—a poignant and compelling novel in which the former servant struggles against the circumstances of class and misfortune to forge a new path for herself and her granddaughter in modern India.

    Poor and illiterate, Bhima had faithfully worked for the Dubash family, an upper-middle-class Parsi household, for more than twenty years. Yet after courageously speaking the truth about a heinous crime perpetrated against her own family, the devoted servant was cruelly fired. The sting of that dismissal was made more painful coming from Sera Dubash, the temperamental employer who had long been Bhima’s only confidante. A woman who has endured despair and loss with stoicism, Bhima must now find some other way to support herself and her granddaughter, Maya.

    Bhima’s fortunes take an unexpected turn when her path intersects with Parvati, a bitter, taciturn older woman. The two acquaintances soon form a tentative business partnership, selling fruits and vegetables at the local market. As they work together, these two women seemingly bound by fate grow closer, each confessing the truth about their lives and the wounds that haunt them. Discovering her first true friend, Bhima pieces together a new life, and together, the two women learn to stand on their own.

    A dazzling story of strength, friendship, and second chances, The Secrets Between Us is a powerful and perceptive novel that brilliantly evokes the complexities of life in modern India and the harsh realities faced by women born without privilege as they struggle to survive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 26, 2018
    ISBN9780062848246
    Author

    Thrity Umrigar

    Thrity Umrigar is the author of seven novels Everybody’s Son, The Story Hour, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time; a memoir, First Darling of the Morning; and a children’s picture book, When I Carried You in My Belly. A former journalist, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and was a finalist for the PEN Beyond Margins Award. A professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.  

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    Reviews for The Secrets Between Us

    4.5/5

    177 ratings26 reviews

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    • 5/5
      One of the best books I have read/listen to in a long long time. It is full of wisdom and will make you laugh and cry throughout!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Loved this so much was addicted must listen or read what ever suits you

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Like its predecessor this book is a richly woven tapestry of lives intersecting and overlapping in ways that can only be described as fate or perhaps divine intervention. The characters are so real that we’re can feel their pain and, less frequently, their joy. A fitting sequel to The Space Between Us.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book about courage and struggle and reconciliation. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      I feel like I know all of the characters as real people. Beautiful book. Simply beautiful.
    • 5/5
      The story gripped my heart in a deep and meaningful way. My gratitude to the author for writing this book.
    • 5/5
      Such a well-told story. So touching, so real. Loved it
    • 5/5
      Delicate story and beautifully narrated and follow on from her first .Recommended as a great read
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    • 5/5
      Tender glimpse into the lives of poor Indian women beleaguered by adversity yet resilient in
    • 5/5
      A fantastic read. I really enjoyed it, finished it in less than 24 hours.
    • 5/5
      There are no words. Reading this book was a profoundly beautiful experience.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely wonderful.Sad heart warming story of love, friendship, reconciliation and hope
    • 4/5
      I liked the friendships that were formed with unlikely people who became family.
    • 5/5
      A sequel to The Space Between Us that stands on its own. The author astoundingly tells the story from an acutely close psychic distance in the third person. Brilliantly told and narrated. A human story with broad implications.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely brilliant! Detailed insights, almost like indian miniatures, into the changing indian society.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written, sympathetic portrait of the Indian underclasses. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Such a great story
      So touching moving
      I was captivated with every word
    • 5/5
      What a beautifully written piece of art. Really moving and deep.
    • 4/5
      3.5 starsBhima is no longer working for the family she had been, and is now living in the slum with her granddaughter, Maya. However, with some help, she has managed to send Maya to university, while Bhima herself is now working two jobs (cleaning and cooking) for two other people. She really dislikes the woman at her morning job, but at her afternoon job, when her employer has a friend move in – a friend who has moved back to India from Australia and seems to have forgotten the customs – Bhima is not only treated very well, she is treated more like a friend. The often disagreeable Parvati has an argument with her nephew and he kicks her out of where she has been living. She finds a room to rent at a brothel, and sells vegetables at a stand during the day to make her daily rent. Circumstances bring the two older ladies, Bhima and Parvati, together and they form a business partnership.This is a continuation of “The Space Between Us” by the same author. Despite this being a sequel (and although I have), I don’t think you need to have read the first book to read this one. The bits you need to know are told to you in this story (good thing, because I wouldn’t have remembered any of it!). I liked this. I considered upping my rating to 4 but decided to keep it at a “good” rating for me. It’s not fast paced, but it’s a nice story of friendship. With the way it ended, I feel like there is a possibility for another continuation (with a different focus). If another book came out with these characters, I would read it.
    • 5/5
      Thirty Umrigar is now my most favorite author. I listened to The Secrets Between Us is powerful and has many truths about, life, forgiveness, women and poverty. I found myself smiling and often with tears rolling down my cheeks often. Now that I am 76 years old, I enjoy a story that illuminates truth and wonder.The first women, Bhima, the grandmother, a housekeeper who loses her main employer grows through hardship and by introduction a woman who teaches that love can be shared by people of a higher caste and knowledge of self worth.The granddaughter, Maya becomes a bridge between Bhima and the higher caste women.The third woman, Parvati, which is a Hindu goddess that ironically sounds like the English word poverty! And she is extremely poor, selling six cauliflower a day that look like they are ready to be thrown out. Plauged by tragedy, she is very hard and mean on the outside but when Bhima comes to know her, the intelligent and wisdom shine through frim the inside.There is so much more! But this tale needs to be shared by everyone for its beauty, love and friendship that is like sisterhood.
    • 5/5
      Sequel to The Space Between Us, where we are introduced to protagonist Bhima, a woman living with her granddaughter in the slums of Mumbai. Though it is a sequel, it can be read as a standalone, since Bhima’s backstory is told in sufficient detail to give the reader the gist of what happened previously.

