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Overview
“Sathnam Sanghera’s witty first novel chronicles three generations of a Punjabi Indian family in England. After his father dies, Arjan Banga, a graphic designer in London, returns to the dreary West Midlands to help run the family convenience store. The move causes tension with his white fiancée, Freya, whom his mother regards with passive-aggressive disapproval. Arjan must explain to customers that ‘as a Sikh I was not expected to marry my cousin or join Al Qaeda’ and smile politely at their interpretations of his name (‘Mind if I call you Andy?’). Torn between familial duty and the freedom he enjoys in London, he gains unlikely clarity from his dimwitted friend Ranjit—a pot-smoking devotee of Steven Seagal movies, Xbox and hip-hop. Arjan’s woes are comic, but the novel’s depth is evident as it sheds light on the economic and political struggles of immigrants.” —The New York Times
From an author whose work has been shortlisted for Costa and PEN Awards, this novel about a man trapped between British and Punjabi culture is “filled with details of the lives of Sikhs from the late ’60s to the riots of 2011. The divisions within the Sikh population are poignantly and comically captured in the protests against the Wolverhampton Transport Department’s ban on turbans” (Los Angeles Review of Books).
“Sanghera’s precise, hilarious rendition of voices and cultural details is the signal pleasure of a novel rich in humor, history, and heart.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609453176 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Europa Editions, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Hairdressers' Journal
Wolverhampton stood in the county of Staffordshire in the 1960s, not in the West Midlands. It was a town, rather than a city. And Victoria Road, cutting from the centre of Wolvo, or Wolves, into what was then open countryside, was more commonly known as 'Wog Row' by locals, owing to an experiment in mass immigration which, while it had not yet led to Asian men being feared and ridiculed as paedophiles, had nevertheless resulted in white residents forming associations to exclude black and Asian syndicates from buying houses in certain areas, and election leaflets openly drawing 'links' between the arrival of immigrants and cases of leprosy.
Mr. Bains had, in short, been proved wrong about the appetite of Wulfrunians for racial tolerance. He had also slowly accepted that running a grocer's as Mr. Walker had done, using paper and string for wrapping things, selling bacon and even biscuits in terms of weight, was a mistake. The format was outdated. The fact was Walker had sold up at just the right time, with several nearby light engineering factories closing down and the abolition of resale price maintenance, which had protected margins.
Though these calamities would pale into insignificance with the emergence of illness — the initial symptoms so slight that not even Mr. Bains noticed them. His young wife in India, who penned long letters begging for money and protesting about having been abandoned with two young daughters among a hostile extended family in Delhi, began to complain that the handwriting in his short responses was getting smaller and smaller — to the point of illegibility. He became so softly spoken that he had to routinely repeat what he had said, a process that led to him castigating his 39-year-old assistant for being hard of hearing.
Bill Hinton, whom Bains had inherited with the shop along with a large quantity of unsellable Wellington boots, and the idea of flogging butter and flour under his own label, did not take the criticism well. Which was quite something, given that he was routinely stealing from his boss. The sweets that he chomped upon all day, which Mr. Bains had assumed were treatment for some kind of gastric disorder, were actually a symptom of his dishonesty. He was under-ringing, routinely charging customers the full price for products, registering a lower price on the till, each empty sweet wrapper representing a unit of cash. The overall contents of his pockets served as a physical reminder of how much money to remove from the till when his boss wasn't looking.
The revelation, when it came, was almost as devastating for Bains as the diagnosis, and when he reported Hinton's thieving to the police, and they let him off without even a warning, he sank into a depression. He was not a young man any more, had squandered all the money he had made during three years of foundry work, and now, just as his body began packing up, having missed out on his daughters' childhoods, he had nothing to show for it.
Little did he know, as he complained to Patwant Dhanda, a local foundry worker and activist, who had turned up in his shop and offered to raise the issue with the relevant police commissioner on behalf of the Indian Workers' Association, that his luck was about to change. Accounts vary about what happened, but at some point during this meeting, as Dhanda snacked on horseradishes plucked from the shop's indoor wire rack without suggestion of payment, and as he attempted to bond with Bains over their common experience of Partition, Bains took on this impetuous 25-year-old man, who was less than half his age and twice his size, as his assistant. And together, they transformed the shop into a newsagent.
The basic idea was that doing so would give them reason to open longer hours, and they did, serving many of the area's immigrant workers as late as 11 P.M., opening every day, resolutely ignoring the garage owner next door, who was fond of remarking, 'The Lord made the Earth in six days, you won't make a fortune in seven.' They also thought that stocking a wide range of publications, everything from Birds to Penthouse, would expand the range of their customers, and they installed a hatch into the front of the shop to attract passing factory workers, so they could pick up their papers on the way to work. At the same time they fitted an outdoor wood rack for fruit and vegetables, delivered groceries when necessary, changed everything short of succumbing to modern notions of self-service (Bains believed in the personal touch) or promotion (there was no sign out front, his thinking being that it would be called the 'ration-wallah' by his compatriots, or the 'Paki shop' by non-compatriots, whatever the frontispiece declared).
