It's not very likely, though, judging from this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner for Best First Book from the Eurasia region. Getting the Commonwealth nod puts Rupa Bajwa's debut novel, "The Sari Shop," in the same league as, say, Vikram Chandra's "Red Earth and Pouring Rain" (which went on to win the overall prize in this category in 1996). Indian-ness was much in vogue when Chandra made his literary debut as a magical realist, so his choice of protagonist -- an Indian poet reincarnated as a monkey, tapping away on a typewriter and telling pseudo-mythological stories -- might be forgiven, however reluctantly.
Bajwa's novel is not as overt, perhaps, in its Indian-ness, but the cover display of a silk sari on the W.W. Norton edition is a painfully obvious come-hither for a Western audience. It doesn't end there. The opening chapter exploits to full advantage the Western reader's notions of small-town India. It describes a typical street scene in the North Indian city of Amritsar, where 26-year-old Ramchand, a sari salesman, walks to his mundane job at the Sevak Sari House. It is as though Bajwa uses this chapter to employ every stereotype of India that has ever been used: the higgledy-piggledy alleyways, the bustling bazaars, the vegetable stalls, the crowds, the street brawls, down to the last stray dog. Thankfully, Bajwa gets all that out of her system in the opening paragraphs, reserving the rest of the book to the task of telling her story, and a compelling one at that.
Most of the action unfurls at the sari shop, where small-town women from affluent families badger, bargain and bully their way into acquiring a sari for the best price possible. At Sevak Sari House, commerce takes precedence over class concerns, and two worlds that are otherwise on a collision course are engaged in a curious detente. One is the middle-class world of protagonist Ramchand; the other, the affluent world of the wives of Amritsar's richest industrialists. Beyond the confines of the shop, though, Bajwa demonstrates how the class divide can never be bridged, making it evident that she knows India -- and the vast gulfs that define it -- all too well. (The name of the shop is a dead giveaway: "Sevak" means "servant," and a sari signifies opulence; the juxtaposition of the two suggests irreconcilable differences.)