Sunjeev Sahota, CHINA ROOM: A Novel

[1:47]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back this to amazing podcast. Listeners, if you enjoy this podcast, I promise you will love my new audiobook for moms don't have time to a quarantine anthology. It's not about the quarantine, but a lot of the essays were written during that time about other things that moms don't have time to do or other busy people, things like reading, eating, working out, breathing, having sex. And 60 bestselling and notable authors wrote essays. All those authors have been on this very podcast. So if you like to listen to my conversations, if you want to get to know these authors better, I read the audiobook myself. Check it out on Audible, Moms Don't Have A Quarantine Anthology. Again, Audible audiobook. Go listen to it. It's like sixty minute podcasts. I hope you enjoy. Sanjeev Sahota is the author of China Room, a novel. He is also the author of Hours Are the Streets and The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature. In 2013, he was named one of Granta's 20 best of young British novelists of the decade. He lives in Sheffield, England with his family. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss China Room. I'm so excited that you're here. Well, thanks, Cindy. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for asking me. So would you mind telling listeners what your book is about? And also, would love to hear more of the backstory of your family and how this is sort of loosely based on folklore in your own family and all that good stuff. Yeah sure. So the book's about a place, a room

[3:56]Sunjeev Sahota: in a farm in rural India in a state in the Northwest of India called Punjab and the two lives that kind of are, that inhabit that room and also in turn inhabited by it. So in 1929 we have Meha who's a young girl, she's 15 years old and she's one of three women that have been married to three brothers and because of the customs of the time and the fact that they were married in one ceremony and they're kept sequestered from the men, she doesn't know which of the brothers her husband. So the novel in a way charts desire to not only just find out who it is that she's married to but also her development to an increased knowledge of her own personhood, of her own right to feel desire and to have needs and wants of her own and for freedom and self expression. So that's 1929. Then there's another strand set in 1999 which is when a young man, her great grandson we come to learn, comes to stay on the farm in that same room to kind of come to terms with his own travails and his difficulties of growing up in kind of the de industrialised North Of England. So it's a story set across once more, three summers actually, where both these characters are trying to, well it's a sum of reckoning, they're trying to come to terms with ideas of self worth and freedom and both kind of like trying to make themselves kind of liberated. I think yes, story of liberation, I see it. And yeah, the seed of the story was there's kind of this legend or this family lore about my great grandmother who was apparently one of four women, actually not three, one of four women who was married to four brothers. And so the story goes how this story has been embellished over the decades you know, Lord knows. But, it's always been passed down that they didn't know which of the brothers or she didn't know which of the brothers she was married to until a year later when they saw who was holding which child when they'd all actually had a child by then. And it was always spoken of with a degree of kind of humour or levity this story but it always struck me as being quite a dark and painful kind of story as well, if not predominantly. So there was that first kind of seed was perhaps that story of my that legend of my great grandmother. And secondly the fact that that room still exists and it used to be called the Women's Room then now it's that room on that farm which is my family's farm in India, it's now used as a grain store and it's still got bars on the window and it just made me think about why was it called the Women's Room, what did they do in there, why were they in there, and what did being in that room for so long actually mean and do to them? So that was the second thing. Then the third thing, there was also some sketchy details, some very sketchy detail about a male ancestor of around that time who was involved in some sort of scandalised way with the burgeoning Indian independence movement. So those three things kind of were the three posts around which I kind of webbed and created the kind of a work of fiction.

[7:13]Zibby Owens: Wow. So tell me about how this started. So one day, are you just like walking by the bars and the windows and you're like, oh, maybe this could be a good novel. Like when did you take the seat of it? And then how did you decide this was gonna make it as a novel? Like, did you test it out? Did you know right away? Did you write any of it? Did you outline it? Like, I'm just very fascinated by the idea of when we get these glimmers of ideas, how do you know when it's going to be a great book and how far do you take it until you decide?

