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‘Writers Kavita Bhanot and BalvinderBanga in conversation: South Asiandiasporic literature, culture andpolitics’Kavita Bhanot & Balvinder BangaPublished online: 07 Aug 2014.

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DISCOURSE

‘Writers Kavita Bhanot and Balvinder Banga in conversation: SouthAsian diasporic literature, culture and politics’

Kavita and Balvinder met after Balvinder, knowing of her editorship of Too Asian, Not

Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press, 2011) approached Kavita seeking an appraisal of his

unpublished novel, Land Without Sorrow. Kavita was struck by the novel – one of the

first, perhaps, about the journey and experiences of first generation Punjabi migrants to

Britain; in particular Chamar characters who are shown living in a Punjabi village, then

later in a fictionalised Birmingham in the 1970s. She recognised, in his work, a shared

interest and investment in writing about Punjabi lives from a place of particularity and

compassion. This includes a pre-modern religious fluidity that is a part of lived experience

but is rarely recognised or represented in literature.

Below is an extract of a continuing conversation that Kavita and Balvinder have been

having since meeting in August 2013, about the literature that inspires them, the work of

contemporaries with whom they most identify in terms of subject matter and writers’

backgrounds, and the politics of writing/representation (in particular of working class,

untouchable, Punjabi rural lives/practices). They also discuss the possibilities and

problems of translating the experiences and world views of their communities and families

into the novel form, in the English language.

Kavita: We’ve been talking about class and ‘British Asian’ literature. The earlier

generation of writers, such as, for example, Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, came

from middle class backgrounds and were grounded in particular artistic, intellectual, as

well as ideological traditions. There is a generation of ‘British Asian’ writers today who

come from more working class communities in Britain, with rural origins in South Asia

and I have been keen to follow the literature coming from this new generation, whose

background I share – but have found myself feeling disappointed by what I have read.

Balvinder: In general, I think you’re right about the ‘new generation’ of writing you refer

to. In my view, the best literary achievements we have amongst Asian writers still arise

from the likes of Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth who both came from privileged

backgrounds. Perhaps freedom from financial worry liberated their imaginations.

Kavita: For me personally, literary achievement or aesthetic quality are not the most

important things, for these tend to be defined by cultural gatekeepers, the establishment

and their ‘canon’. Critique on these grounds is often used to silence writers who come

from the cultural margins, who have not always had the time, the freedom, the cultural

capital to write ‘literature’ as defined by the elite. What disturbs me more is the intention,

the ethics behind the literature of this new generation – the lack of compassion for those

they have ‘left behind’, as they have become part of the establishment – and the extent of

their ideological identification with this establishment as revealed in their writing. Perhaps

it is only such writers who are published and celebrated. Perhaps these writers have no

choice – because otherwise they won’t get published, they won’t be able to earn a living as

writers. And perhaps there is all the more pressure on those who come from financially

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unstable backgrounds to earn a living from writing. This also fits into our current climate

of careerism, professionalism, self-promotion and commodification of literature – so the

selling of literature becomes a priority. My worry is the effect that all this has on the

literature produced.

Balvinder: I am guessing that the career writers you describe do constrict their creative

faculties by virtue of having to think constantly about the marketability of their products.

I’m not quite sure what the answer to that is: government assistance for independent

presses? I’m not sure.

Kavita: Writing in response to government funding can be as problematic. If you’re not

performing to the market, writing into its genres, you’re trying to fulfil the criteria and

categories that are laid out by the government’s ‘multicultural’ policies, that justify its

foreign policies – and both of these are connected. You still approach your writing from

the same place – of giving others what they want and defining yourself by their agendas.

Maybe the problem lies in writing for money.

Balvinder: In my view, the key to improving the quality of British Asian fiction coming

through is to break its subservience to marketability, to enable it to take risks. As someone

in the slush pile, I recall one literary agent effectively commenting to me: ‘great if you

want to talk about your parents’ experiences as Chamars and their transition to England

but that’s not marketable. Consider that in your writing.’ It’s a difficult issue: how is a

profession as ethnocentric as the literary one in England meant to handle stories with

which it feels no kinship? And yet it must look beyond the feeders of the respectable

broadsheet journalists for writers who wish to write of the British Asian experience (for

want of a better phrase), otherwise a certain vitality is lost.

