Books about masters and servants tend to come with an inborn flaw: They are written largely by those from the moneyed class, individuals who have seen the poor from above and must now, in their writing, illuminate their lives from within. This gap can sometimes be breached through immersive journalism of the kind championed by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London or Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed. But such instances are rare, and even harder to achieve in countries like India or Pakistan—places with large domestic-worker populations where socioeconomic differences are so harshly inscribed that one can, more often than not, immediately infer a person’s status from their mannerisms and language.
This is what makes the work of the Pakistani American writer Daniyal…
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Source www.theatlantic.com
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