Sunjeev Sahota’s second novel The Year of the Runaways won several awards in 2015, and though it did not finally win the Man Booker Prize, it was a close contender. Runaways might be about the immigrant experience in the United Kingdom, but its subjects are not professors or writers in hallowed campuses, our most noble exports. Nor are they students from the Indian middle-classes beavering away on technology breakthroughs or post-colonial theses; not even the former working-classes who now own shops or restaurants and participate heavily in politics – all of who are by now familiars in that narrative ship called Indian Writing in English.
Sahota’s subjects, like those of British-Kittian writer Caryl Philips or Zimbabwean-American writer NoViolet Bulawayo, are illegal immigrants who arrive in the UK, often through strange routes (for instance, on truck through Turkey), and sometimes on the back of strange decisions (selling ancestral land or even a kidney to get the initial money). The truth about their lives in vilayet provides the narrative muscle of this novel: terrible work-hours and bare minimum wages; hellish conditions; debts; and worst, often, few jobs for a great many. It is a grim novel – a big novel – about memorable protagonists, and is executed with what can only be described as powerful dignity.
However, Sahota is no stranger to the outlier’s voice. His first novel, Ours Are the Streets (2011), written entirely in the voice of Imtiaz Raina, a British-born Pakistani youth who finds himself open to radicalism, won rave reviews, and earned Sahota a spot in the prestigious Granta list of ‘Best Young British Novelists’. Excerpts from a long, freewheeling conversation in Kolkata:
You’ve been to Calcutta once before, you were saying…
After we got married, we went on this extended honeymoon of three months or so. Around Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Africa, and a part of India. We spent three days in Calcutta then.
Did you stay in Sudder Street?
I can’t remember exactly. But it was somewhere near Sudder Street. I remember the room. It was very cheap. And there were red ants crawling around everywhere. Exactly like your journey around India, I presume.
Oh yes. We called it the anti-honeymoon. Horrible buses, shady rooms, the (anti-) works.
(Laughs) We did the same. We were backpacking, and we were always looking for the cheapest rooms. The only bit of luxury we allowed ourselves on the whole trip was in the backwaters, in Alleppey…
Ah. The houseboats!
Exactly. One bit of luxury in the whole journey. In Kerala, we went to Kochi, Trivandrum, then to Kanyakumari. We went to the Vivekananda Rock in Kanyakumari.
I imagine that’s when you probably got the idea for setting a part of the Epilogue there? I loved the Epilogue. We’ll talk about it again in a bit, but I had a different question. Do you read Hindi or Punjabi?
I can read Punjabi. But very slowly. It’ll take me at least fifteen minutes, maybe, to read a page.
Have you read any Punjabi literature in translation?
Oh yeah, lots.
Any favourites?
Ek Chadar Maili Si by Rajinder Singh Bedi. I liked that a lot. Pinjar. By Amrita Pritam. Puro is really a strong character, a strong protagonist. These would be two of my favourites. Manto, also, but it’s not really…
…Punjabi literature… but then again, there are overlaps.
Mulk Raj Anand.
Oh yes. One of my favourites too. Though he wrote in English, he often incorporated Punjabi and Hindustani in his writing. You know, when I was growing up, I used to read a lot of Bangla literature. My grandmother, basically, lived to read. And I had open access to all her books, all the time. But ever since I moved to Delhi, I find I read a lot less Bangla. There is a question of availability – though I realise that’s just an excuse. So I’ve been thinking I should do this experiment. Maybe for a year – okay, that might be too long – but maybe for two or three months, I’ll read Indian books written only in Bangla, and maybe Hindi…
That’s a pretty good idea.
…and observe how that alters the structures of the mind?
I do know of people who’ve done experiments similar to this. So, for two-three months they’ve only read books written by women. And I think you start seeing the world in a slightly different way. There’s a lot to be said for that. I find that when I spend any extended time in Punjab, my Punjabi gets so much better! Then I go home and start using it less and less again.
