The Bridge Home

There are multiple references throughout the narrative that reveal the incredible resourcefulness of the children who have little in the way of wealth or material possessions. Viji and Rukku are small town girls who are thrown into the heart of a vast city and, from the outset, learn to cope, persevere, and even thrive. When the sisters accidentally break a tea glass on their first day, they convince the teashop owner to let them work to pay it off. As they walk through the city, they see “the poorest section of the city [they’d] yet seen. Shanties built out of every imaginable scrap of waste” (68).

The poverty-stricken citizens of the city waste nothing. When the wealthy residents of the city discard what they consider to be trash, groups of indigent children search the dumps and dumpsters to recover items that can be recycled for additional uses: metal, glass, cardboard, and plastic.

Viji quickly discovers that she and Rukku must be persistent and resourceful if they are going to survive. They turn a large bag of beads into sellable necklaces. They use a raincoat and then a tablecloth to build shelters. They create a family with two equally destitute boys, doubling their ability to acquire food and necessities. A part of their survival strategy involves mandatory sharing of food and goods, which is done with joy and received with gratitude. Those in the story who have the most money live in gated compounds and have servants to chase away people who are experiencing poverty—considering any handout to beggars to be a great act of benevolence—while the destitute go out of their way to share the meager food and goods they have.

Repeatedly throughout the narrative, men demonstrate harsh dominance over women and children. From the sisters’ father who regularly brutalizes their mother, to the bus driver who attempts to corner the girls, to the teashop owner who always speaks in harsh demands, to the trash collector who attempts to kidnap the sisters, to the priest who quizzes them about stealing, and even to the gardener who throws an orange at Viji and Rukku—not to give them a piece of fruit but to scare them away—the adult men in the narrative, with only a couple of exceptions, are abusive and have ill intent.

The women, as portrayed by Venkatraman, respond to men with subservient powerlessness. As Viji points out, when her father strikes her and Rukku, her mother does not try to stop him. She just prays harder. Likewise, Teashop Aunty is cowed by her husband. In her last meeting with the sisters, she ruefully tells them the shop is closing and they are moving, then she ushers them out the door abruptly when her husband calls to her.

Viji is the exception to this theme in that, with no prompting, she stands up for herself and others against the dominance of men. She is in no sense subservient to anyone. It is important to note that, as the story draws near its conclusion, Viji encounters a series of empowered women who have broken with the cultural norm: Celina Aunty who created and runs the school for children without homes; Dr. Sumitra who comes to the school to evaluate the sick children and takes them to the hospital; and Dhanam Aunty who runs a school for children with intellectual disabilities.