The Literary Mirror

Sharma's memoir is framed as a series of car rides — to school, to the airport, to a hospital at 2 a.m. — each one narrated twice: what the young Sharma remembers, and what Bachchu Lal, the family's driver for eleven years, later tells him actually happened.

The device could have been cute. It mostly isn't, because Sharma resists the temptation to make Bachchu Lal wise in the way memoirs like this usually make their household staff wise. He is inconsistent, occasionally self-serving, and once demonstrably wrong about a date that mattered to the family. The book trusts the reader to sit with that.

Where it falters is in the final third, when the memoir tries to become an essay about domestic labour in urban India and loses the specific voice that made the first two hundred pages work. Readers who want the essay should read the essay elsewhere; readers who want Bachchu Lal should stop at chapter fourteen and reread it.

“Every family has a driver who knows more than the family does. This one finally gets to narrate.”