You and your wife speak in…
English? We did try speaking to each other in Punjabi. Because we’ve got two children and we wanted them to learn it organically. But it gets tricky.
Well, the kids are fourth generation after all.
Fourth? Or second? I’m never sure how these things are calculated. My wife and I are the first generation to be born in England.
But your grandparents migrated?
Yes, but my parents were already born at that point. My dad was twelve. My mum didn’t go there as a child. My dad came back to Punjab…
And married her here?
No, actually, he married her over there. He came back to find a wife. At the time it was possible to get engaged and take a fiancé or fiancée there. She was seventeen when she went. So I think I’m first generation born, third generation lived – I don’t really know how that works. My wife and I both speak Punjabi. It was the language in which our parents spoke to each other and we spoke to our parents and grandparents. Her Punjabi is more proper, I’d like to think, and mine is more street. But with our children – well, we’ve laid it on our parents. We’ve told them it’s up to them to speak to the kids in Punjabi. And they do.
But the kids reply in English?
They do reply in English. (Laughs) But I give my daughter – she’s three – a vocab test every day.
Oh dear, Indian parent alert!
No, no, she likes it. So I’ll ask her, “What’s water?” And she’ll go, “Paneeeee”, or “What’s potato?” And she’ll go, “Alooooo”. And then she’ll clap. We play games. But I’m sure she’ll get sick of it in a couple of years. I think she’ll be able to understand Punjabi but not really able to speak it, unless we really… My wife and I did try to speak to each other in Punjabi. But it got quite comical, you know? It feels quite strange for us to converse in what is essentially the second language. What’s next? We used to joke. Japanese?
You know, I was really charmed by the story that’s been doing the rounds. That the first novel you ever read was Midnight’s Children. And you picked it up at the airport en route to India.
Yeah, yeah, it was.
But surely it was not the first novel. Surely, you must have read some generic stuff as a child. Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, which is what we read here, but whatever it is kids in Britain read.
Actually, no. It was not a particularly literary household. My parents weren’t readers. And in school, novels never really played a part in my syllabus. We did plays and memoirs and poetry. The novel was sort of bypassed.
I feel faintly jealous. Imagine doing that – starting with Midnight’s Children. But with none of the literary theory nonsense that English literature classrooms surround the text with.
I didn’t really understand it – maybe about 5 per cent. But you know, you sense the storytelling, the immense wave of the language washing over you, it was something wonderful. Though I didn’t understand all the allusions or what is with Saleem Sinai’s nose – there was something about the storytelling that was able to break through and speak to me. I was in the village when I finished reading it. My Naniji has a farm about thirty minutes outside of Jalandhar. It’s a village, very secluded. So I finished it, probably sitting on one of those charpoys – menjhas we call them in Punjab. I had probably come for seven or eight weeks of summer holidays. I finished that, caught the bus to Jalandhar, found a bookstore and picked three or four Indian novels. And off I went.
The God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy…
A Fine Balance.
That had been my exact list too – at one point. A Suitable Boy was my favourite.
Oh absolutely. I don’t think I left my menjha for a week when I was reading that.
I think I could sense some of the influence of those big, tightly structured novels in Runaways.
Yes, I think you are right. I think in Runaways I’ve been paying my dues to those big books that made me fall in love with reading. In my next novel, I want to go back to a looser structure.
Like in Ours are the Streets? Which has this sort of loose-limbed frame; it is the voice which holds it together, and the rest, past and present, ideas and events, all flow in a somewhat hyper-real way…
With each book, you want to challenge yourself, do something different. You can’t write the same book again and again. It was so easy to write in Imtiaz’s voice. With a third person narrative, it’s different – seems to take more work.