[7:43]Sunjeev Sahota: Yeah, really didn't. You never know whether it's going turn out to be a book, whether it's going to be an idea that's discarded. I find that's part of the writing process for me that a lot. With all my books so far, sometimes as much as 60,000 words, I'll get into a book and then I'll find out it's not working. I've just discard it and start again. It's always frustrating to say the least, but it's part of, I think it's just part of how I work. With this book I started off with, so there was this idea of this, it just starts with that premise not knowing who your husband was could give rise to so much drama, know, just so much kind of in there and how it might play out over the generations and over the years. So I started writing that story and then my initial idea was it would just play out over the generation and we'd see what this, what kind of awful misunderstanding, how that might play out over time. And this '19, this kind of the '99 struggle was never in my sort of consciousness at that time, at that point. So I started writing that story in about 2017, and I wrote about maybe 15,000 words. And before the sec you know, that kind of wobble in my writing, which would become so used to happen, and I thought this isn't working, I didn't see why I needed to write that story. I didn't see what what was the urgency behind that story. I seemed to require a real something really pulling me to the page. The sense that this story has to be written for me to actually keep turning up, keep turning up at the desk. And so it wasn't yeah. I kind of lost I kept I lost faith faith in that story, and I kept I remember talking about it with my friends that the story just died. It was like a bereavement that the story just died on me. I I can't it's not mine to tell. So I set up I set that aside, and, actually, one of the ideas in that in that initial idea I had was this idea of a doppelganger of it was going to have a kind of a magical element to it, idea of this, you know, the idea of the double and seeing a double. It's quite a potent image in Indian folklore as well as in other mythologies as well and yeah it's kind of a harbinger of death and doom and end of times. That was that. So though I discovered although I set what I thought I'd set aside that story, that image of the doppelganger really stayed with me. So I started writing what I thought were complete separate and different novels with this of this playful image of and this kind of fantastical image of the doppelganger. And it was set in the future, stories and these kind of the other novels I started writing or started starting to write. They were set in the future where the kind of doppelgangers were kind of like happening. It sounds all very strange. Very where it sounds strange, but I could have slowly, those doppelgangers because I that because though they weren't quite coming to life, I started putting myself into those stories or versions of myself, and slowly this doppelganger became a version of me until I realized that it was just a version of me that I transmuting and mapping onto the page. And so these doppelgangers in time as well, whereas the story was set in the future, became closer and closer to our to our present moment and then kind of went past the present moment into kind of, like, this slight historical past. So I realized I was writing about a version of myself and that I was actually writing something that was perhaps quite autofictional. And then I realised that this was this would have been in 2019. And then I realised that this character that I was with this unnamed narrator that I was writing about, his kind of concerns and his difficulties and what he was searching for were also liberation, freedom, kind of a place to call home'. And then I remember thinking well that's quite similar to what this mad character that I was writing about two years previously was also kind of dealing with'. So I took that back out of the draw, that initial 15,000 words, and the reality is that these stories actually could be a whole and they could both belong side by side or they could spiral around each other and that's how I see the stories in the book. They do spiral around each other. So that's kind of how they came to be, the novel came to be really. I love that, that's so interesting. So it just goes to show,

[11:51]Zibby Owens: don't throw away those extra words that maybe you feel like the story has died and yet you can revive it. These are resurrectable, if you will, the discarded traps. Yeah. Nothing's ever lost. I do believe that everything will kind of find its way in there somehow. Even when you think even when you think, you know, there's no way it can be. You know, in the book, it was I was really struck by how much fear there must be. I mean, we're living in this time of like Me Too and women being able to say no and women's rights and the actions of men against women. The idea that Meha then her siblings or her sisters in laws or I don't even know what you call them, that they're all there and yet they can't even see barely who it is and they don't know. And all they can feel are the calluses and, you know, catch glimpses and try to see out from their veils the next day. I mean, that is it's really almost hard as a woman to even process how that would be. And then to have to, you know, open yourself up and, like, have children with these men who are, like, essentially, you know, animal. I mean, it's crazy when you think about it. Anyway, the way you made it was so vivid and kind of horrifying, to be honest, putting myself in these women's shoes. So I don't know. You definitely you definitely created this world where that was, you know, and even the way that they laughed together and they tried to find the humor in it to get through as women often do in difficult situations and try to find any sort of levity during what must have been, like, disheartening time to say the least. I don't know. I was really struck by all that. Thank you. I'm not sure thank you is quite right.

