Novel of the week
Francesca Carington
CHINA ROOM by Sunjeev Sahota
Near the beginning of China Room, the narrator, an unnamed man, almost 40, studies a photograph of an old lady in a white chunni holding a squalling baby. “It was of my great-grandmother, an old whitehaired woman who’d travelled all the way from England just so that she might hold me, her newborn great-grandson.” That same picture is printed at the end of the novel – Sunjeev Sahota’s third, after his 2015 Bookershortlisted The Year of the Runaways – which has its roots in Sahota’s own family history.
The novel unfolds in Punjab over two timelines. In 1929, the narrator’s great-grandmother Mehar is 15 and one of three brides married to three brothers – though she doesn’t know which. She and the other wives are “expected to remain dutiful, veiled and silent”, and live in the “china room” at the back of the farm run by their despotic mother-in-law Mai. Mehar’s only encounters with her husband come in a pitch-black room at night; making it all too easy for Mehar to fall in love with the wrong brother, whom she mistakes for her husband.
Meanwhile, the narrator remembers the summer of 1999. He’s 18 and a heroin addict, sent by his parents, who own a shop in the North of England, to India to detox. He finds himself drawn to the run-down farm where Mehar lived, and the stories of a woman locked up in the china room. Sweaty and sleepless, he reckons with the racist hostility that shaped his early years: “I can’t remember ever looking up as a child without immediately feeling as if I had no right and should look away.”
Themes of freedom and imprisonment are knitted through both stories. There is a songlike sketchiness to the pared-back sentences, and the arresting use of colour (“the older kids, with their grey threatening noise”, “a treacly dark light”, “a day as bright as parrots”). Poised and poignant, China Room is a rare novel that makes you pause in its beauty.