You, a sensitive ingénue freshly arrived from the subcontinent, face the gleaming metropolis for the first time. Having hardened yourself to the feelings of your family, you have abandoned a prospective career as clerk in a lawyer’s office and a stable relationship with your third cousin, Padma, for a life of self-actualisation.
A bookish sort of fellow, praised in your Commonwealth public school for your poise and intelligence, you dream of writing a novel. A proper one, full of lengthy digressions and state-of-the-nation screeds. You want to convey the psychic disruption and emotional tumult of the postcolonial condition. You suffer from double vision, blurred vision, seeing triple of everything, but one thing you do see clearly, though, is the glory. Your book will sweep the Booker, the Whitbread and any other prestigious bauble you could think of. You imagine the valley of tears from critics and fans alike, the letters of gratitude, the visiting professorships and the honorary doctorates. It’ll be the greatest novel ever written about the continent – if only you could just get past the first line.
You need a guide. Someone to distil the wisdom of those gone before you, to give you a vernacular into which you’ll pour the distended palpitations of your heart. And here lies such a template. You didn’t ask, my dear friend, but you certainly shall receive.
Your protagonist has arrived in London to study, but feels alienated and misses the ‘warm, red-coloured dirt’ of their homeland. They are naïve, impressionable yet intelligent, albeit in an uncultivated, immature way.
They need cultivating. They meet a male member of the British intelligentsia. If your character is male, the intellectual will serve as a mentor (and implied lover). If your character is female, the man will become her actual lover, adoring her exotic complexion and calling her something like the ‘Nightingale of Kolkata’. He’ll gaslight her into believing she’s unworthy of his love, that he contains a depth and heft of feeling that she cannot comprehend. You, the author, believe this, and so does she. He’s British and wears horn-rimmed glasses, after all. She wants to be a poet, but this seems fanciful.
She’s a hummingbird, a songbird, and this avian quality filters its way through her poetry. Her beloved indulges these creations, calls them ‘delicate’ or ‘evasive’, and urges her to take claim of her heritage, to touch and take on the East. She cannot, or will not, summon the Eastern magic that is expected of her. The past is a foreign land and she has become (whisper it) Westernised. This is unsettling. The couple’s relationship cools. Sexual intercourse becomes intermittent, if not impossible.
Intimacy will be unattainable. Something has happened, somewhere in the deep void of your character’s subcontinental subconscious which prevents this. Don’t mention what it is. Glance toward it. Fragment your narrative and spice it with dark allusions to a terrible misdeed that occurred in the savage motherland. Capitalise things unnecessarily, such as History and Revenge and Hate and Love. Collapse words together like ‘Orangedrink Lemondrink’ and always narrate things in a detached, first-person indirect style. It’ll be a postmodern, postcolonial masterpiece.
But maybe this kind of writing doesn’t suit you. Maybe, my young émigré writer, you have very different desires. You yearn for scale, size, sheer breadth: you want, nay need, to write a big, weighty tome.
