Prima facie, the novel is about the friendship between the nine-year-old Indian Meena and the older, white Anita, who becomes a kind of role model for her. Cocooned within the folds of the Indian family structure with its strangely knotted kinship affiliations (aunts, uncles, nanimas, cousins et al), Anita represents freedom from all to Meena. Anita is a rebel (without a cause, of course) who refuses to be corralled into a middle class framework. Anita is what Meena wants to become "" right then and there.
But Meena is like a trapped tiger in a cage. She is not only trapped within the rigid family structure and the Indian community with its do's and don'ts, but she is also caught between two cultures. She becomes a peculiar hybrid, a blend of two diverse cultures and traditions "" neither British nor Indian. Meena is Punjabi but can't speak the language. English is the only language she knows and her attempts to speak her mother tongue are pathetic: Thusi kither rande ho, ji? Punjab the vich? is just about all she can manage in Punjabi.
Meena is really much more British working class (the novel is set within a working class district of Tollington) who eats dal and roti with her fingers and with as much relish as she enjoys fish and chips. She wants an English Christmas, not the interminable Punjabi festivals with aunties, nanimas and her dreadful cousins, Pinky and Baby. What Syal does not bring out is that Indian expats tend to become far more conservative and a closed-in group than folks back home. It becomes a kind of ghettoised existence where almost all other interaction is with the cloistered Indian community, preferably of the same caste and linguistic group.
For a young girl with an overdose of imagination, this is an impossible situation. She wants to break out and Anita represents the chains of illusion. To get 'there' (of course, the freedom or the existential angst is never defined because the outsider never knows what she or he is outside of) Meena uses her fertile imagination to tell little lies which are laced with her dreams and fantasies; she fights the demons of her life with pluck and courage, gets hurt when she is tossed off a horse in trying to save a friend and exaggerates her working class accent to find acceptance in white upper class Britain. You suspect a hidden metaphor in these yarns. You wonder whether they have taken off from the Panchatantra, the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, but there are no hidden messages: they are simply straightforward tales, probably adapted from nanima's bedtime stories.
Meena is really in search of an identity. She is trying to come to terms with her divided self. For expats this is a real problem, sunk as most of them are in nostalgia. The Indian diaspora (mainly from Punjab, Gujarat and Kerala) helps to smoothen the pangs of loneliness and alienation but they can never come near the 'real thing' back home. Sadly, Syal only touches the fringes of the problem and does not tell us more about the flip side of staying abroad. Instead, she concentrates much more on Anita's changing personality and the growing cult of violence. Meena gets involved with teenage gangs on mobikes as they go rampaging "" beating up people, breaking into shopping arcades because there is nothing better to do.
Slowly and imperceptibly, Meena is growing up and without the alienation that afflicts the young in the west. I was in my own cosy world, my days divided up between solitary bike rides, my eleven-plus studies and quiet evenings in front of the television when I read stories to Sunil or pottered about the kitchen with mama, chopping and tasting when I could. But if my parents had noticed that their wayward tomboy had suddenly become a walking cliche of the good Indian daughter, they did not remark on it to me, fearful perhaps that by naming their good fortune, they would break the spell. Or more likely, that I would be so horrified to have something in common with my cutesy cousins, Pinky and Baby, I might run naked through the village screaming, 'Bugger!' just to prove them wrong.
... my darling parents, how much they had tried to cushion me from anything unpleasant or unusual, never guessing that this would only make me seek out the thrill of the dark and dramatic, afraid of what I might be missing, defiant that I would know and experience more than them. Now I was reaping the karma of all those lies and longings; I had lost a nanima, a soul mate and temporarily, a leg "" enough excitement for a lifetime already... I now knew I was not a bad girl, a mixed-up girl, a girl with no name or no place. The place in which I belonged was wherever I stood and there was nothing stopping me simply moving forward and claiming each resting place as home. This sense of displacement I had always carried around like a curse shrivelled into insignificance...
Publishers today draw a distinction between literature that pleases and so-called serious literature. Anita and Me is serious literature but written in a pleasing way: the narrative style is slangy and racy which makes it very easy to read. And there is enough substance in it to make you realise (especially to those who are thinking of an El Dorado in the west) that you can't live on bread, butter and jam alone. Syal's descriptions of suburban and the working class districts are superb as are her reflections of Asian experiences in a multi-racial Britain.