With Runaways, are there any anecdotes about the characters? Did they come to you fully formed? Or did it all start with an image or a phrase, something slight, minor
Tochi [Tarlochan] arrived most fully formed – and immediately. I think his history, his desire to be his own man, have a say over his own life really – that was very much there from the beginning. And Narinder too. What Tochi and Narinder were running away from [caste-violence and a deeply conservative upbringing, in that order] was very clear to me. Randeep and Avtar – especially Randeep – seemed to take most work. Randeep is quite feckless, quite immature, he behaves appallingly…
In the hostel…
In the hostel. Later, he loosens the ladder and a guy breaks his leg. He stabs Gurpreet. He seems to require the most work – to find out what’s driving him.
And Avtar represents the whole obsession. To actually sell a kidney to pay for passage and get that student visa which is a ruse – only to live the ignominious life of an illegal. This is the late 1990s or early 2000s? I think the Epilogue is now?
Yes, the Epilogue is now. In my head it is 2014. The actual date of the action is 2003; Randeep writes that letter? So their past is set in the late nineties. I always wanted a lot of time to elapse between the action and the epilogue. To give a sense that things have settled, that life has given them these boring options and they’ve taken them. Which people tend to do. 2003 was the last year when you could get a spouse visa just one year from the marriage. Then the British government changed it to three years. Now, I think, after 2009, it’s five years. You have to be married for five years before the Indian spouse can apply for citizenship and the right to remain. So it had to be 2003. I didn’t want to write Three Years of Runaways, you know – three years is too long.
In terms of Avtar and selling his kidney, it does happen in India. I have spoken to people who knew people who had sold their organs to get money for passage and taken loans from loan shops. But I think it’s more prevalent in Pakistan. Though it does happen in India as well.
So I want to understand your views on this. Because your Naniji has a farm and it still runs…
It’s a working farm, yes.
How do you interpret this desire, this hunger for vilayet?
When I speak to my cousins and their friends, other young people from the village, they tell me there is no life for them in rural Punjab.
They’ve got distanced from the farm. It is almost as though agriculture is something to be got-out-of. Green revolution, it is often pointed out, increased the gap between wealthy farmers and subsistence farmers even more. Traditionally, in family farms, every member of the family would pitch in at harvest time. But I think what prosperity has done to farmers in Punjab is that one generation is completely distanced from working on the land. And it’s actually terrible for the world, I feel, if we’ve given the sense to all young people that the only job worth doing is to carry a laptop to an office.
I don’t know any young Punjabis who actually work on the farm themselves. It’s all “baharis”.
Just recently, a professor of Punjabi from Amritsar told me something interesting. Apparently, the Punjabis all put their kids in private English-medium schools and their kids are not learning to read and write in Punjabi properly. But the Biharis and UPwallahs, the labourers and farm workers who come from other parts of India, they send their kids to the government schools where the medium of instruction is Punjabi. So it is the kids of the “baharis” who are learning to read and write in Punjabi, and many of these go on to study Punjabi in college too. So, in a sense, they are the ones preserving the functional space of the language.
My cousins and the others I know in rural Punjab have all gone to English medium schools. I think there are two things here. The wave of Punjabis who went to the West in the sixties, they started coming back. Well, not coming back. But visiting. The young men would see these people coming over, these people with established businesses in the UK or Canada…
And the conversion rates…
Are huge. So they think, “Hey, I want a share of that wealth, of the global wealth really.” They see these things on TV…
And somehow, these young people are not able to integrate with whatever version of the global thing that is playing out here in India?
Not at all. So that is one thing. The NRIs and PIOs coming back and… not flaunting their wealth exactly but you know the sort of thing that goes on. Then there’s the other thing. I know some young people in Punjab, a few cousins, who said they wanted to stay in India. “But to do that I have to be really well-educated. To get a good job and build a life for myself here.” A couple of them tried to get to NIT but they said they couldn’t and general seats were few. I think they lost out because there are a certain number of seats reserved?
Fifty per cent.
