.png)
16 hours ago
14
“Love is not an easy thing … It’s both the disease and the medicine,” a character says in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become star-crossed lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived realities of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.
Newly arrived in England following an arranged marriage with British-Indian Rajiv, Mira feels increasingly out of place as she finds out that Rajiv holds secrets and loves someone else. On the eponymous Belgrave Road in Leicester, entire days go by “without sight of an English person”, and Mira feels “disappointed that England wasn’t as foreign or as mysterious as she had hoped”. She takes English classes, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing shifts her deep loneliness.
Tahliil is an asylum seeker from Somalia, who, together with his sister, Sumayya, joins their mother in Leicester. He works as an at-home carer and at a cash-and-carry for cash-in-hand while he waits for the Home Office to grant his request for asylum. With a chequered past and an uncertain future, he feels untethered to and untrusting of the world around him. That is, until he sees Mira, who has started working as a cook at the neighbouring sweet shop.
What follows is a love story that is tender and true, fragile and arguably forbidden: “In the space of a few syllables, the world began to contract around them.” In a classic will they, won’t they tale that keeps the reader on tenterhooks, the novel dwells on the unknown: the precariousness of their individual futures and of course their future together, “how unprepared he was, how unprepared they both were, for their own happiness”.
In the face of such uncertainty, and through Mira and Tahliil’s in-laws and parents – who have endured that often elusive experience called life – Chauhan cleverly shows the stark contrasts in beliefs between generations. Mira’s own mother believes “the body to be a vessel of truth – every feeling, every struggle woven into its meat, its bones”. Now, as Mira looks at her mother-in-law, who suffers abuse at her husband’s hands, she wonders whether those words hold true, or whether “the body was as prone to deceit as everything else”. Tahliil, too, questions his mother’s words when she says: “Sometimes you have to wait. What is meant to be yours will always be yours.”
And although Chauhan rehearses some familiar narratives about south Asian men and arranged marriages, he smashes one of the deepest-set stereotypes in south Asian stories: that of the evil, wicked mother-in-law. Mira’s deep bond with her saasu is an intergenerational portrait of two south Asian women navigating the trials and tribulations of immigrant and family life. Ultimately, what emerges between them is a strong sisterhood and a fierce duty of care towards each other. Small gestures of love – oiling each other’s hair, making food – turn into radical acts of protection and liberation in a household where the men make their presence felt with a heavy hand or rough tongue, so much so that when Mira contemplates abandoning her marriage, it’s this loss that we prematurely mourn.
Chauhan’s short fiction has already been acclaimed, and with Belgrave Road, the debut author proves that he can also sustain a well-crafted and plotted novel over 350 pages. This story of love beyond borders and immigrants without anchor points (“Each time a person moves country, they leave a part of themselves behind. We end up homeless. Belonging nowhere”) is full of heart and heartbreak, and defiantly explores the destinies we write for ourselves.
At one point, Tahliil’s father tells him “that the past was like a piece of string, stitched to the inside of a person’s heart. One could never be entirely free of it.” Belgrave Road shows us that, sometimes, the promise of a future is all it takes to fight the ghosts of one’s past.
