Booker nominated Sunjeev Sahota’s ‘The China Room’ is about shared pain & longing, 70 years on

Aradhika Sharma

A bravura novel by one of the most celebrated young writers of England, ‘The China Room’ is Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, the first being ‘Ours are the Streets’ (2011). His second, ‘The Year of the Runaways’, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, raising expectations from his third novel. And Sahota doesn’t disappoint.

The book straddles two lives separated by time, space, politics and experience. The stories are distinct yet inextricably entwined. The protagonists, who have never met each other, are young Punjabi bride Mehar and an unnamed youth, later revealed to be her great grandson. Their crises of existence, though separated by seven decades, are similar in the isolation and disconnect they face.

Set in 1929, the first story is that of Mehar, a teenager who gets married to one of three brothers. The other two also wed the same day. Their brides spend the day doing household chores in the confines of the China Room (so called because the shelves on the walls bear the China that had come as part of some bride’s dowry at some point of time) and at night, their widowed mother-in-law (Mai) taps one of them on the shoulder, indicating that the chosen girl should go into a darkened cubbyhole of a room to sleep with her husband. None of the girls knows the identity of the man she is married to. They do their duty in an unilluminated room and that’s the extent of the interaction permitted to them by the tyrannical Mai, who takes pleasure in keeping them guessing about which of her sons is their husband. The irony is that while the brothers know who their wives are, the three girls are kept literally in the dark.

The author says that the kernel of the story lies within the history of his own family. One of the stories he had heard about his forebears was that of four brothers, one of whom married his great grandmother. Evidently, the brides only saw their husbands’ faces when they gave birth to their babies. Until then, their husbands, whom they were supposed to serve and honour and who visited them at night, were faceless men.

Running along Mehar’s tale, but following a different timeline, is the story of an 18-year-old heroin addict, who, at the turn of the millennium, shows up at his uncle’s house in rural Punjab. The son of an immigrant shopkeeper, he travels to rural Punjab from a small town in England in search of answers to his existential anxiety. His predicaments are of a fractured identity that has emerged from the clashing cultures of his country of birth and the country where he was raised. The angst and depression that the boy experiences create a feeling of disconnect, discrimination and estrangement that pushes him over the edge of a precipice into a chasm of dangerous addiction.

Now, just before he is to start university, he comes seeking solace. He finds himself at his ancestral home, irresistibly drawn to China Room where his grandmother’s rebellion had played out. It is a summer of reconnecting, of processing his pain, gathering strength for the journey back home and finally moving on.

A claustrophobic atmosphere engulfs the narrative. The actual windowless room inhabited by Mehar and her sisters-in-law and the confines ordained by Mai bind their thoughts and desires so tightly that they do not even have the right to know the identity of their husbands.

Mehar is not as compliant as the other two girls and consistently tries to work the puzzle regarding which of the three men could be her husband. She does so with several visual and audio clues. When she believes she has recognised her husband, she falls in love with the man and permits herself to explore the pleasures of sex with him, thus taking control of her own desire and asserting her right to feel that desire. The turbulence within Mehar is a mirror to the times of political unrest when India was in a fierce fight for independence from Britain.

The connection between the experiences of Mehar and her great grandson lies 70 years apart, yet, it is strongly felt. The themes of both their lives are about captivity and freedom and are kindred with a similar longing.

Sahota’s sense of empathy shines through the book. He writes about gender, isolation, prejudice, rebellion and desire with subtlety and compassion, careful not to strike a false note. While the feelings of the protagonists are intense and churning, the tone is soft and quiet.