Social Division and Alienation Theme Analysis

“A Real Durwan” focuses on the simple life and tragic turn of events for Boori Ma, a poor durwan, or “doorkeeper,” in a Bengali apartment building. She is introduced from the first sentence living out her days by cleaning the building for the other residents and reciting details about the life of luxury she used to live. From the first line, in fact, she is identified as “Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell.” By focusing on such a character, the narrator calls attention to Boori Ma’s “Otherness,” or the ways in which she is unlike her fellow residents. In doing so, the story illustrates how difference plays a role in one’s life, particularly in the story’s setting of 1960s or 1970s Bengal. Given her position, both what she was born into and what happened to her along the way, Boori Ma has few options in the world and even fewer than she had years ago. Regardless of whether or not the reader should believe Boori Ma’s stories of her past, she remains female, unmarried, unskilled, and foreign in her country. As Boori Ma’s situation gets worse and worse throughout the story, Jhumpa Lahiri suggests that barriers surrounding gender, ethnicity, and class in post-Partition India are oppressive and limiting and create a harsh “us versus them” dynamic. 

From the beginning of the story, Boori Ma is set apart from the building’s other residents. The opening paragraphs describe Boori Ma’s physical appearance, unlike the other characters. The narrator notes her age, frail figure, and swollen joints. Even her voice is “brittle with sorrow.” While the reader does not enter her thoughts, Boori Ma’s body and voice speak of a hard life. Her memories shed some light on her status: she claims to have had a husband and four daughters, and she mentions a daughter’s grand wedding, yet she is all alone in Bengal. Without a husband or son at this time and place, her life and her income are quite limited. While the truth of Boori Ma’s memories remain debatable, what is clear is that she is a refugee from the Partition of 1947. The story notes that “No one doubted she was a refugee; the accent in her Bengali made that clear.” With a linguistic marker, she is never fully assimilated or accepted into a stringently divided society. Boori Ma is marked for that which she cannot change: her gender, her country of origin, and her solitude. However, her economic situation appears just as immovable. She is in an entirely separate class from the other residents of building. At one point, Mrs. Dalal notes that Boori Ma wears a cheap sari, “with a border the color of a dirty pond.” The narrator adds that it is “cut in a style no longer sold in shops.” With this detail, the story implies that Boori Ma has been wearing the same clothing for years with no disposable income to replace them, a visible marker that further alienates her from her neighbors.

When Boori Ma has downtime to visit with the residents of the building, the narrator notes that she knows better than to go inside the apartment. Instead she “crouches” near the doorway. A similar verb is only used one other time in the story, to describe the manual laborers who work on the building. They too “squat” during their break around the perimeter of the building. Like these men, Boori Ma is positioned squarely as a laborer, not a resident deserving of a seat at the table. Boori Ma’s crouching—halfway between a seated and standing position—also reflects her ethnic Otherness, as she is perched precariously between two cultures. Furthermore, Boori Ma owns very little. The news of Mr. Dalal’s promotion—suddenly propelling his family into a life of relative abundance—takes place shortly after Boori Ma’s quilts disintegrate while hanging outside in the rain. Not only is one of her few possessions destroyed, but now she must sleep on newspaper. And even though Mrs. Dalal promises to provide Boori Ma with new bedding, the woman gets swept up in her own newfound wealth and fails to provide for Boori Ma. That Boori Ma is thrust to the sidelines in this instance, descending deeper and deeper into poverty with the loss of her quilts, further ostracizes her from the other residents.

Just as Boori Ma straddles two cultures as an immigrant, so too does her status as an unofficial durwan, or “doorkeeper”—not quite a full employee, nor a real resident—leave her with little stability or protection and emphasize her otherness. The narrator notes that “over the years, Boori Ma’s services came to resemble those of a real durwan.” However, “under normal circumstances this was no job for a woman,” suggesting that Boori Ma’s status as less than a “real durwan” centers on her gender, which also makes her “less than” in a patriarchal society. When things fall to pieces and the building’s beloved new wash basin is stolen, the residents don’t question Boori Ma in the hallway but force her to the roof, where they plant her “on one side of the clothesline and started screaming from the other.” The position has no utility except to physically represent her inferiority—as a woman, an immigrant, a poor person, and a laborer, Boori Ma is set apart from the rest of society. The residents quickly decide that banishing Boori Ma will solve all of their problems: “What a building like this needs is a real durwan,” says a resident named Mr. Chatterjee. With this, the residents “tossed out Boori Ma. All were eager to begin their search for a real durwan.” The residents jump on the opportunity to dismiss Boori Ma from her post, emphasizing once again how she is clearly the other—dispelled from their fold, and made to feel like she is not a “real” member of the community despite living and working in the building for many years. Ultimately, all of Boori Ma’s identifiers set her apart in a society governed by rigid class divisions and gender roles: as an immigrant, a woman, and a low-level worker, she is deeply limited and vulnerable in a way that her male, married, middle-class residents aren’t.