OTHER HUMANS, OTHER WONDERS
A collection of 17 interlinked stories, Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel is made up of many arrivals—most significantly, his own
THE FIRST STORY IN We Move is called ‘Arrival’— an apt title for a collection all set within hailing distance of Heathrow airport. A young couple, Aanshi and Chetan, have agreed to their driveway being used as temporary parking by the sister of a friend who has flown off on holiday. When she fails to return, her jilted fiancé turns up to claim the car, but not before Aanshi and Chetan have discovered the delicious, illicit possibilities that car ownership opens up for them. The story is tender, understated and lit with moments of quiet joy. At one point, the couple are sitting at home, and Aanshi leans against her husband, resting her body against his. “It was calming to feel the weight of her on him, this whole other human.”
In one simple phrase, Johal captures the wonder and mystery of “whole other humans” and how impossible it is to really know another person in their entirety. Each of the 17 stories that make up this novel offers a glimpse into the interlinked lives of a vivid cast of characters, mostly from the Punjabi community of Southall and Ealing. I scarcely want to call them ‘characters’: there is such a strong sense that these are simply (simply!) ‘people’ whose lives continue long after the page has been turned.
The stories move easily between the 1960s and the present day. We see characters arrive full of hope and promise, determined to find a way to feel ‘at home’ despite the weather, the bland food, the racist attacks, the National Front, the longing for the familiarity of ‘back home’. In ‘The Red River’, Onkar arrives from Punjab to take up lodgings with his cousin, Balwant, in a grim little bedsit: “The first thing he did was buy a pack of cigarettes. He picked the brand at random, and tucked the little box into his rolled-up t-shirt sleeve, like he’d seen in the movies.” He recalls first meeting his prospective wife under the watchful eyes of their parents: “He and Renu both picked the Parle-G over the barfi.” It is touching details like these that make Johal’s writing shine.
When she arrives at Heathrow, Renu is subjected to the infamous ‘two-finger test’ by immigration officials. Years later, when their local gurdwara erupts in anger at the massacres of Sikhs in 1984, the shout she finally unleashes is fuelled by a burning sense of injustice both personal and political.
Food, too, is both personal and political, and is a recurring theme in the book. Aman, an aspiring chef and cookery book writer herself, calls this the ‘mango-fetish’ of the West: “You only had to wait so long, she said, when reading a western story about India, to come across a mango, a railway or a spiritual reawakening.” It takes considerable chutzpah to both point to the literary mango cliché and then go on to write about mangoes—but Johal manages to do so with deceptive ease.
Like Bernadine Evaristo’s Booker prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other, We Move feels like a real breakthrough in giving a voice to a community vastly underrepresented—and often misrepresented—in contemporary literature. The two books are structurally similar too, as characters appear in different stories at different times and stages in life. As Johal says in a Guardian interview, “Communities are hard to convey in single narratives—how can our messy, interlinked lives fit into a clean, narrative arc? I like how collections offer a kind of narrative web, instead.”
Johal’s narrative web has none of the self-conscious sass of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, nor does it suffer from the blokey misogyny of Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal. He never reduces his characters to caricatures (as Gurinder Chadha so often does when representing British Punjabis), and though there is laughter in the book, it is never at their expense. This is a genuinely accomplished debut from a young writer—age just 24—who I suspect we will be hearing a lot more of in the years to come. In his dextrous hands, the ‘chatpata’ blend of spice, sharp and sweet that make up the lives of these whole other humans is held in perfect, delicious, balance. ■
Johal never reduces his characters to caricatures, and though there is laughter in the book, it’s never at their expense