The first thing you notice about Sunjeev Sahota… actually, the second thing, because the first thing you notice is just how tall he is — 6’3”! Well, what strikes you about Sunjeev is his Yorkshire accent and how he says “Punjabbi” with a double ‘B’, like they say it in the pind (village). It’s evident that here is a man wholly comfortable with his dual identities — the British and the Punjabi.

Multiple moors
But this was not always the case, the 35-year-old Booker-nominated writer tells t2 as we sip hot tea from paper cups in the Authors’ Lounge at Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet (Kalam), held last month in association with Victoria Memorial and The Telegraph.   

“I think I have become better at traversing the two (identities). I used to struggle a lot in adolescence. I was not able to work out where I belonged. As I got older, I sort of realised that it was fine to either have no home or to have more than one home, that it was fine to have multiple places where you belong. I might belong in England, I might sometimes belong in India, with my wife and kids, sometimes at my desk… those are all states of belonging that as of now I am pretty content with,” he said.  

Sunjeev is a third-generation British national of Indian origin. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the UK in the 1960s, when his father was a boy. Immigration and the promise of a better life form the heart of his second novel, The Year of the Runaways (Pan Macmillan India), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. 

Midnight moment
He started writing his debut novel at 25, called Ours Are The Streets (2011) about a British Pakistani young man who becomes a suicide bomber. And that was just seven years after Sunjeev read his first novel! 
The story of how he only read his first novel aged 18 when he happened to pick up Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has become a familiar signpost at all his interviews and appearances at literary festivals. He was asked the same at Kalam too. 

“In school I studied poetry and plays, memoirs as well. There were no novels. Also, ours wasn’t a particularly literary household. Books weren’t ever discussed,” he told the audience. He made up for lost time by “reading very intensely throughout my university career, sometimes three-four novels in a week, 10 days.” 

After Midnight’s Children, he read Rohinton Mistry (“A Fine Balance absorbed me and sort of swallowed me whole”), Vikram Seth, V.S. Naipaul (“I loved A House for Mr. Biswas”) and Arundhati Roy. More recently, he’s been reading Anne Enright and Tessa Hadley. J.M. Coetzee remains a favourite. 

The transition from reader to writer didn’t come as a surprise to him. “After about three or four years of reading, I think at some point I started asking questions of the writers of those books. Why did they make that decision, why did they structure the book that way, why use that tense… once I started wondering how a book was put together, it was not a big leap to want to have a go myself.” 

Three-month honeymoon
Having studied mathematics in college, Sunjeev has worked in finance for five-six years. He would write in the evenings, on weekends, during holidays. “It was only halfway through my second novel that I was able to become a full-time writer.” It took him four-and-a-half years to write each book. “So, I don’t think having a job and not having a job makes any difference to how quickly I write,” he smiled. 

In 2011, he married Purdy, a British-Punjabi girl. “It was a traditional Punjabi wedding with lots of dancing, lots of alcohol, lots of food... and a traditional Sikh ceremony,” he said. They travelled around the world for three months on their honeymoon, visiting Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, several countries in east Africa, and India. “One of the places we travelled to was Calcutta. We spent three or four days here.” 

The couple have two kids now, a three-year-old girl and a year-old boy. His wife has just gone back to her job in the local government in Sheffield, where they live. 

The house in Sheffield
Sheffield, located two-and-a-half-hours by train from London, is also the city where both his novels are set. We ask him about the immigrants’ house where his protagonists live, in Runaways. It’s a horrible, hard life for these immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, a life far removed from his own life as the grandchild of immigrants. 
“Yes, it’s not my reality but I think the British-Sikh community is very aware of these young men and the living conditions they are in. For the last 15 years or so, these were the stories I had been hearing time and time again. They feel very real to me even though I have not experienced them,” he said, adding that the stories of Tochi, Avtar and Randeep came out of conversations he has had with people in Punjab. 

Kindred spirit
What about Narinder, the visa wife? 

“I love Narinder. I don’t like writing heroes and I don’t really believe in heroes but she is probably as close as I’ll ever get to writing about someone who I think behaves quite heroically. She is a devout young Sikh (British-Indian) woman. Her mother died when she was little and she is living in a house with her brother and father, a very patriarchal, oppressive existence. And she pretty much lives her life going to the gurdwara and back home. She strongly believes in the idea of doing seva, of being good. But she can’t reconcile her ideas of goodness and having a good god with what she sees people going through. And she tries to almost atone in a way for something she didn’t do in her past, by becoming this visa wife.” 

Though there are three male central characters, it is this woman Sunjeev sees as a kindred spirit. 

“See, if you are the child of immigrants, it’s something that I think about a lot — what does it mean for me, who has benefited from immigration for nothing I did, completely a fluke, because my grandparents immigrated at a time when Britain wanted manual labour. Why does that mean that my cousins and the other people that I know ‘back home’ shouldn’t have access to the privileges I have? It’s a question Narinder wrestles with a lot. It’s a genuine moral tussle.” 

But isn’t Narinder also slightly scary?

“You’re not the first person to say that. Some people have found her disturbing too, because she seems so single-minded in her sense of what is good, she will sacrifice a lot to achieve what she thinks is right. That sort of selflessness these days is quite unusual and perhaps quite scary. But I loved her. I think she is heroic in what she does and what she gives up.” 

One foot in India
We move on to what’s next for him. With little ones to raise, he doesn’t quite have the headspace to start writing another novel just yet, he says. “I don’t know what I am doing next. There’s an idea but it’s not strong enough. I sort of need it to sit in my head for a bit and gather some mass before I go somewhere. I think I’ll try to do one or two short stories first.”

Will his future works have South Asian characters as well? 

Yes, he thinks. “That is what I know. India and my heritage play such a key part in making me who I am that it feels natural that I’ll always write fiction that has at least one foot in India in some sense. India in some form will always be there in my work, because it is there in me.” 

Samhita Chakraborty
 

The hour is here: The sixth book in Jeffrey Archer’s Clifton Chronicles is out! Titled Cometh The Hour (Pan Macmillan India Rs 599), the story picks up from the cliffhanger the master storyteller left us at last year, with the fate of Emma Barrington tied up in knots because of a libel charge brought against her by the vile Lady Virginia Fenwick. There was a letter written by the equally vile Major Alex Fisher before his suicide which could sway the jury in either woman’s favour. 

The opening chapters of Cometh The Hour finally put our curiosity to rest. 

This book comes with a special India cover featuring the Gateway of India and a young couple riding on a scooter. That’s Emma and Harry’s son Sebastian Clifton, who falls for an Indian girl in London and travels to Mumbai in her pursuit. We can’t wait to see how the story we have been devouring for the past five years pans out in our country!