MARRIAGE MATERIAL
Sathnam Sanghera
Random House India, 2013
352 pages; Rs 299
You have probably seen them on television, from Tandoori Nights to Citizen Khan. The storyboard is always simplistic: grandparents transported straight from the subcontinent, rebellious children, and parents torn between the two - with one foot in modernity and the other in tradition. Throw in a few smart lines, an exaggerated accent and wallpapered homes and the picture of a South Asian family in England begins to emerge.
The truth is complex. Sathnam Sanghera has given the narrative a whole new dimension with his sophisticated analysis of immigrant life in England in his two books: The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton (originally released as If You Don't Know Me by Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton), and now Marriage Material, a novel. The underlying sentiment of the first book was pain and the effort to understand it; the second is lighter and is laced with hilarity. Both books talk about the strong bonds that exist in Punjabi families, which only get strengthened in a crisis. Mr Sanghera's observations are astute. A few of these deserve mention.
One, the immigrants carry with them all the prejudices and biases of the subcontinent to wherever they go. The social milieu may be different, but the beliefs, reinforced over centuries, do not change one bit. You come across several of these in Marriage Material - distrust of other communities, the ever-so-evocative cry of religion in danger - but the strongest are the iron-clad fault lines of caste. The protagonist's father is a Chamar, and his mother is a Jat Sikh - the two ends of the social spectrum that still cannot meet in India without creating a storm. Things are little better in Mr Sanghera's Wolverhampton. There is little give or take between the two communities; they even go to different temples. The full import of the underlying social tension hits you towards the end when the protagonist's friend-rival-enemy assaults him, accompanied by a hate speech straight out of the Middle Ages.
Two, Mr Sanghera doesn't slot people into stereotypes - my old gripe about Asian television dramas made in England (Why are all of them comedies?). Marriage Material is the story of two sisters, Kamaljit and Surinder, and the store set up by their father. The two relocate with their mother to England at a young age. Kamaljit, the older of the two and the protagonist's mother, is unable to fit into the new world; she loses confidence, withdraws into her shell and ends up marrying the servant of the house. The younger sister is good at studies, wants a career and rebels when her mother tries to rein her in. Surinder Bains is enterprising, adventurous and spunky. When her nephew, Arjan Banga, the protagonist, discovers her almost 40 years after she left home, she is successful and has taken on a new identity, Sue Barnes. People around her think she is Spanish. The new identity is interesting: new, but in some way connected with the old.
The Punjabi men, too, don't fit into a stereotype and come in all types: honest and cunning, simple and complex, hard-working and scheming, sleazy and likeable. These are men from the real world, not caricatures out of sitcoms. Yes, you will find all the early immigrants similar in Marriage Material - ready to shape a future for themselves in an alien land, with little skills and social tools at their disposal - but that's a well-acknowledged fact. This is the thread that binds them all. You will find that puritanical work ethic missing in the later generations. As families prosper, the pioneering spirit somewhat subsides.
Three, Mr Sanghera probably wrote Marriage Material when race riots had broken out all over England a few years ago. The book is redolent with counter-cultural angst. Ranjit, the friend, rival and enemy, is the embodiment of the frustration that can result from financial success that comes without acceptance into the social mainstream. So he takes an expensive car, listens to loud Punjabi music and takes on the language and mannerisms of African Americans - a clear sign of revolt against the cultural mainstream. You also get a glimpse of the Punjabi sub-culture of England: pubs, for instance, where any Englishman would feel awkward and, perhaps, even insecure.
Actually, such counter-cultural angst was also visible in Mr Sanghera's first book. His brother develops a fetish to build his muscles, obviously to show that he is not weaker than others. In fact, if you have read Mr Sanghera's first book, you will find several traces of it in Marriage Material. One of those is the unravelling of family secrets. In The Boy with the Topknot, when Mr Sanghera's parents were travelling to India and the bags weighed much more than what the airline had allowed, he began to unpack and found medicine along with a doctor's note that said his father suffered from schizophrenia, the deadliest mental illness known to man. That was also the moment when he realised that his older sister's odd behaviour, too, was nothing else but schizophrenic. That set him on the road to discovery.
In Marriage Material, it transpires right at the end that the protagonist's father had agreed to not grow his business in return for money from a rival - money with which he paid for his son's expensive education: an uneducated father's sacrifice to make sure his son doesn't fall into the same trap.
Read on, for sheer pleasure.