Kavita: Did it have an effect on your writing, hearing that from the agent? Did it make you

question what you were doing?

Balvinder: It didn’t affect the trajectory of my writing. I had a passion to say something

about people from families like mine, untouchable families which had historically been

treated poorly in one world and ventured forth to another. The people who were writing

about caste and village life weren’t my people. For example, a novel like A Fine Balance

(Rohinton Mistry, 1995) is brilliant in many ways, but it’s clear that Mistry is far more

convincing when writing about the middle class city dweller Dina Dalal than dealing with

the grittiness of Chamar village life for Omprakash and Ishvar. There aren’t many writers

who have come from those areas. That’s a big problem but it is, at a snail’s pace, changing.

Kavita: I agree with you. I have my own thoughts, but I’d be interested to know why you

think that’s a problem.

Balvinder: Literature, like history, is a record of the winners, i.e., the literate. How can

you get the authentic stories of oppressed communities, like those of untouchables, if their

people cannot write? What you end up with is well-intentioned writers filling the vacuum

with novels that are like poor sheens through which the grain of wood is viewed. I think of

writers like Munshi Premchand and Kamala Markandaya. The latter in some ways is a

wonderful writer. I really like Nectar in a Sieve (Kamala Markandaya, 1954). But its

central character, Rukmani, never feels like a real person to me. She’s a creation to make a

point, albeit a necessary one, about the lack of social mobility.

Kavita: There are limitations to the representations of the lower classes/castes by upper

class/caste writers, no matter how well intentioned they are. To give more recent

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examples, there’s Animal’s People (Indra Sinha, 2007), White Tiger (Aravind Adiga,

2008), and Serious Men (Manu Joseph, 2010). These writers don’t know anything about

the world that their characters have come from, the world that they’re writing about. A

writer like Aravind Adiga spends a few days with some rickshaw pullers for ‘research’.

Not only do the characters of these writers not ring true, but another way of thinking about

it, is that they are actually silencing those that they think they are speaking for. By defining

them primarily by their lack – their poverty, these writers don’t grant full humanity or

agency to their subjects, engaging with their culture, religion, interrelationships, social

structures – the details of their lives. They are just poor people and often, because they’re

poor – they’re shown to be greedy, desperate, manipulating. They’re shown in a purely

positive or negative light. With all their good intentions, these writers end up revealing

their own upper class/caste prejudices.

There’s a power dynamic at play. We see its absurdity if we inverse it – someone from

an estate writing about someone who went to Eton. They wouldn’t dream of doing it –

they don’t have the confidence, the arrogance. The powerless rarely have the arrogance to

assume that they can capture, write about those they know nothing about. That’s why they

tend to write about their lives, about what they know. The educated upper class don’t think

twice before assuming that they can represent those who are powerless, and they are

offended if those they are representing raise any objection.

Balvinder: Perhaps a case in point is Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo (Martin Amis, 2012).

Kavita: I found that novel very offensive – representing working class people as greedy,

stupid, comical, ridiculous – something that Owen Jones also argued in his critique of

the book (The Culture Show, 2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwycGJ1KSRY.

I think that whole debate is relevant to the politics of British Asian/South Asian writing, in

terms of engaging with literature as representation. We have to question the liberal notion

that any writer can write about anything, anyone, in any way – in the name of freedom of

expression – as if the writer has no responsibility for what he/she writes, as if there is no

ideology, politics in literature, no notion of power, in terms of who writes about who, and

how – and the influence this then has on how we perceive those people. A book like Lionel

Asbo confirms all the assumptions about poor working class people.

Balvinder: You raise the issue of the extent to which a writer can have complete creative

licence to write about what he wants. In this context, should the writer write about people

from a different class or caste? Of course they should. Martin Amis should be able to write

about people from housing estates if he wants to. But the underlying question is one of

power, i.e., Martin Amis can write about the working class, and Munshi Premchand can

write about the lower castes in India. But that has to also be tied in to the issue of the working

class and the lower castes getting their voices heard too. The thing aboutMunshi Premchand

and Martin Amis is that they can write about people who are radically different to

themselves because they have power (quite apart from obvious talent). In this context,

power, of course, is not just a question of who you know to bypass a slush pile but something

more fundamental than that; it is the cultural capital that affords a writer an affinity with the

literary industry towhich he seeks admission. If you are not a personwith power, you too can

write about what you want to write about, and be as talented as you want, but nobody will

hear you. And this comes down to the effectiveness, and appetite, of the literary industry, in

soliciting new voices that are culturally different to what is already in its midst.

