Prose usually flows in Balli Kaur Jaswal’s books like nobody’s business. But in Now You See Us, her latest novel, it is a river in spate – subsuming life, injustice, politics and small wonders.
Moments when an artist changes route in her work are significant. They stand as markers of societal change – often the kind which has proven impossible to ignore for the artist. In a perceptive world, we would have paid much attention to such shifts, using them as the mirror they are to our systems. In Now You See Us, Jaswal focuses on the lives of the Filipina domestic workers who make Singapore – the country which was Jaswal’s home for important parts of her life.
‘Now You See Us: A Novel,’ Balli Kaur Jaswal, HarperCollins, 2023.
The novel arrives after Jaswal’s four earlier ones – each with themes that explore aspects of diaspora life, focusing largely on women. No stranger, thus, to looking beyond the remit of experiences and into the small things that make up the world that we live in, Jaswal takes her skill of honouring tenderness to a sublime level in Now You See Us.
Three maids – all of whom have arrived from the Philippines to Singapore – work, seethe, love and live in the course of the novel, which also doubles as a thriller. A madam has been murdered and the suspicion is on her maid. Thus, the novel opens.
There is Corazon, wise beyond her years, grief stricken for reasons best known to her and a veritable victim of a particularly shameful period of Philippine politics.
There is Angel, who is quiet and whose hopes also need to be quiet as we find out as the plot unravels.
And then, there is Donita, whose audacious presence underlines the role of maids as a symbol of economic status.
The book has been compared to The Help – the timeless novel by Kathryn Stockett on the lives, dreams, hopes, and abuse of Black maids in 1960s Mississippi households.
More than anything, this comparison underscores how few and far between popular novels of this kind are. Jaswal’s, being set in a country that thrives on a supposedly multicultural ethos, tackles many more nuances.
The three women are testimonies to three different kinds of experiences that maids can have in Singapore – a country now five decades into a scheme that allows foreign workers to be employed in households. Like all women, they too come through agencies that issue such work permits and like all women, they too are no strangers to the murky network that ensures such agencies and their rich clients enjoy a chokehold over whoever they employ.
An advertisement for an agency that offers maids to households in Singapore. Photo: Sharon Hahn Darlin/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The maids ‘sirs’ and ‘madams’ are at various points on a spectrum of cruelty – from refusing to let one eat after she is late from an outing on her lone day off, to insisting a maid sit with their family at an expensive restaurant table. The exploration of why the latter is cruelty, not kindness, is one of the reasons why this book is particularly perceptive. There are many such reasons.
On this topic, it is difficult to not invoke Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo, a critically acclaimed 2013 film on a Filipina maid in a financially struggling Singapore household, which played to a nearly full hall during the 2016 Kolkata Film Festival. In it, the lead character’s absent hopes and dreams play out in the lives of the family, who are also unhappy.
But while one of the biggest takeaways from Chen’s film is the fact that the maid is also a mother who has to leave her own child to bring up another, Jaswal employs no small amount of kindness in distinguishing the maids’ personal goals from traditionally understood women’s roles. None of the women have children or husbands but their worries about family and friends are visceral; they simmer through the whole story, taking lives of their own near the end.
A still from Anthony Chen’s ‘Ilo Ilo’.
Jaswal’s book is an assertion also of another discerning fact – something which shines in the story of Angel – that a domestic worker may often enjoy some aspects of her work. Angel dwells deeply on the element of care in her daily work with the indisposed Mr Vijay and when she sees the nurse Nurul, she wants to train to become a nurse too.
That the story is, first and foremost, a story of women is also reflected in the fact that much of the plot progresses through that age-old vehicle of information – gossip. Often derided as a woman’s vice, it is vital in sustaining women – offering knowledge on abortion centres in a legal setup where getting pregnant could lead to deportation, on which families are abusive to maids, on where to eat, what to buy and how to stave off the gnaw of missing home.
Horrifying though the scope of the novel is, the rippling humour coursing through it is both succour and yet another insistence on the fact that none of the characters demand the reader’s pity. They are just living their lives and are politically alive too.
None of their experiences are glorified, but nothing is minimised in the effort. The body of work on Asians writing on other Asians migrating to yet other Asian countries is little when compared to the shelves available on immigrants’ experiences in the west. Jaswal’s popularity in India ensures that a new, party familiar and essential vista opens up for her readers through this book.
