Tale of Two Writing Styles

The description in chapter three of the Chawls that Ram and Salim and the Shantarams live in provides a good insight to the novels attitude towards poverty. The selection set in the crawls (and perhaps the out house) is the most intimate description of poor folks in the whole novel. The neighbors have names like Mr. and Mrs. Gokhale or Bapat and humanizing stories. They are not the faceless mothers washing the dishes in sewer water. However this is not a scene of the extreme poverty that the heroes are fleeing or come from but rather a middle class space (albeit on the edge of that category). It is not a place were people “suffer” but rather “simply live” (56). After escaping Maman, this is already a sort of upward mobility for the boys. Especially when one considers the contrast between the boys and the other tenets. The most obvious is drunken Gudiya’s gradual transformation from middle-class provider into a monster. However there is also the negative portrayal of the girls of the Chawl as fat and stupid (56) or the Bapat’s relationship that swings from domestic abuse to noisy love-making(58). This portrayals avoid that Dickensian pitfall of romanticizing poverty. They do show poverty as damaging instead of ennobling. There is no Bob Cratchit or Tiny Tim preaching forgiveness and generosity of spirit. However in their brevity I worry these portrayals are trite and patronizing and go to the other extreme of dehumanizing the poor. Especially when one considers how Ram and Salim never seemed touched by the grind of lower-middle class poverty of barely holding on that degrades everyone else in the Crawls.