Kavita: If your intention is to present the views of these people who are silenced, you

could put your efforts into encouraging their voices to be heard, you can use your power to

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bring out their voices. I think the case with Martin Amis particularly, and a lot of

contemporary writers of our era, is that unlike those earlier writers, like Premchand, whose

writing came out of a certain progressive politics, they don’t have that intention. They

don’t have that –

Balvinder: Sense of social responsibility?

Kavita: Exactly. They’re not writing for that reason. It seems to me that they’re writing

for more cynical reasons, from a more individualistic space, and that cynicism has seeped

into the writing itself. This is the sad truth that we need to face up to when we engage with

a lot of contemporary literature.

Balvinder: I don’t know what Amis’s intentions were. All I can say is that he did a bad job

with Lionel Asbo. But that is also largely true of writers who have grappled with caste. I

think of writers like Munshi Premchand and Mulk Raj Anand. They were part of the same

progressive movement, but they didn’t really immerse themselves into the cultures of the

people that they wanted to write about and champion. The progressive writers’ movement

of the 1930s was less about absorbing that caste culture into their own psyche so they

could express it authentically, but rather, it was about making a political point. And the

political point was about showing the way to India’s harmonious future. That’s not the

same as creating an authentic expression.

Kavita: One of the problems with literature that comes from such a political framework is

that you’re not interested in people for what they are. The abstract framework is more

important than the people themselves – and you end up disconnected from ordinary

people’s lives – for example those who have some form of religious practice in their lives.

So, while those writers were resisting colonialism, imperialism, they often wrote from a

Marxist perspective which is important but limiting in its Eurocentric framework – not

being rooted in the specific histories and lived lives of the people they were writing about.

They were also writing, as you say, the nation into existence. These elite writers weren’t

able to represent the true voices of the dispossessed.

Balvinder: The progressive writers were, though, necessary for the time, for creating that

foundation on which future writers who wish to address challenging issues could build.

For that I applaud them. A memoir like Joothan (2003) by Om Prakash Valmiki could not

have been written if the progressive movement had not existed. They were path-breaking

for putting items on the agenda that were not there before. I’m just not convinced that they

were that great as novelists.

Kavita: Perhaps the problem is that, like the elite writers who were earlier representing the

‘other’ – whether it comes from a progressive, or more commercial imperative – we are

continuing to write for the same readership – to write outward, for the education or

consumption of the elite, the middle classes, or in the British context, for a white middle

class readership/publishing industry – to explain, to present our lives, culture. Whether or

not it is conscious, the audience you write for, the direction you face as you write is

embedded in the work – it’s apparent in what we explain, what we assume. A white writer

can take so much for granted, they know that their readers will generally know what they

are writing about – their entire mind-set is different. And in my opinion, this direction that

our work tends to face, is why novels such as Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material

(2013) lack a certain complexity, depth and trueness – leaving me, as someone who is

from a similar kind of world, quite unsatisfied.

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Balvinder: In Britain, that’s inevitable when the literary profession is largely white and

from a narrow social spectrum, and statistically, the frequenters of bookshops are too. I

wonder if that forces British Asian writers to be all things to all men, to dilute their stories

to reach audiences that they believe, rightly or wrongly, would not ‘get them’ otherwise.

You mentioned Marriage Material. Perhaps that’s a case in point. I thought that novel

suffered from that, particularly in the drawing of the Sikh aunt who manages hotels. It felt

to me as if that completely Anglicised character was drawn as a deliberate counterpoint to

the aunt’s salwar-kameez-wearing sister in order to make the novel less of a cultural

challenge to white readers. And the novel suffered for it.

Kavita: Sanghera does repeatedly assert in interviews, and when I’ve heard him speak,

that his novel is ‘universal’, concerned with ‘universal’ themes, telling ‘universal’ stories.

