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Literary Review
Chicken tikka lit
ANITA ROY
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Mildly spiced (to suit the Western palettes), more of a starter than the main dish and going down equally well with a side-order of naan or chips.
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Bitter Sweets, Roopa Farooki, Macmillan, price not stated
The “tangled web that we weave when we first practise to deceive” is precisely the one that Roopa Farooki unravels in this jaunty first novel. Opening with a delicious deception of a wedding reception, Rashid (a.k.a. “Ricky”)
a sensitive young Bangladeshi bridegroom finds himself on his nuptial night faced with an extremely bitter realisation: “that his educated seventeen-year-old bride was actually an illiterate shopkeeper’s daughter, a thirteen-year-old child who had married him as a way to skip school and fulfil a schoolgirl fantasy of becoming an actress.”
Family traditions
Virgin she may be; innocent she’s certainly not. Henna, his child-bride, has learned how to lie, dissemble, and fib her way through life at her father’s knee — and carries on the ignoble family tradition with considerable élan. The lying gene is passed on to their daughter, Shona, although she’s a far nicer person than either her mother or grandfather.
Shona and her husband Parvez (referred to throughout by her disapproving parents as “the Pakistani”) elope to London where they raise twin sons — Omar and Sharif. Farooki lightly leaps across years, zooms forward, jump-cuts and telescopes lives to keep the narrative dancing along. As we follow the fortunes and misfortunes of the family through three generations, the lies roll in thick and fast. Rashid stays true to his (false) wedding vows for 20 years but then — true to his heart — marries bigamously, and leads a double-life with his new true love, Verity and their daughter Candida. As you may have guessed, names mean a lot to this family. The narrator suggests that Ricky/ Rashid would never have fallen for Verity Trueman if she’d been called something else.
Farooki’s narrative style is sure-footed and unassuming until about a hundred pages in when she suddenly decides to switch to the first person viewpoint, so that Sharif (for some reason) gets to explain the slow dissolution of his parents’ love. Nothing before or after this suggests why Sharif (a fairly inarticulate, self-centred young buck) and no one else is chosen to describe this story. Neither is the tone anything like how he speaks in the rest of the book. It’s all rather baffling. And yet, it is here that we get the clue to the title, when Sharif describes his father’s love of music as “a bittersweet gift” — he could appreciate it but wasn’t much good at playing it himself.
Experiments that don’t work
Having spent one entire chapter explaining the death of Shona and Parvez’s love, it seems entirely unnecessary to spent yet another chapter doing the same, 16 pages later, but this time addressing the reader as “you” throughout. Both of these chapters stick out like sore thumbs, stylistic experiments that would have been much improved by the early intervention of a stout-hearted editor with a sharp knife.
About two thirds of the way through, I began to wonder if I’d read this book before: three generations of Asians, the immigrant experience in 1960s London, arranged marriages and love matches, Brit-Asian teen rebels and feisty, sari-clad grandmums… it all seemed awfully familiar. In the wake of early hits, such as Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, an entire subgenre has sprung up, by now substantial enough to deserve its own moniker: “chick tikka lit” perhaps
. It’s mildly spiced (to suit the Western palettes), more of a starter than the main dish, authored and read mainly by girls, and goes down equally well with a side-order of naan or chips.
Of its kind, Bitter Sweets is definitely one of the better examples of tikka lit: neither as serious as Jhumpa Lahiri, as portentous as Bharati Mukherjee, nor as twee as Divakaruni. Provoking quiet smiles rather than belly-laughs, t
he family have to deal not with slings and arrows but “life’s little ups and downs”. And instead of catharses, Farooki serves up with a series of rather neat happily-ever-afters, confirming, if confirmation were needed, that the emphasis in the title is on the second word, not the first.
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