Like most first novels, Anita and Me is strongly autobiographical, but unlike most, it is not just the story of one person but an evocation of an entire era.
The working-class mining village of Tollington, where Meena Kumar grows up, is peopled with some sprightly, vivid characters. From Mrs Worrall next door, with her friendly potato of a face, tombstone teeth and invalid husband, to the raucous crew of women, known collectively as 'The Ballbearings Committee' who flirt outrageously with anything in trousers on their way to work.
Meena longs to escape from her humdrum existence into a world of tragedy and glamour, of techni colour emotions painted on a big screen. The romanticised version of her parents' lives, which she later paints for exotically-inclined boyfriends, was a far cry from her everyday existence in Tollington. The strength of this book, ultimately like Meena's own, is the hard-edged refusal to glamourise the very real pain, loss and loves felt by ordinary people.
Meena's thrill at her parents' story of a stabbing witnessed during the Partition riots, horrifies her mother: "She looked at me much as I imagine Damien's mother looked when she gave her smiling baby his first shampoo and found three sixes curled up like commas behind his tiny pink ear." But what fascinated her was not the violence, but "this meeting of two worlds, the collision of the epic with the banal".
Meera Syal is too fine a comic writer to let real-life hardship bog the reader down. She mines a similar rich vein of Indian English life as Hanif Kureishi, but unlike Karim in Buddha of Suburbia, Meena's journey from innocence to experience never descends to bleak, biting satire. The characters that people her life, both English and Punjabi, are portrayed with genuine affection and her ultimate triumph leaves the reader cheering her on, hopeful for the future.
The village bad girl, Anita Rutter, is everything that Meena longs to be and that her parents fear she will turn into. Sluttish, irreverent, wicked and charismatic, Anita is the antithesis of Pinky and Baby, and when she abandons her sidekicks, Sherrie and Fat Sally, and chooses Meena as her second-in-command, Meena's dreams of adventure seem to come true. But when Anita takes up with Sam Lowbridge, Tollington's resident skin-head and racist, Meena's idolisation turns to something more complex.
Though she may caricature occasionally, Meera Syal never simplifies her characters' inner lives. Even racist thugs, she manages to say, are not only that. Meena's hatred of Sam is mixed with her attraction towards him, his sheer energy and lack of respect. But in the final showdown, it is Meena who turns the tables on him. "When I said them," he rasped, "I never meant you, Meena! It was all the others, not you." "I am the others, Sam. You did mean me." Syal manages to blend the yearning felt by every child "not to be different" with Meena's growing awareness of her brown skin in a white society. Her sheer spunkiness is infectious as she point-blank refuses either to be a victim of the racism that surrounds her or, equally, to be the chaste, obedient "good Punjabi girl" that her relatives want.
More Mike Leigh than Salman Rushdie, Meera Syal manages to combine comedy and tragedy with deceptive ease. There are moments of pure farce—such as Meena's mother's first 20 mph solo drive to the local gurudwara—which can suddenly turn nasty, revealing the latent racism all around, and a stupid insult from an unflinching middle-aged woman deals a blow to Meena as effectively as a fist in the stomach.
On one level, Anita and Me is a simple story of the path from innocence to experience during two years of one young girl's fairly unremarkable life. On another, though, it is exactly this collision of tragedy and everyday life. Death, love, jealousy, rivalry, betrayal: the elements are there for a Shakespearean tragedy—or a modern day fable—but throughout and above all, there is Meera Syal's wicked, wonderful way with words. Those who have laughed their way through Bhaji on the Beach, for which she wrote the script, will not be disappointed by her sharp wit, fine eye for detail and keen ear for accents. A wonderful debut novel, and an appetiser for things to come.
