The first response you have when you see the cover of Sanjay Suri's Brideless inWembley is that its going to be like Bend it like Beckham or East isEast between covers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As somebody who has a little more than a passing acquaintance with the Indo-Pak-Bangla diaspora in that country, (I stayed in London for a year during the turn of the millennium, including a two-month stint in Leicester where I was in an Indian play), I was little prepared for a book that takes the lid off the vast, complex, often contradictory societies that make up the 'Brit-Asian' socio-cultural mosaic.
Sanjay Suri's non-fiction account of his 'wanderings through the Indian corridors of England' unfolds quite entertainingly, innocuously, with the story of brave, enterprising Dhanjibhai Atwal, who after illegally emigrating to England in 1956 now spends his life making a similar (legal) passage easier for Indians. You keep indulgent company with this first account as you read about the indomitable spirit of this self-professed 'Gandhi-satyagrahi' who is also a 'Bombay-ka-khiladi'.
In the next episode, the writer's discovery of Leicester not being anything close to multicultural, or even adjacently cultural but, in fact, being variously monocultural from a day's unmoving penance on a bench in The Shires mall observing how many shoppers moved in ethnic groups is sly-funny. It's from the story after, 'Give me Ghetto', that you begin to realise you're in for a ride that is less charming catalogue and more incisor-sharp sociolog. Suri goes to visit Mr. And Mrs. Barot, who stay in white, working class, Northfields, Leicester, a very long mile away from the Indian neighbourhoods around Belgrave and Melton Roads. "I wasn't expecting to step on to a metal sheet when Mrs. Barot opened the door. She saw my surprise over this metal doormat. 'It's these boys,' she said. 'They had been throwing fire inside and they used to put shit through the letter box. So I put this iron sheet and I sealed the letter box.' The way she told me, she'd obviously been saying it to visitors before; matter-of-fact, like it was just sensible to let shit land on a tin sheet, not on a welcoming rug."
From Leicester we travel through England opening a Patel's Box as Suri discovers the most divided surname in the history of modern man. We learn about the Kutch Leva Patels being distinctly different from the Muktajivan Patels despite both sects being followers of Swaminarayan, the Chha-gam (six-village) Patels, the Charotar Patels that comprise the Chovis-Gam (twenty-four-village) Patidar Samaj, Shree Bavis-Gam Patidar Samaj (twenty-two...), Shree Sattavis Gam Patidar Samaj, Shree Vis-Gam Patidar Samaj, Shree Sattar-Gam Patidar Samaj, how the Sojitra Samaj, although being a part of the Cha-gam Patels is in the camp of the Charotar Patels...till at the end of this chapter you are least surprised to find 40 out of 380 pages devoted to this illustrious name so zealously splintered that inter-sub-group marriages are more rare than a sub-group without a 'hole' (hall).
Holes is where our writer goes to (and, presumably where the title of this book derives from) to look for a prospectivewife. As the narrative draws to a close with his travels to a meeting-place-for-prospective-marriage 'hole' for Gujarati lohannas, for Gujarati Aryas, to his increasingly frantic efforts at Fun-dating, Speed-dating and HP (Hindu-Punjabi) dating, we reflect with unease, on a society riven with caste, communal and colour divisions, incest, wife-incarceration, rape, and Indo-Pak tension. The natural question that comes to a reader's mind is : 'How on earth did all this madness go unchecked? For answers, please refer to India: The Mother Country.
Brideless in Wembley is a look at Brit-Asian society through the eyes of a seemingly neutral observer who gives it all away with a straight face that alternates between marveling with admiration, guffawing with disbelief and exploding with anger. I feltthe same.
A slightly shorter version of this appears in print.
