China Room and How to Kidnap the Rich
January 7, 2022
Sunjeev Sahota, Punjab
In China Room, British Indian novelist Sunjeev Sahota weaves together two stories set in Punjab, India, but occuring 70 years apart. Mehar, is one of three teenage women married to three brothers in 1929. During the day, they are hard at work in the family’s “china room,” where the mother-in-law keeps a set of china plates, part of her dowry. The three women are cut off from contact with their husbands.
At night, the mother-in-law summons them to a darkened chamber. From beneath her veil, Mehar tries to figure out which of the brothers is her husband, based on the sounds of their voices and the calluses on their fingers, while she serves them tea. Soon events unfold putting her life at risk, against the backdrop of India’s struggle for independence from British rule.
The other story is about an eighteen-year-old, a great grandson of Mehar, who grew up in a small town in England. He is the son of an Indian immigrant shopkeeper. Facing racism, violence, and alienation from the English culture, he sought escape through drugs.
In 1999, he visits his uncle’s house in Punjab, seeking to get rid of a heroin addiction. At his ancestral home in Punjab, the unnamed young man makes slow, uneven progress on getting rid of his addiction. Meanwhile, intrigued by the abandoned china room, which is locked, he asks villagers and relatives and learns more about his great grandmother.
The story is partly inspired by Sunjeev Suhota’s family’s history. His grandparents and parents immigrated from Punjab, India, to England more than 45 years ago. He was born in Derby, England. The book has a photo of Sahota as a baby, being cuddled by his great grandmother, who is visiting from Punjab.
Fluent in Punjabi, English is Sahota’s third language. China Room, long listed for the 2021 Booker prize, has received praise from publications ranging from TIME to POPSUGAR and Apartment Therapy. Sahota is “a bold storyteller who seems to have learned as many tricks from TV as from Tolstoy,” a reviewer noted in The New Yorker. “With poise, restraint and deep intelligence . . . Sahota feeds us big, difficult themes—segregation and freedom, revolution and empire,” a reviewer stated in The Times, London.
Sahota’s stories starkly portray the racism that Indians at all levels - as well as other South Asians and the browns and blacks from other former British colonies - face in the United Kingdom, be it in small towns or in London. His previous novel, The Year of the Runaways, 2015, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. One of the characters in the story, set in Sheffield, England, is a recent immigrant from India who works at a fried chicken outlet. He is spat upon by white racist youths, while serving them. In 2011, Sahota published Ours Are the Streets.
In 2013, he left his day job at an insurance company, after he was able to make a living as a full-time novelist. He is an assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, U.K. Sahota is 41-years-old. He told the ReadDurhamEnglish blog that he enjoys teaching creative writing since “the tutor learns as much as the students.” He lives in Sheffield, England, with his family.
Rahul Raina, Delhi
In How to Kidnap the Rich, Rahul Raina narrates the story of Ramesh Kumar, who grew up working at his father’s tea stall, in the concrete coffin that is Delhi. At age 24, he makes money, illegally taking exam tests for sons of India’s wealthy. Ramesh and one of his clients are kidnapped by criminals. But they escape the kidnappers and turn into kidnappers and criminals themselves.
India “smells like a country that has gone off, all the dreams having curdled and clumped like rancid paneer,” Ramesh says. “Why I carried on living in Delhi, I don’t know. I spent my whole life complaining about it…Delhi isn’t saffron. Delhi isn’t spice. Delhi is sweat.”
Novels set in Indian cities are typically about Kolkata or Mumbai, Raina told thebookseller.com. In his book, he is “trying to put my version of Delhi onto the map, because Delhi as a city often gets ignored.”
Like Suhota’s work, Raina’s novel has received wide praise. The book “purports to be a how-to manual but is in fact a rollicking urban adventure and a biting satire of inequality”, notes The Economist.
Rahul Raina’s family moved to the U.K. from Kashmir, India, when he was five. Raina, 29-years-old, divides his time between Oxford, United Kingdom, and Delhi. He runs a consultancy business in England, which he founded and which employs 30 people, providing links between UK small businesses and big businesses in India. He also volunteers with charities for street children. His writing time is from 10 pm to 1 am.
In India, getting high grades in a series of competitive exams is seen as the path to career success. The pressure to do well in exams is intense, Raina told thebookseller.com. “You can get 99.3% in an exam and you feel your life is over because you didn’t get 99.4%. I have loads of friends…(in India with) terrible problems with mental health, who are in their mid-twenties and feeling that they have failed in life because they haven’t gotten a job with KPMG,” a global network of accounting and consulting firm.