Meera Syal: The Queen of Comedy

If you grew up watching Goodness Gracious Me (GGM), that hilarious 1990s BBC sitcom about the cultural divide between British India and England, chances are Meera Syal kept you guessing and guffawing much of the time. One of our funniest exports, Syal is a writer, playwright, journalist, singer, producer, actress and comedian with a solid hand on the pulse of our nation.

“When we used to send money home to India there was this sense that people were thinking, ‘You shouldn’t have left in the first place, you should have stayed here and suffered with us’,” she jokes, laughing. Typically dangerous wit from the woman who dares to make the jokes you are thinking in your head, with the quality of truth running through them. For, Syal has been describing the source of many NRI-Indian battles: the all-Indian property dispute which broke her parents’ heart, an episode that finds a place in her new novel spanning rural India and cosmopolitan England, The House of Hidden Mothers (Doubleday, 430 pages). “I wanted to write about it. By the time they got it back, they felt utterly let down by the country that they wanted to return to. It’s just so common, it weirdly is. There’s one section in the book, based on what happened to one of our friends, where the nephew really did whisper in their ear and say, ‘If you don’t leave now, we’re going to kill you.’”

Appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her service to drama and literature this year, Syal has steadily built a trademark body of work since the 1990s, when she wrote the screenplay for Channel 4’s Bhaji on the Beach, directed by Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha. Writing and performing GGM for five years on radio and television, she was a scriptwriter on Andrew Lloyd Webber and AR Rahman’s Bombay Dreams, and played her actor husband Sanjeev Bhaskar’s grandmother, the epic Sushila, on Emmy-award winning hit series The Kumars at No 42. As Aunt Hayley in Beautiful People and in various roles in the theatre, ranging from Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing to Zehrunisa in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, she has explored a variety of roles. The Wolverhampton girl (Syal’s hometown and, fittingly, the home of Caitlin Moran, the popular comic columnist who wrote the new sitcom Raised by Wolves) built her career in the era that succeeded 1980s Asian TV comedy pioneer Tandoori Nights (starring Saeed Jaffrey) and Hanif Kureishi’s classic film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).

Syal’s novels may be less widely appreciated but they tap a rich vein of tragicomedy. She used her childhood in a small mining community to write the endearing Anita and Me (1996, also a 2002 film starring Kabir Bedi), about a young Asian girl assimilating in suburban England, and the hilarious Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999, also a 2005 three-part BBC television miniseries) is a Bridget Jones-worthy romp with some sad- serious moments, about three young British Asian women growing up in England. The novels are certainly less immediately enjoyable than her wit on stage—Syal writes as if for TV or film, often relying heavily on dialogue to carry her plot forward—but the sheer strength of her voice carries them forward.

The House of Hidden Mothers is a darker variety of novel, amusing if uneven, and extending the canvas in some ways. We begin with the comedy of Shyama, a feisty British Indian woman who is trying to have a baby with her young White boyfriend, Toby, in the sunset of her life. At the fertility clinic, her thoughts are typically sitcom-worthy: ‘All those years spent avoiding getting pregnant, all those hours of sitting on cold plastic toilet seats in student digs/ shared houses/ first flats, praying for the banner of blood to declare that war was over, that your life would go on as before. And then the later years, spent in nicer houses on a better class of loo seat—reclaimed teak or cheekily self- conscious seats like the plastic one with a barbed-wire pattern inside …—still waiting.’ Shyama already has a daughter, Tara, from a previous marriage which didn’t end very well, but she must now, comically, repeat the whole song and dance. Mala, back in India, lives the traditional life of roti-kapda-makaan in her village, her riverside laundry idylls offering her time with the girls, just as Shyama has her time at the pub—‘Washing was only the background for the real work of talking’. Hers is the body which will house the child Shyama’s ‘inhospitable womb’ (provoking predictable jokes) cannot bear. The balance is tricky, and thought-provoking.

“That self-deprecating humour that women do have about their bodies,” says Syal. “You see that through the central character, Shyama. I like the mixture of the dark and the comic in the book because that’s how life is, it goes from hilarious to tragic in a moment.”

Was the subject of IVF something she consciously set out to write about? “In India, it’s a very serious issue—yes, that proposed new bill which is going to limit surrogacy. There are so many dreadful cases when people have had babies and they can’t take them back to their country. It varies from country to country.”

The new model for Syal’s heroine is progressive, very much of the times. “The book reflects how we’re all changing and evolving. The fact that Shyama is divorced, has a difficult and complex relationship with her daughter, the fact that her parents live at the end of the garden. My own mother lives with me so I know all about that.” We laugh.

“It is becoming really common: the blended family. It’s going to become more and more common as divorce is becoming more common, more acceptable: you can have another life and you can fall in love again. The second time round what I do see is that they find a partner who is younger or of a different race. They may have had a tough time the first time round so they want to please themselves. Maybe the second time round, women have found love and want to have a baby late, surrogacy is something they may pursue.” We talk about how different yet alike the two women are. “I really didn’t want to make the surrogate the victim. I wanted to make Mala as strong as Shyama. She could be running an international business.”

They meet with the hope of new life. “For nine months they are intimately bound to each other. How do you handle this, from Shyama’s point of view—do you feel like a colonial exploiter? There’s a reason the women who do this are very poor. The reason that this is the biggest industry in the world is that it’s the cheapest industry. Fertility has been exported. This is why I thought of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in my epigraph.” The epigraph that ends: ‘You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies’.

How difficult is it being funny today, as opposed to being funny in the 1990s, I ask, cheekily.

“Firstly I am very happy that there are more people from the diaspora doing comedy. For too long we were the only people doing it. It raises your game. Also the issues change so much from generation to generation. The things we wanted to talk about and find humour in, are not necessarily the same for the generation coming up. At the end of the day, funny is funny. As long as you’ve got your finger on the pulse.”

We turn to the show that brought her to millions of Indian screens around the world. “We have done two Goodness Gracious Me specials this year, as a brand we’ve still got an audience. It’s really nice to know that we still have that audience. If you’re writing about the Indian family, there is a connection. GGM was supported and watched everywhere in India, there was a huge black market going on in smuggled tapes. It was bizarre and wonderful. Though I always make clear in my books that I write as an NRI, it can only be through the lens of my specific cultural experience.”

Syal talks about the rise of television as a medium. “The number of stars who are doing television—it used to be looked down on, but if anything now it’s the other way around. Movies take so long, so unless you have a massive blockbuster, TV can be important. In television, you know you are going to get your slot. People can be on it for a long time, with the internet, etcetera.”

At the moment, she is working on a new, revised version of Bombay Dreams and she has just been asked to adapt “this amazing undiscovered writer” called Celia Fremlin (author of many crime novels and stories, including the 1958 Edgar Award-winner The Hours Before Dawn). “She writes absolutely brilliantly about the psychological landscape at the cusp of feminist writing in the 1950s.”

“It’s a little easier to take charge of a book schedule, because it’s just you. The thing about anything else—a play, a TV series—[is that] a lot of people are waiting on it. I prefer writing prose to anything else really. It’s more intimate. You can write till you drop dead. You only get better as you get older, which is comforting. As every actress knows, you get offered less work as you get older.” She laughs, and we joke about her 9-year-old, who is singing beside her. It is patently clear that this will not be anything the reigning queen of British Indian comedy has to worry about.

Bend It Like BeckhamBhaji on the BeachBombay DreamsGoodness Gracious MeMeera SyalThe House of Hidden Mothers