[13:29]Sunjeev Sahota: I'm glad was vivid, know, that's kind of what you want on the page. You want the page to feel alive. You want it to actually, you know, kind of live inside the reader's head. But you're right. They have no they have no voice. They have no the women, you know, Meherr and Herbrandson and Gharlene, the two sisters in law, they have no right to feel anything. They have no right to know anything according, you know, according to the other people in the house, not least the tyrannical mother-in-law who's watching watchful eye they live over. Today we would consider those behaviours in terms of gendered power dynamics, but of course those kind of terms weren't available to them. Nevertheless it's really interesting to me how those kinds of power dynamics do play out and do corrupt kind of like these people's love for each other actually. So even though on one hand the story could be read as a kind of a love story between Meher and Suraj but also it's kind of it's a love that is corrupted by these very you know gendered power dynamics. So how much is, and this is a note in the book, how much is Meher's professed love for Suraj actually just her projection for her need freedom, how much does she just see him as a vehicle to get her out of the China room and to get to a place where she does have greater liberation? And likewise how much is Suraj's professed love for Maher actually just a projection and an illustration of his need to sort of like, as he says, destroy the world, know, the difficulty he faces to be the youngest born son in a family where the youngest is not allowed any or permitted any sort of rights to land or to, you know, status. So it's interesting to me how the love, how the gender paranomics do actually play a big part in their feelings for each other. And also I just love the fact that Meherr, you know she is, you're right, she doesn't have a voice but she is courageous, she is strong willed, she's spirited and parts of you know the joy for me in the book is watching how she kind of takes ownership of her right to feel desire and of her right to her own personhood as the novel goes on. Wow.

[15:29]Zibby Owens: Did you debate using any other titles or were you sure this would be it the whole time? Titles.

[15:35]Sunjeev Sahota: Well, no. When I was started it was called The Women's Room which to me felt just felt a little never quite start right. I felt a little too on the nose and just slightly slightly both too generic and also just too particular because it didn't really, it kind of pointed too much to that space without talking to the things that the space might represent a bit more widely. So when China Room came to my head that was it felt right and usually with titles that's it. You have it they feel right and either they refer to something in the novel or they refer to something outside of the novel. What China Room did both it both refers to the space but also refers to what that space represents, it points outside of the space as well. And China, and I have these silly ideas that China is, you know, the idea of delicacy versus room, which is quite a room is meant to be quite solid spaces. I like that kind of opposition and also, and this is a silly thing, I like the fact that no letters in the word China are repeated in the word room. So as if both the words are kind of like the letters all stand apart and they come out they're staring at each other in quite a spare kind of like gazing quite like a hard way which no one else would ever notice but it's something that I think appeals to my sense of what a good title can do and can be. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[18:47]Sunjeev Sahota: Wait. So how did you become a novelist to begin with? Well, I think like most writers I was a reader first, I was a late reader. I didn't start reading novels until I was in my like late teens, till I was about 18. When I really got the bug and I realised that through the act of reading was where I found meaning in that kind of conversation between reader and writer is where meaning is kind of like producing, watching these characters going through their lives in this hypothetical space which we call a novel was where actually ideas of truth and dramatic truth actually really came to the fore and they really resonated really strong with me. When I first started reading novels I was just reading so heavily, so I was reading beautiful novels a day. It was like a dampered burst in this world of storytelling that just sort of came over me like a wave. So I read heavily and then at some point, you know, I just thought I started asking questions of the of the writer beyond the page, like why did you write this book in this way? Why in this order? Why have you know, why not like this instead? And I think once you start wondering how a book is put together and how it works, for some it's it's not too great a leap to to think that you can have a go yourself. Actually, I could have I could have a go at this. I can actually if I can do the nuts and bolts and the mechanics and put together this clockwork arrangement and try to make a novel work. So I started writing my first novel when I was probably yeah, was in my mid twenties, about 26, and that came out when I was 29. Wow. Were you working full time also or did you make that your job? Like how did you fit it in? No, was working full time, I was working in a, for a financial services firm in, I was working for, it was an insurance firm actually, I was in the marketing department for them so I'd write in the evenings and at weekends and through you know holidays instead of going you know anyway interesting. I just sit in the room at the top of my parents house secretly scrolling away just writing. I didn't tell anyone I wanted to be a writer or that I was writing. It simply felt like something I needed to keep quite secret and to myself and I didn't start writing full time until I was about halfway through my second novel or just when it became financially viable to do so. Wow.