      The main storyline revolves around Bhima and another woman, Pavarti, who has had an even rougher life and sells six bruised cauliflowers daily to barely eke out a living. At first Pavarti believes Bhima looks down on her. Both women are scarred by past experience and have built walls around their hearts to avoid getting hurt. They almost accidentally form business partnership, and a friendship gradually develops between them.

      A secondary plotline revolves around Bhima’s new employers, a lesbian couple, who treat her much better than her former employer, for whom she worked for decades. Bhima’s granddaughter is in college, working hard to get her degree, with a goal of getting herself and her grandmother out of the slum.

      Umrigar is a wonderful writer, even when describing the harshness of a life in poverty: “But in the basti, one thing sizzles from hovel to hovel, much like the illegal, overhead electric wires that some of the residents have connected to their homes. It is hope. Even in the depth of their despair, hope runs like electricity throughout the basti. It is what makes the woman with no legs weave wicker baskets that she sells to a fancy shop. What makes the blind boy’s mother spend her days picking rags to pay his school fees. What makes the burn victim look for a good match for her daughter.”

      The characters are vivid. It is rare for me to cry when reading a book, but this book is powerfully moving, and I admit to shedding a tear or two. The first book is well-constructed and beautifully written. The second is even better. The first is extremely sad. The second contains a more optimistic outlook.
    • 4/5
      I love the novels of Thrity Umrigar and I loved “ The Secrets Between Us”. Such strong, tragic, female characters. Women who have been used and greatly abused by men and a caste system that dehumanizes women. This novels is of strong women who rise above poverty to claim dignity and a space in the world. This novel raises hard questions about the treatment of women. Bhima and Parvati two poor, aged women are the heroes in this novel.their partnership selling fruit in a marketplace brings together two desperate people but creates a family. I loved them throughout their stories. Ngoni works 2 jobs as a cook and maid and selling vegetables at the market. Her husband left her and she us raising her granddaughter herself sacrificing everything so Maya can get an education. Parvati was sold by her father and raised as a prostitute until a man dies marry her only to treat her as a slave. When he dies, his son kicks her out and she is living outside the door of a nephews apartment until, sick, she gets kicked out if there. The circumstances these women live in and how they rise above, mss as Jesus “ The Secrets Between Us” such a good book.
    • 3/5
      The Secrets Between Us is my first experience with one of Thrity Umrigar’s novels. I have always found it difficult to imagine what daily life must be like for India’s poorest, those people forced to spend all their time and energy on finding enough food and shelter to survive for just one more day. Always one day at a time…and always knowing that cultural constraints make it next to impossible for them to escape their lot. I was hoping that The Secrets Between Us would help me understand what that kind of like must be like - and it did exactly that.“This is what I believe. There is only one true evil. And it is being poor. With money, a sinner can be worshiped as a saint. A murderer can be elected chief minister. A rapist can become a respectable family man…Understand?”The story revolves around two main characters, Bhima and Parvati, two women who do not know each other as the story begins. Bhima, poor and illiterate, has spent the last two decades cleaning and cooking for a middle class family in Mumbai. Her duties often take her to the rambling, open-air vegetable market where she has noticed Parvati, an old woman selling her sparse good from a rug spread on the ground. The two women, however, have never acknowledged each other’s existence. Bhima thinks that Parvati is beneath her notice, and Parvati believes Bhima to be a snob who overestimates her own worth.Both women will soon begin to learn how wrong they have been about the other. It will take some time, but time is just about all either of them has anyway. Bhima is the sole provider for Maya, her teenaged granddaughter, and after Bhima is unfairly fired from her cleaning job without warning, she is desperate to replace the lost income before she and Maya end up living on the streets of the slum. Parvati has no one to call family anymore, other than the young man she thinks of as a “nephew,” even though he only allows to have her sleep outside his apartment door every night as long as she does nothing to offend the neighbors. Largely because there are no better options for either of the women, Bhima and Parvati come to an unlikely business arrangement with the potential to save both their lives if only