Virtually all black and Asian writers tend to insist on this, and ‘universality’ in this context

usually refers to accessibility for white middle class readers and publishers. I often wonder

what is behind this need to reassure others that your work is universal, to declare that

you’re a ‘writer’, disconnected from any kind of identity label. Perhaps it is insecurity, a

desire to associate yourself with power, because you want to be taken seriously – you want

the luxury and freedom that a white male middle class writer has. But the truth is that we

simply don’t have that luxury. There are so many aspects of my identity – as a Punjabi, as

a woman, as a ‘British Asian’, my class background – and I write through these lenses. I

can’t escape it, and I don’t want to.

Balvinder: I think it important though to not become entrenched in a ‘them and us’

mentality. Great writing and great writers do strike chords universally. Charles Dickens’

descriptions of child poverty resonate with stories I hear about my own father’s poverty.

William Faulkner’s obsession with bloodlines and race mirror my own community’s

concerns with caste. Even Jane Austen’s obsession with propriety strikes a chord in some

ways. I think for us as British Asian writers (and more fundamentally as just people) the

key is to find the confidence to speak with our own voices in the knowledge that the

cultural heritages we embody need to be honoured in their expression: easier said than

done.

As someone in the slush pile I have come to the position where I keep asking, what is

the happy median between authenticity and resonance with a literary market? If I don’t

resonate with somebody that can facilitate publication then it doesn’t matter how authentic

I am. I have to create some kind of bridge between my world and theirs. These are

conversations that happened in America in the 1950s for black American writers when the

likes of James Baldwin broke through. Anyone who is interested in these issues should

read the interviews that Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, gave to The Paris Review (James

Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78, Spring 1984, No. 91; Ralph Ellison, The Art of Fiction

No. 8, Spring 1955 No. 8).

Kavita: I don’t think the writers of that time were so implicated in the needs, demands

of the market. The present era is different from those periods of idealism, of those

freedom, socialist, civil rights movements – we have also bought into the idea of art and

literature being a pure, creative, apolitical space. But again, don’t such conversations

about building bridges contribute towards writing that is more outward or upward

facing, rather than feeding our own literary cultures – whether for commercial reasons

or for social justice?

Balvinder: I’m not sure that’s true. I do think that that the cultural gap between the worlds

of black writers in the 1950s and white America was in some ways smaller than the gap

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between the world that British Asian writers are writing about now and the white

publishing world they have to find peace with. The need for Ellison or Baldwin to dilute

their stories to make them acceptable to a whiter readership was therefore less pressing

than that faced by contemporary British Asian writers.

Kavita: Yes, I agree – and that is perhaps about the degree to which people became

colonised, their history, culture, consciousness merging, through dislocation and/or

education over the generations, with that of the colonisers. The worldview, the perspective

of African Americans, while remaining marginalised, is going to be more accessible, more

palatable for the white centre, than the perspective of rural South Asian peasants – as is

that of elite upper class South Asian writers, and to an extent second generation ‘British

Asian’ writers who write about a culture clash from a position of assimilation.

Balvinder: It’s not all bleak. There are examples of ‘authentic’ quality (for want of a

better phrase) that have come through. It’s important to honour the effort of books like The

Buddha of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi, 1990) and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

(2004). The latter, in my view, is the Stoner (JohnWilliams, 1965) of British Asian fiction,

i.e., a forgotten classic.

Kavita: I love Buddha of Suburbia, it’s a complex work – but I do think that it also

approached Islam and ‘Asianness’ from a disconnected, alienated perspective – due

perhaps, to the author’s own experiences and beliefs – and perhaps this set the mould for

the ‘British Asian’ literature that followed. I agree with you that, as writers, we have been

formed by this literary tradition – influenced by Hanif Kureishi, by these other writers you

talk about; Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. The very form of the novel comes from a certain

culture, ideology, history. But the worlds that we write about, our characters, are not part

of that tradition. And that’s where the conflict comes in: because we’re writing about

characters who are from Punjab, from villages, who carry a different history, culture,

worldview, all of which are not recognised by, or are dismissed as backward and

uncivilised within this intellectual, literary, political tradition. Even the English language

itself can’t recognise these without judgement, without framing. This is what we have to

grapple with in our writing. After that, there’s the hurdle of finding publishers for our

work, and once we find publishers, we must resist censorship through editing, being

pushed to make our work more accessible, being marketed in a certain way. Maybe we will

have to create our own infrastructures rather than waiting or fighting for acceptance and

approval on our own terms – we need to support, represent, edit, publish each other, using

new media – blogs, e-books etc.