[21:03]Zibby Owens: That's amazing. Why were you afraid? Were you afraid they weren't you wouldn't be successful? Like, what was the where was where did the fear come from? Let's dig deep here. I

[21:15]Sunjeev Sahota: suppose there was just no, that I had no examples of people around me who worked in the arts or were bookish. I wasn't from a particularly, I'm not from a literary family or a bookish household and no one around me was bookish. So it just felt quite a slightly bombastic thing to say, say I want to be a writer or I'm going to be a writer. It's like well who are you to be? It felt like just a strange and slightly unbelievable kind of goal to aim for. So I think that's why I think just not wanting to appear, getting also just not perhaps not feeling as if if in some sense I had quite at that time had the right to claim that kind of thing. Whilst you know, once you are right you realize it's nothing at all, know, it's anyone can anyone can and should do it. It shouldn't be something that is put on a different plane to any other kind of profession at all. At that time I did feel something that was just something otherworldly about it.

[22:12]Zibby Owens: Well so your doppelganger could be a professional author while you could be squirreling away in marketing or something.

[22:20]Sunjeev Sahota: Yeah that would work. Are you working on a new novel now? I am and I've just started it's very early days but the idea of the doppelganger zoobie won't go away it's still gnawing at me. So clearly there is something in that image and in that idea which I'm going to have to just write out because I think it's going to go away until I do actually get it on the page. I think, but the book might well centre that kind of idea or notion. But again knowing how my creative process worked in the last three novels, I could get 30,000 words into it and realise that's not going to fly and just start again. At the moment it's just a very early delicate stage where I'm just trying to work out not even what the book is about, but like what do I want the book to be about or what you know but I'm usually in the second draft that the book will tell me what it's really about. Interesting and what do you like to read? Do you still love to read? Do you read all the time? Oh, don't I don't read any as well near as much as I used to. I have three young children, so it's just time just isn't there to read as much as I did, though. It's getting easier. Dad don't have time to read books, perhaps? Yeah, but it's getting easier as they are slowly but surely getting older. I love to read it. Mean I'm reading Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment at the moment which is somehow I didn't read it when it first came out and I'm loving, really loving that actually. That's really enjoyable. I love Curtzy, the South African or I suppose now Australian novelist Joan Didion. I really love her work. So yeah, Helen Garner. I tend to write poets. Actually Les Murray, the late Les Murray, he's a real favourite of mine, the Australian poet but I tend to respond to writing that's really spare and taught and terse kind of like Didion I guess and you know that's really just feels like it's just about to break that kind of really hard

[24:17]Zibby Owens: lyrical edge to a sentence. That's kind of the writing I kind of want to get to and try to kind of write myself. There was a memoir I read a while ago that I feel like has that same sort of aesthetic or not maybe aesthetic's the wrong word, sort of literary style if you but it's called Joy Enough by Sarah McCall. Oh, okay. Of the Joan Didion. It's memoir, not poetry or anything else, but I don't know. You might like it. Not that you're looking for a book recommendation, but it's easy to read in, a day. It's very short. So but it's about losing her mother. And I don't know. You're so good at writing female characters, so it could be research. Anyway, you might enjoy it. Joy Enough by Sarah McCall. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know why recommending books to you. But how old are your kids, by the way?