they can learn to stand each other’s company. Both women have secrets about their past that they have sworn to share with no one, but they will come to learn just how much they have in common with each other - as well as with most every other Indian woman. “She is aware that every mother in this basti has deposited her unrealized hopes into her children because not one woman believes that she will live long enough for her own Age of Darkness to end. It is for their children’s sake that the women put up with the bad tempers of bosses, the humiliations and assaults too numerous to count, the arbitrariness of their hirings and firings, the grind of public transportation designed for a city one-third the size of what Mumbai has become.”Bottom Line: The Secrets Between Us is a story about the surviving strength of women in a society in which they are clearly second-class citizens. It is a story about women who are willing to do whatever it takes to give their own children, especially their daughters, the chance for a better life than the one they themselves have endured. What the novel has to say about the plight of women even today in parts of the world is horrifying, but in the end it leaves the reader with the hope that it will not always be this way. “I am like this paper. People can write on me, spit on me, tear me up, it makes no difference. One strong gust of wind and -“ she releases the scrap of paper - “bas, I’m gone. And no one will even know I was here.”
    • 5/5
      Not surprisingly, I liked this book even better than the first one. I think the reason was that beyond the extreme poverty and the horrors of living in the slums of Mumbai, Umrigar allowed in the one thing that makes human beings go on living even when circumstances are dreadful:hope."In her own basti, there is a woman with no legs. There is a child who is blind. Another woman with burns all over her body. But in the basti, one thing sizzles from hovel to hovel, much like the illegal, overhead electric wires that some of the residents have connected to their homes. It is hope. Even in the depth of their despair, hope runs like electricity throughout the basti. It is what makes the woman with no legs weave wicker baskets that she sells to a fancy shop. What makes the blind boy's mother spend her days picking rags to pay his school fees. What makes the burn victim look for a good match for her daughter."It was a wonderful book. The despair in the first book was resolved and not in an artificial way at all. Simply wonderful.
    • 5/5
      With her extensive knowledge of the class and caste divides of Northern India, and her feel for truthfully rendered dialogue and inner thoughts, Umrigar never disappoints. Horrible things happen for no reason, but there's usually an uplifting surprise or two. In this story, a continuation of her earlier novel The Space Between Us, Bhima, a devoted housemaid and cook for a wealthy family in Mumbai, has been fired by her employer and is trying to take care of granddaughter Maya and send her to college. Unwilling to settle for servant status again, and feeling way too old to start with a new employer, she sets up a vegetable stall in a market with the help of Parvati, another elderly woman. Parvati's heartbreaking story of being sold to a brothel by her father at age 11, and her subsequent marriage to a policeman, comes out in dribs and drabs, and the two women become as sisters. One falls into the rhythm of the plot from the first sentence.
    • 4/5
      A special thank you to Edelweiss and Harper for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.Part two of the Between Us series by Thrity Umrigar picks up on Bhima's story from The Space Between Us. Bhima had been a servant for the last 20 years and she lost her job when she spoke up against a crime that was committed against her family. What is more painful to her than losing her job is the loss of the relationship with her former employer, Sera, who was her only confident in her otherwise lonely life. Bhima must now find a way to make ends meet for her and her granddaughter, Maya.Her luck seems to change with the chance meeting with Parvati, a bitter and street-wise older woman. They form an unlikely relationship from acquaintances to business partners. Each woman fills the voids in the other that were created by their pasts. Bhima has made her first true friend.Although set in modern day India, there are some horrific and almost barbaric things that are almost unbelievable in today's society. Then again, we live in the western world and cannot fathom what life is like for women in India, especially poor and illiterate ones. Umrigar's story is about love, loss, struggle, class, and misfortune due to circumstances. Her words read like fine poetry and are a sharp contrast to the cultural brutality that is depicted. I have had the pleasure of reviewing her before, and this certainly won't be the last. Her writing is captivating and thought provoking and I highly recommend this series.