Sunil Sethi: A new spin on 'chick-lit' and 'mis-lit'

AL FRESCO

To the sub-genre of contemporary writing known as “chick-lit” there is the additional category of “mis-lit”. Chick-lit is a cheeky, often trivial update on Jane Austen about the doings of young females in search of romantic partners; mis-lit for “misery literature” is a tawdry take on Charles Dickens and centres on awful childhoods — domestic violence and other dark disorders of a wretched upbringing. Chick-lit and mis-lit accounts are a staple of Western bestseller lists but two recent non-fiction accounts by foreign-born Indians, both successful journalists in their thirties, give a new glow to the rubbed-out coinage of the genres.

If You Don’t Know Me By Now by British columnist Sathnam Sanghera and Marrying Anita by American-born financial journalist Anita Jain, are funny, acutely observed and often painfully honest stories of the torn identities and double lives of immigrants’ children; they raise the bar of the misery memoir way above wallows of self-pity that make the pages stick glutinously together. You’ve met second-generation Indian Brits and Americans in the fiction of Hanif Kureishi and Jhumpa Lahiri. Now meet them as they really are.

Sanghera was born in the dreary lower middle class industrial town of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. He grew up in a Sikh ghetto; entire villages, it seems, were plucked out of Punjab and plonked in the bleak British landscape — extended clans that followed, one after another, as unskilled migrant labour from the 1960s. To be poor and illiterate is a curse anywhere but in an alien landscape, with little communication with goras, life revolved round the local gurudwara and other Sikhs. Sanghera was exceptional: he won a scholarship to grammar school and then to Cambridge; in a bold attempt at assimilation he stole away from school and had his top knot cut off. But the alienation wouldn’t let go. As a journalist in London he lived in fear of his mother discovering that he had a white girlfriend. At 24 he chanced upon some papers in the family house that turned out to be medical records of his father’s lifelong battle with mental illness. As a child it didn’t strike him as odd that his father never went to work, nor why his mother slaved away at piece-work on her sewing machine. Schizophrenia ran in the family — his sister too suffered — and the slow exhumation of family history is both transforming and redeeming: “My father and sister had gone from being my father and sister, two people who behaved a little strangely at times, but two people I loved, to being a collection of symptoms.”

Sanghera’s book starts as a letter to his mother explaining why he undertook excavating his family’s secret saga; and to tell her why he can’t make the arranged marriage she so ardently wishes upon him. Anita Jain’s memoir Marrying Anita has no such fears — after years of working in cities as far-flung as Mexico City, Singapore and New York, she is heading out to India in search of a suitable boy.

Misery memoirs are not the sole preserve of childhoods riddled with illiteracy, madness and violence. You can be a cool, footloose Harvard-educated hot chick in midtown Manhattan and be traumatised by the loneliness of it all; Jain is sick of her love life, littered with discarded Spanish lovers and one-night stands. From time to time, Daddyji, a retired immigrant engineer in California, hollers down the phone to ask when she will settle down. Jain gets a job in Delhi, logs on to shaadi.com, and hangs out with a cast of eligibles:dope-smoking rockers, Gurgaon executives, Noida nightclubbers, Kashmiri journalists, IIM graduates and many others. She doesn’t get what she wants but draws a splendid portrait of urban newbies on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Sanghera and Jain give mis-lit and chick-lit a new meaning altogether.