Personally, I am really in favour of that sort of positive discrimination. You need that, given the centuries of what had happened. But consequently, a lot of young people feel that even if their marks might be better or whatever, they may not be able to get into the colleges or universities of their choice. They are now thinking, “Okay, I’m going to go to Canada instead.” So, it’s a mishmash of all these factors.
But tell me something. Now that the jobs have dried up – in fact, I think you’ve done this great service by portraying the truth about the situation – do you think there is a decrease in the fervor? Has this information trickled down?
It doesn’t seem to make any difference.
Oh dear. I think Bollywood needs to make a film on this.
(Laughs) People I meet ask me, what’s life like over there, can you sponsor me, and so on. I say, look there’s no work! People are living on the streets. They are getting involved in drugs, women are getting dragged into the sex trade. It’s almost like they don’t believe it. They don’t want to believe it.
I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the uprooting of Partition? Because of that huge wave of migration, it has somehow unstitched them in a way. It’s as though only another migration can open the key to a better life, redeem them somehow?
That happened with my family. My grandparents were from a small village near Lyallpur. Partition happened and they fled for their lives quite dramatically, and then had to look for some land to cultivate and turn it into a home. They were living like that for ten-fifteen years when an opportunity came for my grandfather. North England at the time wanted labourers.
Which year was this?
1962. He went to work in an iron foundry as a manual labourer. He always had the intention of coming back, so he went alone, maybe with two or three people from his village. Then, after four years, he decided to bring his wife and kids. In 1966, they were about to pass the bill to stop the immigrants from bringing their families over. So he had to make a decision – and he decided to bring his family over.
The die was cast.
It was definitely a second migration that was a consequence of that first migration. If Partition hadn’t happened, they probably would have stayed there. They had land there, the family home was here. A second migration, almost to make up for the horror of the first migration. Because the home they had left was the home of the ancestors.
I would hazard that perhaps this is mirrored in Bengal too. And the East Bengalis who came in three different waves probably have a similar hunger, though for many of them the route they take is different – a more academic route, through research and grants and so on. Several of these characters appear in Jhumpa Lahiri’s books, for instance.
That’s the kind of immigration story I’ve never known, you know. People who have come in illegally, have these hidden lives, get up at 4 every morning – they are the ones I like to write about. It goes back to the time of my grand pa. The street they lived in, all the Punjabis who lived on it were doing manual work. I have not seen closely the lives of these educated immigrants. For my first novel, I never really sat down and thought about what the mind of a suicide bomber was going to be like. I was just trying to build Imtiaz. He is a young man like me, from the north of England, the child of immigrants. What is it like growing up in England at a time when, politically, things were desperate? The manufacturing industry had been decimated. Betrayal is in the air. Immigrants were not welcome. It was a difficult time to look different, to be of a different colour in the north of England. There was a lot of anger and frustration in the air – understandable anger and frustration – but it was taken out on the wrong people. If you don’t feel welcome in the country of your birth, what does it mean? What does it do to your sensibility? My brother and I were the only brown people in our school.
Was it a really posh school?
No, it was a really rough school. Where we grew up was just outside a small town, a former mining community. There weren’t any brown people there. Immigration hadn’t touched that town in any major way. From the age of seven I lived here. Till the age of seven, of course, I lived in a place that I say was an Indian village just transplanted to the north of England. Everyone looked like me, the shops sold Indian stuff. So suddenly when I went to this place, where everyone was white, I became aware of these things for the first time…
What are you writing next?
I don’t have the headspace for a novel just yet. There is an idea fermenting, sort of. It’s going to sit in my brain, gather mass. In the meantime, I am going to have a go at writing one or two short stories. I have never written short stories in my life. I’ll have a week now in Jalandhar. It’s quiet and sleepy. I hope to get some work done.
(Devapriya Roy is the author of The Vague Woman’s Handbook, The Weight Loss Club and along with Saurav Jha, of The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat.)