The East End as a career

During our visit to London last year, we were picked up from the YMCA one evening by a man called Khaled who worked as a news anchor at a local news channel in London. He was dressed in a dapper Indian-suit and drove a swanky car that he had bought a few months back. He wanted us to go to his office and participate in a documentary he was making and then take us to a friend's place for dinner. The office was situated in East End, just beyond Brick Lane. I had never been to Brick Lane before. We noticed the famous sign which said Brick Lane in Bangla lettering and saw music shops, departmental stores and mechanical stores with distinct Bangla names. Some of the houses also sported cracks and few years of grime. The effect. You must have heard of Monica Ali's book, Khaled was saying. She wrote all kinds of rubbish and made money out of that. And she doesn't even know how to speak Bengali!... This kind of reaction usually draws a condescending chuckle and a sneer from citizens of a secular, democratic republic as we were. If you rail against something as sophisticated as a novel, you're bound to be the irritable intolerant we thought you always were.

I hadn't read Brick Lane then, although I had read rave reviews of it. After coming back to Calcutta, however, I managed to read it and formed a slight opinion.

Brick Lane is almost nothing like a mini-Bangladesh. The graffiti on the wall (see pic.) looked nothing like what could be drawn on a wall in Dhaka- even if you consider the posh areas of Dhanmundi or Bonani. Second and third generation Bangladeshis are moving further and further away from ilish maach and Rabindrasangeet. They simply do not care, as Nazneen's daughters in the novel don't.

The news channel, whose office we were taken to, seemed to wallow in an outdated Jibanananda Das-style nostalgia for a rural Bengal specially manufactured for Coca-Cola-guzzling Londoners. Whereas Jibanananda Das' approach worked extremely well with sentimental, middle class Bengalis scared of losing their touch with their soil in the post-Independence era (and before), the images of remote villages in Bangladesh captured with careless photography, in my opinion, could hardly have an effect on anyone. There is simply no reason to blame the young Shahanas and Bibis for their indifference.

Our host, before starting to shoot, introduced us to some of the senior personnel. They looked impressive and had more than fifteen, twenty years of experience 'in this field'. We were taken to the floors and Khaled seemed to be in a slight dilemma. He brushed it away and asked us to sit on a narrow sofa. There were four of us- and we fit tightly into the sofa and I thought, unfortunately, we resembled an overgrown group of refugees- escaping from a violent country- at the back of truck. The lights were pointed directly at our face, whitewashing us, I imagined, of every possible colour in our faces. The cameraman was in this field for more than twenty years.

However, nothing prepared us for a visit to Khaled's friend's place. It wasn't in Brick Lane- in fact, far from it. His friend, a senior doctor at an important hospital in London, lived in one of the more posh localities of London. He had a house all to himself. Being extremely tired at the end of his long days, he liked to listen to folk Bangla music. For this purpose, he flew in a baul singer from Bangladesh and kept him in a house a few yards away from his own. His house was three storeys highs. His wife was a simple woman who looked slightly frail but not unhappy. They had quite a few children and we met two of the daughters who were, I supposed, in their pre-teens. They seemed nice and quiet, unlike the petulant rebels I expected. No, they had not cooked beef because we were from India and you know.. heh.. heh.

A small crowd had gathered in the house and they talked about London, Sylhet and Bangla music. There was a remix artiste there- actually two of them, a deadly brother-sister duo. The sister had remixed a Nazrulgeeti and the brother played the keyboards. They played it over on their cellphone and the house fell together in a quiet hush to listen in. I remember finding the song quite amusing.

In Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Nazneen- born in what was then East-Pakistan- is married off to Chanu, a jack of many trades but unsuccessful in most, with a paunch and a great liking for proverbs, aphorisms and Tagore songs. What could have easily become a tiring, oppressive caricature, is, however, rescued well and handled very beautifully by Ali. Chanu is the most heartwarming character and is probably the only reason for reading the book. It makes a mess trying to maintain a parallel narrative with Nazneen's sister who stayed back in Bangladesh and writes in a strange and irritating vernacular in her letters to Nazneen. Nazneen's character rolls along and the novel stays afloat with a few more characters who are distinct stereotypes of culturally alienated Bengalis. Until, sick of her loneliness and ennui, Nazneen begins to have a torrid affair with a young would-be revolutionary. It reads a bit patchy from here and one is not sure what exactly keeps the affair going until the inevitable end. The caricature and the dangerous underlying prognostications of hopelessness and inevitability in an alien land provokes the ire of Khaled and his friends, I guessed. To be fair to him, his argument is, after all, an argument. To be held as mere misfits in a place they call home (not to mention their own manufactured versions of it) could easily be taken as insulting and, in a way, demeaning.

I wouldn't dismiss Brick Lane. That a reaction has been effected must itself come as good news. 'Brick Lane' is worth debating and discussing over. The place, Brick Lane, isn't, after all, paved with goldbuiscuits. It dwindles into narrow caricaturing at times and is not exactly a literary masterpiece. It has its own mannerisms which aren't always sweet or interesting. It lacks the precision of Jhumpa Lahiri's prose and also the great emotional crunch contained in it. Lahiri's more of a master of this kind of diasporic fiction and is as literary as they come, but Brick Lane keeps a debate going, or, at any rate, the pots boiling.

(The poster is from Sarah Gavron's adaptation of Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane'- with Nazneen played by Tannishtha Chatterjee. Hopefully we'll have a dekko this year in India.)