3 days Ago By Sheila Kumar
We are back in Sahotaland, in his fourth book, The Spoiled Heart. His Booker-shortlisted second book, The Year of the Runaways, was about three migrants, the horrors that force them to leave their homeland, and their struggles in the UK. In his next book, China Room, longlisted for the Booker, a case of mistaken identity, love and transgression wreak havoc on a woman’s life.
In The Spoiled Heart, race and identity politics impact the characters in different ways. Taken to the small town of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, we look around, taking in its drab features, the bent church spire, the desolate car park, the empty town centre, the washing lines off the railways, the grubby semis, the sad gardens, the damp foreboding as one character puts it. Then, we are introduced to the main characters, whose lives we will come to examine a bit more closely.
There’s Nayan Olak, indefatigable defender of the working people, running for the post of General Secretary of the city’s biggest union. There’s the enigmatic Helen Fletcher, the object of Nayan’s interest; there’s Pyara Olak, Nayan’s dementia-afflicted father; Brandon Fletcher, Helen’s diffident son; Megha Sharma at the union office pitching herself as Nayan’s rival in the upcoming elections. And of course, the lives of all these characters start to loop together in less than simple ways.
This is a two-toned story, and while the two tones are quite different, they don’t create any discordance together. In the foreground, we see Nayan fighting, at first indolently, then hard, to be elected leader of the union to which he’s given most of his life; it is a classic situation of the old guard versus the newbie. The feisty Megha makes what initially seemed a shoo-in for Nayan look anything but a done deal now; she throws reverse racism charges at him, and it looks as if some of it might well stick.
Sahota is on familiar turf, dealing with race and class issues, arguing through his characters for the working class people of colour, but here, there is the angle of the less than well-to-do white workers who also face a kind of racism in their lives. This is sharply delineated when Brandon tells a young girl, a person of colour, at a posh residential school where he is an assistant cook, to move along. There is immediate public shaming, and he loses his job amid the melee of racism charges and protests.
And, in the background unspools the story of Nayan’s personal family tragedy; a fire at his father’s shop killed his mother and five-year-old son, and the perpetrator was never caught. Sahota brings in a narrator in the form of Sajjan Dhanoa, someone who lived in the same town all those years ago. This device didn’t work for this reviewer, with some of Sajjan’s telling of the story sounding intrusive, even a tad manipulative.
However, the story Sahota tells is a striking one, and rises above this glitch. Nayan’s personal history is pieced together by Sajjan in a set of small reveals, all leading up to the big one. Sajjan is kept a shadowy figure but that’s fine because Nayan Olak, a basically decent man, tends to own every page he appears on.
Helen’s reserve and distant air seem to stem from certain secrets she holds, which has to do with her past in this town. She starts a relationship with Olak but it is hobbled by the weight of what she keeps hidden. In Sunjeev Sahota’s stories, character is not destiny, the circumstances of life are, and it’s no different here.
Fans of Sahota’s writing will relish the familiar restrained manner in which he unpacks the characters’ emotional baggage. There is a quietness that suffuses Sahota’s stories which stands in contrast to the violence the characters are experiencing. This quiet gaze heightens the impact.
There is a resemblance to the style of Kazuo Ishiguro in this aspect. In the latter’s case, this quietness has been attributed to the influence of England, where he has lived for years. Perhaps this holds true for Sahota, too.
The identity politics that suffuses the story stands sharp and pointed. We are not racist, Brandon tells Nayan at one point. Nayan in turn, reflects ironically that that kind of verdict lay not with the white boy Brandon, but with the likes of Nayan.
It is 2024 but racism in Britain is well and truly alive. Of course, there is spirited, and oftentimes, effective pushback; there is the amplification of such incidents by social media; there is weaponisation of the woke ideology; there is talk of BAME—Nayan is shown to be anti-DEI; there is mention of privilege walks, whatever that might be. Ultimately though, the cookie continues to crumble in the old familiar manner.
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