Balvinder: As second and third generation British Asians increasingly step up to have

their voices heard, the issue of creating new infrastructures, or renovating old ones, to help

their voices to be heard, will without doubt become one of key importance. Which

established British Asian writers will speak up and be in the vanguard of the debate?

Works Cited

Adiga, Aravind. White Tiger. Atlantic. 2008. Print.

Amis, Martin. Lionel Asbo. Jonathan Cape. 2012. Print.

Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for Lost Lovers. Faber and Faber, 2004. Print.

Baldwin, James. The Paris Review. The Art of Fiction No.78, Spring 1984, No. 91.

Ellison, Ralph. The Paris Review. The Art of Fiction No.8, Spring 1955, No. 8.

Joseph, Manu. Serious Men. Hachette. 2010. Print.

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Kureishi, Hanif. Buddha of Suburbia. Faber and Faber. 1990. Print.

Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. Signet Classic. 1954. Print.

Sanghera, Sathnam. Marriage Material. William Heinemann. 2013. Print.

Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. Simon and Schuster. 2007. Print.

Valmiki, Om Prakash. Joothan. Translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee. Columbia

University Press. 2008. Print.

Martin Amis and Owen Jones on the Culture Show. 20th June 2012.

Extracts from Land Without Sorrow by Balvinder Banga

‘Salah’ mumbled Tiloka Singh, wiping his brow with the tail of his turban. He took a deep

breath and stood and swayed with both feet on the shovel blade. It sunk an inch into the

earth. The younger men clapped, bringing the old man out of his reverie and into a prideful

digging frenzy. He wondered how long they had been watching him. ‘He needs water,

sahib’, said Prem Lal.

‘Lunch is in one hour’ said the foreman and told Tiloka Singh to go home if he was

too old to work. ‘It is too beautiful here, nah? This is like a holiday, Bapu’ he said and

laughed.

Ten minutes elapsed and again Tiloka Singh was balanced on his shovel, willing it to

penetrate the ground. The foreman placed himself before the old man with his mangled

teeth on show. ‘Come on Bapu. Hurry up. Extra chapatti for you.’ The old man stepped off

the shovel and raised it high to his knees and then crashed it hard into the earth. ‘Arrgh’ he

whined. ‘Again’, said the foreman and up went the shovel. Prem Lal looked away,

mentally drawing down a curtain to preserve the old man’s dignity. ‘Again, again’ said the

foreman and down it crashed. ‘Again, shabash!’ The shovel crashed onto the earth with an

old man’s feeble might, sufficient though it was to slice clean through his right foot. Blood

poured out and softened the unyielding ground.

Before he took cognisance of his amputated toes, flailing like unearthed worms,

Tiloka Singh’s bowels opened. A gush of hot urine ran down his thighs. His lungs

expelled all the air they held and a scream came through his dry throat, muffling the

beats of his shocked heart. It shattered the peaceful sanctuary of the doves and they beat

their pretty wings against their prison netting. When Prem Lal would later dig in his

dreams he would see doves turning from the old man as he fell and shot bile in watery

parcels of vomit. It created the bed of sickness in which he fell. Soon that dream faded

and the pestilential soup in which the old man had lain became transfigured in his mind

into pools of liquid gold. When he would meet Lakshmi she was usually heating her

bones in the sun outside her door, crouching down. He would bend down and touch the

dust on her feet and attest to the blessed nature of the passing. ‘Ma, it was as if Krishna

was there.’

‘My Seva is coming’ is all she would say.

Chintu was the first to wake from the men’s collective shock. ‘Tie his foot with his

turban’ he screamed.

‘He is a Sikh. You will curse him’, said another man.

‘He’s a Hindu, Salah. What are you going to do, let him bleed to death?’

A heated debate followed about Tiloka Singh’s faith and the karmic consequence of

turbaned feet. By the time it finished he was oblivious to the conclusion reached and with

his brown irises warmed by the sun, unblinking and dead.