It worked. By the time we join him in early 1968, Bains is running the most successful retail outlet on the road; he has helped Dhanda set up a shop nearby, on condition that they will not compete in the same specialist trades; he has hired a new assistant, Tanvir Banga, a 27-year-old Chamar boy whose family has worked for his wife's family for decades; and he has finally been able to pay for his wife and daughters to join him in England. Though the slow and reduced movements, the muscular stiffness, the loss of balance, and the tremor are so debilitating at sixty-two that Mr. Bains is confined to bed, unable to feed or dress himself, and reduced to running the shop by barking directions down the stairwell.
The task of looking after him normally falls to his family or to Baljit Kaur, a diminutive pensioner from down the street, and from down the road in Mrs. Bains' home village in the Punjab, who provides the service in exchange for her weekly groceries. But tonight, as he does twice a week, Dhanda has charged himself with his care. Sitting next to his friend and mentor, he massages his legs, feeds him a few crumbs of each ladoo he chomps through, informs him about trade at his new drapery store, reads out headlines from various Punjabi newspapers, and brings Mr. Bains up to date with the activities of the ever-expanding Indian Workers' Association, which is currently preoccupied with the case of Tarsem Singh Sandhu, a Wolverhampton bus driver fired for returning to work from a three-week illness in a beard and turban.
'We're planning a march,' he says, oblivious to the irony of a clean-shaven, un-turbanned Sikh taking up the cause. 'We're billing it as a general appeal for religious freedom. Local Council of Churches might join us. Could be the biggest march in town since World War II. Six thousand people.'
Downstairs, as Wolverhampton's answer to Malcolm X continues to brief Mr. Bains, in what would be the front room if number 64 were a private residence like the other 250 terraced houses on the road, Mrs. Bains, a thin, pale-skinned woman of about forty-five, is cleaning up after a busy day in the shop. She straightens goods which customers have picked up and thrown back untidily, wipes down surfaces inked with the paw prints of schoolchildren popping in for crisps and lemonade, the coloured glass bangles on her wrists tinkling as she dusts the wooden box she needs to stand on in order to operate the bacon slicer. Smallpox scars dot her face, her prematurely thinning black hair is tied back in a bun, and, as she gets down on to the floor to sweep it with a dustpan and brush, her breasts squeeze between her knees, threatening to tumble out.
Her modesty would normally be protected by a chuni, but she has just used it to mop up a spillage, while her green apron has been requisitioned tonight by her eldest daughter Kamaljit, who is standing over a stove in the kitchen cooking keema. The lamb comes from the butcher on a nearby corner; the greens have come from the front of the shop; the salwar kameez Kamaljit is wearing underneath the apron has been made from material purchased from Mr. Dhanda's drapery shop; and the concoction on the gas stove simmers, as does the chef. The evening meal used to be a task she split with her sister, but ever since she left school, the housework, to her resentment, has become entirely her responsibility, while her pampered, spoilt, precocious baby sister ...
... well, her baby sister would normally be catching up on homework, or making new suits and dresses for Mr. Dhanda, or, in her capacity as the most literate person in the shop, filling in forms or going over paperwork. But tonight she is standing in the living room, which the family call the 'baithak', located between the shopfront and the kitchen, playing a role in an unusual scene. Tanvir is sitting in a chair, old newspapers laid out at his bare feet, a bath towel tucked into his shirt collar, while Surinder, in an adaptation of her school uniform (she changes from a skirt into trousers for the journey to and from school), hovers behind him, brandishing her mother's sewing scissors in one hand, some handwritten notes in the other, her lips pursed in concentration.
Tanvir has proved himself so indispensable in the shop that he now has a bedroom in the house, or, at least, a bedroom full of all the excess stock for which there isn't room in the basement, with a corner cleared for a mattress on the floor. And after five years in England he no longer has the fresh immigrant's tendency of comparing everything to life back home. But there are still some Indian habits he can't shed — such as overuse of the '-ing' form ('I am working in shop') and the farmer's disinclination to spend money on anything that doesn't serve a clear practical purpose. The things he considers an extravagance include: shoes (he prefers to walk barefoot or in chappals); toothbrushes (he cleans his teeth with the same tree bark he would use for the task in the Punjab); and, when he learns that Surinder trims her father's hair, barbers too.
Surinder recoils at the suggestion. The idea of being in close physical proximity to Tanvir's shoulders, fingering his greasy hair, making chit-chat in his painfully bad English, is about as appetising as plunging a hand down the bowl of the outside loo. But the request plays on her mind. She has never had her own hair cut — being obliged to keep it long, trailing behind her in a ponytail — but her favourite pastime as a girl, during her heady prepubescent days of freedom, was hanging out at Maureen's hairdressing salon next door. Cutting her father's hair is the only aspect of his nursing that she actually enjoys, and she has in recent months become a devoted, albeit surreptitious, reader of the Hairdressers' Journal.
