Sunjeev Sahota

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Sunjeev Sahota: ‘I don’t see why I should benefit from migration when other people don’t’

The Man Booker-shortlisted author talks about racism, characters caught between worlds and asking how to be a good person

 

Since deciding, after taking a maths degree and working for an insurance company and a building society, that he was more interested in literature, Sunjeev Sahota has written two novels about some of the most hated people in Britain. He started his first novel, Ours Are the Streets, 10 years ago, soon after the 7/7 tube bombings in London. The book takes the form of a journal left by a young British Muslim for the white British girlfriend he is about to abandon when he blows himself up, along with as many passersby as possible, in Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield – though the story breaks off before the reader learns whether or not this actually happens.

Sahota wrote it over three years in the upstairs bedroom of his parents’ home in Chesterfield in Derbyshire, keeping an eye on the door so that he was not interrupted. “Being brought up in the British Sikh community where shame and honour play such a big role and you don’t air your dirty laundry, I felt I was exposing a lot, which is probably why I wanted to write it quite privately.”

 

Ours Are the Streets was well received in 2011, with poet and critic John Burnside calling it a “moral work of real intelligence and power”. Two years later Sahota was on Granta’s once-a-decade Best of Young British Novelists list and a full-time writer.

 

By this time he was well on his way to finishing a second book. The Year of the Runaways was selected for the 2015 Man Booker shortlist and propelled Sahota, now 34, into a new league, despite being beaten to the £50,000 prize byMarlon James. It is a bold and original novel about illegal immigration to Britain: two of its four protagonists have married for the purposes of securing a visa; another is a refugee from Hindu nationalist violence who arrived in the back of a lorry; and the fourth is on a student visa – another scam, as he has given up studying. The novel gives an account of each of their backgrounds – three in India, one in London – and describes how their paths meet, cross and diverge. Unlike his first novel, which he calls an “emotionally driven” exercise in voice and character, The Year of the Runaways uses a traditional social‑realist structure; Sahota calls it “a homage to the books that made me fall in love with reading – immersive, classic storytelling”.

 

But if the form of the novel is familiar, its contents are eye-openingly fresh. The subject matter ranges from political violence in rural north India, to the appalling living conditions, chaotic building sites and grubby corners of the catering trade in the north of England. Sahota’s characters cling on, but debt, loneliness and disappointment threaten to overwhelm them. The wolves of hunger, destitution, exploitation and death hang around the door.

 

With his wife and two young children, Sahota has recently moved into a new, red-brick house on one of Sheffield’s leafy suburban hills, with a view over the city. Ecclesall Road, where much of the action of the book takes place, is just around the corner. Did he make it up? Or was this a novel that required research, conversations, interviews on street corners and in takeaways?

 

“I knew there were houses in Sheffield full of 10, 12 or 15 young men; you hear stories,” he says. “I didn’t feel I needed to go and read books.”

 

Sahota, whose grandfather came to Britain in 1962, grew up in Normanton, Derby, in a close-knit community of British-Indian Sikhs, and says temples, or gurdwaras, have played a role in looking after new arrivals. One true story he adapted for his novel told of how the congregation of one temple objected to homeless young men sleeping there, and promised to bring them food and blankets if they agreed to move to a railway bridge.

In India, where his maternal grandmother still lives, along with his extended family, and where he visits regularly, illegal migration is an “open conversation”. In bazaars and other public spaces, “people talk quite openly about schemes to get to Australia or the UK” – about possible marriages, visas and loans.

“I never felt I needed to draw stories out of people. I think because I am so interested, and such a lover of India, and because I speak the language idiomatically, there’s a way in,” he explains. “I remember speaking to some young men who had been to England but had come back to India. I told them I was working on a book, and they said, ‘Are you going to put us in a positive light, because everyone seemed to hate us?’. They said, ‘Tell them we work really hard, that we’re happy to work whenever, that we work really long hours, that we’re competitively priced’ – it’s almost like they wanted me to write an advertorial for them.”