In the coming days and months the house was notable for Tiloka Singh’s absence

and the absence was a relief like an unrealised threat of brooding clouds. Sometimes she

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would hear the rat like scratching on the roof and know it was him by the smoker’s

wheeze that accompanied it. At other times it was just a rat, or a mouse, darting around

somewhere unseen but near. With his scraggy chest pumped out and pathetic he would

descend for meals, eat without noise and provide in return frayed rupee notes that he

would scatter on the manja or stool. They were his silent contribution to the family’s

sustenance. She would hear or see with her own eyes at times the casual work he

undertook to gather those notes but the irregularity of their arrival caused her rosary to

spin through her skinny fingers.

She knew he never looked at the child, and that when he did it was as a disenchanted

husband using the infant as a thing to blot out her existence. ‘He is growing’ she would

hear him say, as if his axiom was a substitute for kindness or the kind of rough play other

men, like Chintu, engaged in with their boys. ‘By the grace of the Guru’ she would reply,

pointing to the calendar of Ravidas to emphasise that it was not by his. And all the while,

month after rapid month, the child did grow, swiftly like a bamboo reed, seeking his

mother’s milk.

In the corner of the house, near the shutters, were mud bricks laid on the floor,

encircling the hole in which she cooked. When the fire was lit, smoke filled the house and

stray dogs barked and loitered outside, hoping and scavenging for food, scaring the young

child with their calls. But that was only for a while. In time the guttural whines became as

familiar to him as the buzzing of mosquitos. To cook she would rest on her haunches and

lean over the fire, her son by her side, at first on her hip, and then standing with his left

hand resting against her waist for support. By twenty-one months he was kneeling, too tall

to stand while leaning on her waist. His plump fingers would press into her like a warm

bandage and she would call to him in mock annoyance, telling him she must focus on food.

‘If you don’t stop, no one will eat’ she would say. All the while she would draw in her

elbow so his hand could not be dislodged from her side. Moaning for release he would lean

his head on her shoulder, his mouth rubbing her spine, marking it with spittle, contented by

her side. By three, he would sit on the wooden stool, absorbed by the flames of dung and

straw, with his hands underneath his thighs while his mother’s elbows remained drawn in,

warming the fading imprint of his hand and where it had entered her and reached up to her

soul. She would repeat to herself the only truth by which she now lived: ‘without him I am

dead.’

Extract from novel-in-progress (as yet untitled) by Kavita Bhanot

As they stood in the doorway of her mata’s sitting room, Kamala and Sunita caused a

disturbance. Those who recognised her, nodded and waved, including Anu, a school friend

Kamala hadn’t seen for almost ten years. Others turned to look. Kamala, embarrassed, bent

to sit in the doorway, but her mata had already seen her. Full of excitement, she waved

Kamala to come over to where she was at the front. Kamala put up a hand to indicate that

she was fine where she was, but her mata kept insisting. With a sigh, Kamala dipped a foot

into the gathering. It was difficult to keep her balance as she made her way through the

room. She created ripples as she went along, people shifting this way and that to make

space for her and Sunita behind her. They created the biggest splash at the front, next to her

mata, as they went to sit. There was not enough space, but space had to be made for them.

Everyone around Mata moved back, or made themselves small – hugging their feet closer

to themselves – until they could both sit.

Mata put a hand on Sunita’s face. ‘You’ve come now’, she mouthed to Kamala,

adopting an expression of mock anger, but Kamala could see that she was happy. She

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squeezed her mata’s hand, gave a half-nod, showed an ‘I’ll explain later’ palm, and turned

her attention towards the boy. He was telling a story about Guru Nanak and Mardana, the

conversation between them as Mardana was dying. Kamala tried to follow it, but within

minutes her mind was wandering, thinking about that morning, thinking about the

difficulty with which she had managed to come that day.

It had been almost two years since she had last come home to Birmingham. She had

planned a trip a year earlier, but Bobby, the boy who helped in the shop, had gone to India

unexpectedly, to look for a wife, so she had to cover his shifts, had to stay on to look after

the shop full time. And then she had planned another visit, five months earlier, during

Sunita’s Easter holidays. They had been packed and ready to go, when the Taneja family,

distant relatives from Jalandhar, had turned up unannounced. ‘Well, she can’t go now’,

Mata-ji had said. ‘Who will make the food?’ Remembering this, Kamala found herself

clenching her fists.

