Sunjeev Sahota: The Accidental Author

The book,which he began writing in 2006,is a confessional account of Imtiaz Raina,a suicide bomber and a second-generation immigrant. It slithers around the uncomfortable crevices of his life and mind,his inability to be at home in the country of his birth and his eventual descent into radicalism. Unsentimental and taut,Sahota’s account turns not to religion,but to Raina’s fractured sense of self-worth and identity to understand his transformation. “I wanted to look beyond the usual debates of policies and practices. I had no other rationale in mind. More than anything else,I wanted to see if I could put it together and pull it off,” he says,of a debut novel that won him critical acknowledgement. Most recently,he found a place on Granta magazine’s list of best young British novelists (2013) based on a work-in-progress second book.

The idea that he could write came to him almost by whimsy over a decade ago,ahead of a trip to India when he was 18 and on the verge of a degree in mathematics from the Imperial College,London. From a kiosk at the Heathrow airport,he had picked up Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to read on the long flight,and had found himself irrevocably drawn into the world of wordsmiths. Other novels,Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things,whetted his curiosity further. “It’s not as if I had not read before that. Literature was a part of the curriculum,but it wasn’t something that I paid special attention to. I picked up Midnight’s Children because the blurb mentioned it was written around the time I was born. But once I began reading it,it was just so easy and lovely and circular. I didn’t get it all at one go,but I would stop short every few pages to wonder how the author managed to write in the way that he did. It was the first time that the workings of the novel caught my attention,and the first time that I wondered if I could,perhaps,have a go myself,” says the 32-year-old,who confesses to a fondness for the works of Russians Leo Tolstoy,Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky,South African writers Nadine Gordimer,K Sello Duiker and the Irish author John McGahern among others.

The call from Granta’s John Freeman,informing Sahota about his selection in the magazine’s list of young talents this year,came at a crucial juncture. He had quit his day job at a finance firm in March to concentrate “full-time” on writing and had just brought home his five-day-old daughter. It was a time when he desperately needed an affirmation of his talent and the call came “as a pat on the back,an acknowledgement that I was on the right path.” Sahota admits that writing is often an excruciatingly lonely exercise,not nearly as exhilarating as seeing the fruit of one’s labour in print. “I cannot write in parks and cafes and public spaces. It’s a solitary activity for me. I need to be in a locked room,curtains drawn,with no natural light filtering in. I write for four-five hours like that and slowly,through trial and error,a narrative emerges,” he says.

It’s a terse,but fulfilling exercise,even if the process is often fraught with anxiety and self-doubt. “I wonder if this is the best way I could have gone about it; if these are the right words and the best structure. For Ours are the Streets,I ran through five-six drafts over three-four years. Getting the form was tricky. I started with the third person,but it didn’t come together till I had switched to the first-person narrative. But once a work is over and done with,I don’t go back and read it,” he says.

His second novel,tentatively titled “The Year of The Runaways”,which he is due to complete by the end of the year,is better planned,“more well-thought out” and larger in ambition and delineation. Spanning continents,it is a story of four illegal immigrants living in Sheffield,UK,three of them from India. Among the Indians,two are from his native Punjab and one from Bihar,while the fourth,the female protagonist,is the visa wife to one of them. Sahota is still pondering over the timeline of his novel,but is almost certain that it will be contemporary. “There is a sizeable British Asian community in the UK that leads hidden lives. It’s a world that I am aware of and that interests me. More than the political questions of right and wrong,I am concerned about the interior lives of these characters,” he says.

Sahota’s choice of themes has less to do with working on issues that occupy public mindspace than with his upbringing that taught him how limiting self-absorption can be. “I find writing about my own experiences unsatisfying because there’s a wide world out there that demands my interest and attention. When I write,I am trying to go beyond myself,” he says. In that,Sahota’s second-generation immigrant experience has been integral. “I don’t think I would have been a writer if I had not been in the UK. I belong here more than any other place,but my idea of the land is perhaps not the same as that of my white British friends or for that matter,even of how my cousins born and bred in India think of the country,” he says.

Despite the topicality of his subjects,he does not,therefore,feel the need to provide a fitting moral to his narratives. “When I write,I don’t feel the need to pull punches above my weight. I am not trying to offer solutions,give a take-home message,least of all,to offend. In fact,writing a didactic novel is far from my mind,so the question of censoring my thoughts has never come up. What I’m really trying to do is write a book that I’d want to read,” he says.