Writing a novel was neither fun nor a carefree endeavour but it was absorbing enough to engage Sunjeev Sahota completely. There were days, recalls Sahota, when he started writing on a Sunday morning and did not look up from his keyboard till dusk had settled in. It was time well spent as his debut work, Ours Are The Streets published in 2011, brought him immediate accolades even though the novel took shape after several drafts and took him four years to write. It was nominated for the Daily Mail Award for Original Paperback Fiction, 2011, and the East Midlands Book Award, 2012.
Now his second book, The Year of the Runaways, a story centred around a group of illegal immigrants living in Sheffield, is being hailed as both engrossing and incisive.
But for a chance encounter with Rushdie’s work, Sunjeev Sahota could have missed the literary bus completely. It was not until he reached university to study Mathematics that this Man Booker longlisted author, a Sikh born and brought up in Derbyshire, England actually began reading. Reading happened when on his way to a holiday to India, where he bought and read his first novel, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Soon he found himself going beyond the act of just reading as he began thinking and contemplating on the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of the craft of writing.
Sahota recalls his reading Rushdie, “Reading that book was like a dam coming down. It opened my eyes to the world of storytelling and will always be a very special book for me.” Though he had read plays of Shakespeare and Sheriden and Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry in school, he recalls he had read no novels. After Midnight’s Children, Sahota turned into a voracious reader devouring Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy among others.
He realised he couldn’t have enough of world of storytelling and found himself making up for lost time. That wonderment led to the inevitable — the desire to have a go at it himself. And in 2005, in the aftermath of the terrorist bombing in London, Sahota decided to write the story of a suicide bomber told in a Muslim voice.
About his latest book, Sahota says, “I think the books’ emotional posture is attuned to my own feelings about my place in England, the sense of not feeling, in some vital way, wholly part of the land I was born in. That fed into my first novel, a book which suggested that, for some young men, feelings of animosity towards England are driven by a thwarted desire to belong in England.”
Sahota’s cross-cultural writing, he says, did not get him any negative noise. He says, “There wasn’t any criticism over my assuming a Muslim voice to tell the story. In the book, Imtiaz yearns for, and then in Pakistan thinks he finds, a place where he belongs. Maybe, that’s Imtiaz’s tragedy that he confuses a sense of belonging with the difficulty of finding your own place in the world.” His dual identity, for Sahota, is both a positive or negative influence as it gives him another way to look at the world. But he adds that the interface where both cultures meet — personally and politically — is also a cause of great tension. “I love India a great deal and visit once or twice a year. I have a large family in Punjab and always feel very much at home there.”
Though some have called The Year of the Runaways a political novel, Sahota says he doesn’t fully understand what a ‘political’ novel is. He does agree though that “since the book does concern itself with notions of goodness and sacrifice, what we should do for those around the world who want their share of the global wealth, and these are ideas that have become politicised — so maybe it is a political novel.”
Among the writers who he admires, Sahota names the South African writers Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee and Damon Galgut and says, “The unflinching way they record their country’s history and predicaments is inspiring.” Not yet quite sure about his upcoming book, Sahota says, “I’ve not yet got a clear idea of what my next novel will be. I think it will be a shorter work, and may involve a fantastical premise.” He adds a tip for the aspiring authors — “Read lots, give yourself time to write, and be patient, both with yourself and the work.”
