A review by Sunita Sehmi
I read this on a plane and had to stop twice because I didn’t want to cry in front of a stranger. There’s a moment early on where Meera Syal writes about her mother’s and aunties’ voices the specific pitch of it, the exact phrase. “Don’t sit with your legs apart!” And I had to put the book down on the tray table because I could hear my own mother saying almost the same words. Not similar. The same. Different kitchen, different town, same warning about how to sit, how to speak, how much space I was allowed to take up in a room.
I don’t think I’ve read a book that made me feel this exposed in a long time. Not because it’s about me it isn’t but because she’s found the exact grammar of a childhood I thought was mine alone: the aunties. The way love and control came wrapped in the same sentence, and you couldn’t always tell which one you were being given. The jokes that were actually warnings. The warnings that were actually love.
I recall one of my aunties told my mother when I was 16, “Aap ki larki apko tara dikahigee Rani.” Translated, “Your daughter will show you stars not the good ones, but the kind that make you dizzy and out of control.” And I did!
And then there’s the other line, the one that made me laugh out loud and then go quiet: someone asking, when she first pitched the idea for an Asian comedy show, “Are Asians funny?” I know that particular flavour of dismissal. Not cruelty exactly, just a total inability to imagine you as a whole person. She turned that sentence into a career. I don’t know many people who could do that.
What undid me was Partition. I’ve heard fragments of that history my whole life, the way most of us have sideways, at the end of an argument, never as its own subject.
I was born in London in the sixties. My parents were Punjabi immigrants who left India for the UK, hoping for a better life and better days ahead. My parents lived in extremely difficult circumstances as children, and they didn’t have much money at all. Hence, having seen the partition in India, they were consumed by the ghosts of division and the struggle for economic survival and hence moved to London in the 1950s, where both economic and financial stability were assured… at a price. The Indian community that moved to London in the fifties had seen both violence and viciousness during the partition. The stories were universal and stayed with them, flashing in their dreams, unspoken as the grief was overbearing. My parents worked hard, and like most immigrant stories, life was a daily struggle. I recall my parents wanted us to “fit in”, but essentially, they wanted us to be Indian, specifically Hindu. We all grew up in a context where I was constantly reminded that we were Indian, we were immigrants, we were different. I got this incessant message inside and outside my home.
Syal puts it on the page directly, next to stories about being laughed at for wanting to be funny on television, and somehow the two sit together as if they were always meant to. Because they were. That’s the thing nobody tells you: the fear your family carries doesn’t stay in the year it happened. It gets folded into how your mother tells you to dress, how your aunt vets your boyfriends, how nobody in your house has ever fully exhaled.
I laughed more than I expected to, which is its own kind of relief, because grief this size needs somewhere to go. And I was angry at points too at how much of these women’s fire got spent protecting instead of living, at how long it took any of them to be believed by anyone, including their own families.
By the last page I wasn’t thinking about the book anymore. I was thinking about my own aunties, the ones still alive and the ones who aren’t, and everything I never asked them because I was too busy being embarrassed by them to notice they were the bravest people I knew.
I don’t know how to review this cleanly. It isn’t a clean book. It’s a howl and a love letter at the same time, and I think that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be.
PS Lastly, 11 years ago I got in touch with Meera on a webchat, as it happened atThe Guardian. I am still writing the book!! But what a generous woman!
I love your work, Meera, and your boldness really had such an empowering effect on me. GGM was not only funny but clever and changed the perceptions of British Asians forever.
Now my question/request is: I have a story I really want to write or script but don’t have your talent! Would you be interested in hearing it? Worth a try, init?
Meera’s answer
Admire your pluck! I’m not in a position to hear a pitch because I can’t commission anything, but I would say if you have a good idea, the first thing you have to do is put it down on paper in as entertaining and short a way as possible – that’s essentially your pitching document. When you’ve done that, drop me a tweet, and I’ll see what I can do: @MeeraSyal.
Vigilauntie: A Memoir – Innit? Read it and then call an auntie!