 

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Sahota breaks off, laughs. But although he is sympathetic to the migrants he writes about, in classic social-realist style he wanted to offer more than one perspective, not to be their advocate: “It’s brutally dog-eat-dog, especially in the last 10 years when the work has dried up. If there are 12 people and one job, there’s very little room for kindness. It’s who can step on who to get somewhere. No one’s completely innocent, and I wanted to be truthful to the complexity and greyness of it.”

 

Sahota did not read much while growing up. He says he was always fascinated by words on advertisements and packaging, but hardly encountered novels, even when studying for his GCSEs, because his English teacher chose a memoir and a play instead. He read his first four novels one summer in India – Salman Rushdie’sMidnight’s Children, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance – then came back to England and read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

 

At the age of seven, Sahota’s father gave up working as a TV engineer in Derby to buy a convenience store in Chesterfield. He and his younger brother went from being part of an extended kinship network that he likens to an Indian village, where childcare was shared and he didn’t know the difference between his brother and cousins, to being the only Asian children in their secondary school. He did well and got a place at Imperial College London, which is where he studied maths. But racism made its mark.

 

“I remember in my first year when I was 11, there were a few fifth-years who seemed to target me. It only became physical once or twice, but there was lots of blocking in stairways. People don’t think of blocking as physical but it’s very invasive, and the worst thing is how much it makes you aware of yourself and your difference. Walking down the street, or into a room, you think, how are people going to react? What are they going to see first?” His parents’ shop had “the odd broken window”.

 

As an adolescent and young adult living back with his parents, he did not know any young men in the process of radicalisation. But he thinks his own feelings of alienation and disengagement may have had something in common with those of the 7/7 suicide bombers, who grew up not far away in Huddersfield and Leeds.

“There was an idea of belonging that seemed to connect with what I was feeling in my late teens – not that I would ever have gone down that route,” he explains. “But given a certain time and place, and given who you think your people are and what might be happening in the geopolitical sphere, a set of circumstances could trigger that sense of not feeling connected to the country. The biggest factor is not feeling English inside.”

Sahota himself feels a strong sense of connection to his relatives and background in colonial India. Previous generations of his family came from near Lahore and fled to Punjab following partition. His grandmother used to speak of the atrocities she witnessed in that tumultuous period.

In Sheffield he is busy with his young family, and after his wife’s maternity leave he will combine increased childcare duties with days spent writing in a windowless study in the basement. He says he can count his friends on the fingers of one hand. But part of the impulse of his fiction, to describe characters caught between worlds of rich and poor, motivated by their search for a better life, is a sense of solidarity. “I don’t see why I should benefit from migration when other people don’t,” he says, “even if they aren’t family members. It’s a quirk, it’s luck, and, perhaps because I’m aware of the privileged life I lead, comparatively, I do think about what is required of me, what sacrifices I should make, and what it means to be a good person when people are suffering.”

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Sahota married within the Jat Sikh caste he was born into and values his faith, but is an outspoken critic of the prejudice, or casteism, within his and other Indian communities, and the closely connected codes of shame and honour. Caste plays a key part in his novel, with one of the main characters, Tochi, horribly abused as a chamar, or “untouchable”. Sahota is determined that his own children will be freed from such obligations. For his own generation, though, this has proved impossible, he says, “purely because the stakes are so high. I think that’s what a lot of people don’t understand – you might lose your parents, they might not talk to you.”

Sahota is so far unscathed by professional rejection. He doesn’t know who his readers are, and doesn’t keep track of sales, but says he “can’t wait” to get stuck into novel number three, in which he expects to move away from autobiography to reveal the influence of South American magical realism. The “seed” is a scene from the life of his great-grandmother, who married one of four brothers and, because she and the other brothers’ wives were obliged to keep their faces covered and eyes down, didn’t know which man was hers.

It is an image that has stayed with him. “When I read fiction, I read to understand the world,” he says. “I’m not saying people who don’t read fiction are worse people. My parents don’t read fiction, most people I know don’t read fiction, yet they are really engaged and lead perfectly good lives. But, for me, there’s something about watching people go through their lives in this imagined space than enables me to go through life in a better way.”

• The Year of the Runaways and Ours Are the Streets are published by Picador.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/12/sunjeeva-sahota-books-interview-the-year-of-the-runaways