Mind Picker: China Room

They live in the china room, which sits at a slight remove from the house and is named for the old willow-pattern plates that lean on a high stone shelf, a set of six that arrived with Mai years ago as part of her wedding dowry. Far beneath the shelf, at waist level, runs a concrete slab that the women use for preparing food, and under this is a little mud-oven. The end of the room widens enough for a pair of charpoys to be laid perpendicular to each other and across these two string beds all three women are made to sleep.

China Room really shouldn’t have worked for me — it’s kind of a sentimental historical drama, dripping with desire and forbidden love — but it touched me. I cared about the characters, was fascinated by the customs, and appreciated the long view that author Sunjeev Sahota provides by splitting the storyline between two members of a Punjabi Sikh family, three generations and seventy years apart. This is unlike Sahota’s last Man Booker nominated novel (The Year of the Runaways, which I loved), and although it feels less deep, it worked for me. Rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred, he counts, barely working his lips and standing unmoving in the yard, in the moon. The sun in the moon. He looks about him, from the quiet of the barn to the charpoys stowed upright under the veranda, their long round legs like rifles, all the way across to the china room, shuttered in silence. He’d skipped over the double-doors at the rear of the porch. Now, he walks towards them, applies his hand to the flaking paint and steals inside, to where Mehar has been instructed to wait for her husband.

I have no idea how commonplace a practise the basic premise is: It is 1929 in the Punjab and a nasty matriarch has, over the lives of her three sons, arranged marriages for them with girls from distant villages, and in order to save money, she decides that all three ceremonies will happen on the same day. Three young women (from fourteen to nineteen) — always veiled in public with a material that only allows them to see their own feet and hands as they walk and work — move into the “china room” off the main house on their wedding day; and although they can peek through the slats of the blinds when the men are in the courtyard, none of brides have any clue which of the brothers is her own husband. Even when one of the brothers gets permission from his mother for a conjugal visit — for grandsons are wanted to work the family farm — the room that they couple in is so dark that none of the women can figure out which brother was hers; and it would apparently be bold and impious to ask. The most daring (and youngest) of the women, Mehar, decides to risk everything to make a deeper connection with her spouse.

Men have their needs. But for her life would be over. She can see herself now: head shaved, breasts exposed, the iron pigring around her neck and the coarse rope parading her through the village. She can hear the crowds calling her a dirty whore and feel the rocks cutting her flesh as she lurches to the well and jumps to her drowning end. Yes, for those reasons she will go. But, lying on her bed, her back to Harbans’ back, she recognises another note, a lighter, brighter music behind the crashing deathcymbals. She listens to it, and hears it for what it is: desire, her own, amplifying. She closes her eyes and whispers, out loud but so only she can hear it –‘I want you, too’– and then she reopens them, and for a long time she stares at the muddy apples spilled across the stone ledge of the window.

In a second storyline, it is 1999 and Mehar’s eighteen-year-old great-grandson returns to the Punjab from where he was raised in rural England, wanting to kick his heroin habit before starting university. When his sickly presence proves too upsetting for his uncle’s sour wife, the boy moves out to the old farm, eventually fixing up the homestead and unwittingly choosing the china room as his own sleeping quarters. Through the hard work and the company of some locals, the unnamed character regains his health and hears stories about the customs that still thwart people’s desires. Looking around at what seems to him like a fine place to live, and recalling instances of the racism and back-breaking work that his parents suffered through in order to give him a better life, he has to wonder if their sacrifices were really worth it.

‘You know what the best thing is about falling out of love? It sets you free. Because when you’re in love it is everything, it is imprisoning, it is all there is, and you’d do anything, anything, to keep that love. But when it withers you can suddenly see the rest of the world again, everything else floods back into the places that love had monopolised.’

Apparently roughly based on Sahota’s own family history (there is a photo at the end of a very old woman holding a baby; is that Mehar with her great-grandson, the author?), China Room has the feeling of truth to it; the plot didn’t go the way I expected, but such is life. This novel doesn’t employ sophisticated literary tricks, and I could even call it lightweight, but it weighed on me all the same. Call me pleasantly surprised.