And now, during Sunita’s summer holiday, when the family had again agreed that she

could go home, she had almost lost the chance at the last minute. Her body grew stiff as

she remembered what had happened that morning. So grateful they were letting her go, she

had spent hours cleaning the house, making paranthe for everyone’s breakfast, and then

dhal and sabzi and rotis for their lunch. It had been almost 11 o’clock when she finished.

By the time she had got dressed and got Sunita ready, she had been sure they would miss

the coach. They had been at the front door when they heard her mother- in-law’s cries. She

was ill, she moaned, and there was no one to look after her. She was pretending, of course,

but Kamala looked at Prakash’s sad, pleading face and was too angry to argue. ‘Forget it, I

won’t go’, she said.

Kamala remembered how relieved Prakash had looked at that moment; he’d been

happy to accept her sacrifice. She’d dragged her bag upstairs and started to unpack,

throwing the contents, one by one, onto the bed.

Prakash stood in the doorway, watching her, his pathetic face melted in confusion.

She had worked so hard to teach him; lecturing, nagging, crying, screaming, telling him

to look beyond the surface, not to always give in to his mother, to be more sensitive, to

think of his own family too – his wife and daughter, to stand up for his wife, to be a

man. And still he was always torn, often pushing her aside to give priority to his

mother.

He stepped forward. ‘Don’t come near me’, she said through gritted teeth. She was

breathing heavily, tears falling. Kamala hardly knew what happened next. It was only

when she regained consciousness that she realised she had had another fit. She lay on the

floor in the bedroom, her head in Prakash’s lap. He stroked her wet hair – she was soaked

with sweat and tears. Sunita stood in the corner of the room watching.

He repacked her bag himself, and they followed him down the stairs. Kamala saw

him wince as he shut the front door with a bang, slicing his mother’s cries. In the car,

she didn’t say a word. It was pointless, she knew, making the journey to Dadoo’s on

Plumstead High Street, where the coach stopped to pick up passengers; they had missed

the bus. But she didn’t have the energy to fight him and she wanted to let him do this,

even as a gesture, a sign, to prove that she was something to him, too. The bus, they

were told by the man behind the counter in Dadoo’s, had been late. It had left just ten

minutes before. Kamala pressed her lips, said nothing. She had resigned herself to the

fact that she would not be going. They all got back into the car and Prakash started to

drive. It was some minutes before Kamala realised that he was not going back towards

the house, that he was trying to overtake the coach, to reach the next stop on Eastham

High Street before the coach did. The whole journey, even after he had put them on the

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coach, she didn’t say a word to him. That expression of relief on his face when she had

said she wouldn’t go replayed over and over again in her head, was still replaying even

now as she sat listening to Baba-ji.

‘You are too much in the world,’ the boy was saying, as Kamala’s attention returned to

him. ‘Sitting here, it is just your body that is present, but your thoughts are back at home.

You’re thinking of the fight you had with your mother-in-law, or with your husband or

wife, it is replaying in your mind, making you angry. All your energy is going into that.

How can you sit with a clear mind, to remember God?’

Kamala looked at the boy. Was he reading her mind? He was right – she could

never switch off. That was why she didn’t go to gurdwaras and mandirs. There was no

point. How could she turn her attention to God if she was always too full of these

things? Before she could forget one thing, there would be another incident to put fire

inside her. She had got better after all these years; she had learned to hold her tongue, to

let things go, to make herself numb. She didn’t let herself get excited any more, had

trained herself not to expect, not to think of herself, to try to keep those around her

happy. But sometimes she slipped.

Notes on contributors

Balvinder Banga is a barrister working in London. He is the author of the unpublished Land WithoutSorrow, a novel charting the journey of first generation Chamars from Punjab to England. He can becontacted at balvinderbanga@yahoo.co.uk

Kavita Bhanot lives in London, where she works as an editor and teaches creative writing andliterature. She has had several stories published in anthologies and magazines, two of her stories havebeen broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and she is the editor of the short story collection Too Asian, NotAsian Enough (Tindal Street Press, 2011). She is working on her first novel about a Birminghambased dera community. She can be contacted at bhanot.kavita@gmail.com

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