Magazines are, as far as Surinder is concerned, the only perk of growing up in a shop. Her schoolmates imagine her gorging each night on slabs of Dairy Milk. But the sweets which line the walls of the shop, and the chocolates displayed in the glass cabinet counter, are just as much of a treat for her as for most girls, owing to her mother's obsession with her girls staying slim for their future husbands. Surinder does, however, get to intersperse library books with Bunty, and in recent months she has moved on to more adult fare, chief among which is the professional journal delivered once a fortnight for the salon next door.
The news pages are of no interest. Surinder doesn't care, for instance, that the National Hairdressers' Federation is considering banning the press from its annual general meeting. But she loves the full-colour adverts and the long feature articles on how to make yourself resemble celebrities. She must have read the item about Elizabeth Taylor forty times before giving the magazine up. Just holding the Hairdressers' Journal makes her feel sophisticated and metropolitan, and soon after Tanvir makes his request she notices that the magazine also features regular step-by-step guides to men's hairstyles.
One week, for instance, there is an extensive item on a hairstyle called 'the Wentworth', which she, in spite of herself, pictures on Tanvir, but dismisses on the grounds that it is aimed, judging by the headline, at a 'mature' man of about forty, and 'men of higher status'. Tanvir is twenty-seven and, being a lower-caste Chamar, is certainly no man of status. Conversely, the following week she discounts an article on a hairstyle aimed at 'the Young Male Client', on the grounds that Tanvir isn't young, will probably never 'work in a large office', and doesn't, as the piece expounds, 'like pop records, dancing and generally having fun'. Tanvir works in a shop and the only time he seems to be having fun is when he's stocktaking.
But then she spots an article entitled 'How a Continental Master Styles a Head', a step-by-step guide to how 'one of Germany's top stylists, Heinz Krethen of Cologne' achieves a new kind of cut aimed at twenty-something young men, so when Tanvir, sporting a lopsided bouffant, once again whines about the tedium and expense of haircuts ('I am not having time to do all this work, as well as going to barbers in town'), she finds herself offering to help him out. She has made salwar kameezes and English dresses for payment from Mr. Dhanda, designing her own patterns, becoming a master at estimating yardage and box-pleated bodices. Surely a new hairstyle couldn't be much different?
Surinder approaches the enterprise with high precision. She copies out the instructions from the magazine by hand, so as to minimise the chance of Maureen complaining that her subscription has been rifled through. She lays used newspapers on the floor, to protect the plastic Dandycord mat, and puts out her tools on the foldaway dining table. Among them: a pot of Brylcreem and two plastic combs, which are normally to be found in the letter rack underneath the mirror in the hallway upstairs, permanently clogged with long black hairs.
She begins, as instructed, by 'examining the general growth style' (wild), and 'special features of the hairline and crown' (receding). Then, having combed his fringe flat on to his forehead, avoiding the patches of acne, she snips a quarter of an inch off the edge. The texture of his hair surprises her: her father's is wispy and feathery and white. But Tanvir's is thick and black. She wonders briefly what her hair would feel like to someone running their fingers through it, but then remembers who she is with and flinches. Tanvir flinches in response.
'Keep still,' she snaps in Punjabi. Tanvir is older than Surinder, but she cannot help being brusque with him. 'Do you want me to have your ear off?'
She reads the next set of instructions out to herself, under her breath, and follows them to the letter. She starts cutting at the nape in order to get the basic shape of the back. She makes sectional partings across the head, cutting each section individually to reduce bulk and length, and is congratulating herself on how well it's going when she realises she doesn't understand a single sentence of what comes next, under the heading of 'stage eight'.
'Attend to the neckline with the hair-cutting machine; taper out.'
She doesn't have a machine but can improvise, but what on earth does 'taper out' mean? Does it involve a measuring tape?
'Using the dryer, apply the air stream against the natural root-growth tendency.'
There is no hairdryer in the house, owing to Mrs. Bains' conviction that, like drinking unsweetened tea, or doing embroidery in the evenings, they induce illness and disease. But natural root-growth tendency? Tanvir's thick hair seems to grow in every direction.
'Brush movement, applied all over the head, will give the desired amount of lift.'
Lift? Brush movement? What? Like copying down maths equations from a blackboard, she has somehow managed to transcribe it all without taking any of it in. She skips stage eight for stage nine. Which she then skips for stage ten. Soon she is hacking at Tanvir's hair in the manner her mother occasionally employs when tackling the privet hedge in the back garden. Then, suddenly, she is confronted by a patch of bare scalp on the crown of Tanvir's head. The sight of it makes her gasp, and freeze, like her father sometimes does when being guided out of bed towards the bathroom.
'Teek taak?' asks Tanvir.
She coughs. Has the patch always been there? Or has she created it? She steps across the room to consult the original magazine, hoping for advice or guidance. But all she discovers is the unhelpful news that 'the square bob in Vidal Sassoon's salon this spring will have the back hair falling short and the sides about one-and-ahalf inches longer than the back'.
Her voice wobbles. 'Just finishing up.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Marriage Material"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Sathnam Sanghera.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
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