[25:00]Sunjeev Sahota: Oh, they're eight, six and four. And it's girl, boy, girl and yeah they keep, you know, obviously they're keeping more than occupied

[25:11]Zibby Owens: and with the summer holidays bearing down on us I'm kind of like fearful about what on earth are we going to do for seven weeks with unless you know with the restrictions as they are lots of walk and walks I imagine. Yes I have the same I have the same I have an eight year old girl and a six year old boy also but I also have 14 year old twins and I finally have sent them to day camp which wasn't open out here last summer and I'm like this is amazing!

[25:34]Sunjeev Sahota: Well, it really helped. It really helped to get those few hours of just when you can just you know, when you I could you know, I can load the dishwasher. I can get something else done. Yeah. Well,

[25:44]Zibby Owens: that came out wrong. I mean, I missed I actually started crying when they all left for camp yesterday. I was, like, burst into tears. But, I mean, I don't mean that I don't love them home, but I think, you know, you know what I Yeah. Definitely. Honestly, I do know what you mean. Yeah. But, yeah, sometimes I'm just like, I don't know how I think I'm getting all this stuff done. I can't they are, like, not leaving me alone, but I don't know. So thank god for these four weeks of camp so I can read like a thousand books. Anyway, awesome. Well do you have advice to aspiring authors? What would I say to aspiring

[26:11]Sunjeev Sahota: authors? I'd say you know it took me a long time to work out and I still probably haven't got there what kind of writer I am and want to be. I'm trying to be okay with that. I spent a lot of time kind of like mimicking or emulating other writers that you know when I was younger that I admired and because I thought that's what writing should be and I think the sooner you can kind of get over that, the better and the sooner you'll get to the kind of where that feels alive. So I don't know if there's any way to to that point without perhaps, but I suppose just being aware of it. Be aware of when you are perhaps just mimicking other writers that you love and that you justify or be in love and that you just want to sort of like pay your dues to or doff your cap to and to accept that sometimes, especially sometimes writers we love are not the writers that are most useful to us and to be recognising that difference. I found that certainly. And also you don't need to I hear a lot of people say write every day and I say you don't need to write every day but you know but that isn't to say don't only write when you feel inspired but you know but also don't put off writing as well. Things are much easier. Once things are down on the page it's easier. The first draft is always just difficult whereas the editing process is like it's not joyous but it's easier than the

[27:32]Zibby Owens: the initial kind of like trying to lever something out of your body you can get onto the page. I don't know though, I'm working on a memoir myself and I just printed out my first draft and now I'm like, how on earth am I gonna edit this? It's so big. There's so many like it's so easy for me to edit an essay, because you can, like, see it all and move it. I'm like, how am I ever gonna do this? So I don't know. Yeah. I find I don't I'm not that I'm not that I'm giving advice, but I find putting it away for if I can if I can put it away for a month or so, that usually

[27:58]Sunjeev Sahota: helps me in kinda, like, trying to just see it differently and not just come up with fresh eyes, but also other things will have happened in that meantime where I'll thinking about it differently. But you're right. It's a it's a big thing. It's like trying to, like, I don't know, look at an elephant through a microscope. It's really, it's not easy.

[28:16]Zibby Owens: Yeah. And I guess it has to be by chapter or something. I don't know. Well, anyway, I have so much respect for you and your ability to do this over and over again and the worlds that you create and the style in which you write and even just how you shined a light on this group of women and, you know, they sort of came to life and their own experience and how that informs my own day and feeling so grateful that I don't have to be in a China room or women's room or whatever. So anyway, well, thank you for sharing. I hope you find more time to read and write and do whatever. And, you know, there's always Roblox for the kids on iPads if you allow that. That's my go to strategy.

[28:52]Sunjeev Sahota: No, my eldest is a fan of Roblox. So yeah, we definitely got that one chalked up. Okay, good. All right.

[28:58]Zibby Owens: All right. Well, a great day and thanks for coming on. Thanks, Zibby. Thanks for having me. Okay. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.