Sunjeev Sahota: Class Apart

THE TITLE OF Sunjeev Sahota’s fourth novel The Spoiled Heart (Hamish Hamilton; 329 pages; ₹699) is open to multiple interpretations. It could hint at a relationship that goes awry, it could tell of a centre that rots. It is also a phrase that appears only twice in the novel, once right in the middle in reference to smoke from a fire that “spoils the heart so mercilessly;” and then a few pages before the ending in reference to a character still being in love with another, “Spoiled hearts, indeed.” For some authors, titles appear late in their construction of a work, but for others, like Sahota, the title tows the entire narrative. Working at his dining table in Sheffield, England, when his children are away at school, Sahota started with scribbling ‘solid,’ as the novel rotates around ideas of solidarity and cohesion. But he then realised that ‘spoiled’ contains ‘solid’ and started playing around with that. As the British writer (whose grandparents migrated from Punjab to the UK in 1966) points out, ‘spoiled heart’ neatly captured the main themes of the book. For one, the novel is set in Yorkshire or the “heartlands of England,” which Sahota says has been “decimated through right-wing politics,” and where “left-wing politics is so uninterested in ideas of equality”. Speak­ing on a Zoom call, he says the title captures a tragedy that befalls a father, the novel’s geography, and its politics.

The fulcrum of The Spoiled Heart is Nayan Olak who was a factory worker in Chesterfield and is now contesting an elec­tion to be union leader. In the first ten pages itself the reader learns that Nayan lost his mother and four-year-old son to arson, and that the perpetrators behind the fire were never caught. The reader must dispel layers of smoke, and clear ash from surfaces, to find out the real reason and culprit behind the fire. Sahota doesn’t like tricking the reader and deliberately withholding information, so he employs a handy device. He uses Sajjan “brown, educated, a writer” to unearth Nayan’s backstory. In The Spoiled Heart the reader initially sees the char­acters only in half measures. With every chapter, assumptions behind the characters and the incident alter. Sahota does this not with wiliness but with panache. One keeps reading just as one binge watches, knowing that each twist is a revelation.

Unlike many contemporary novels that deal with numer­ous themes, The Spoiled Heart is chiefly interested in class dynamics. Sahota grew up in Chesterfield, “a small northern town in the north of England”. Born in 1981, he witnessed the effects of Margaret Thatcher’s policies on the mining town, which resulted in mass unemployment and a “sense of betrayal in the air and lots of anger and resentment in the town”. His father lost his job as a labourer and his mother lost her factory job. His parents then decided to try their hand at business, and bought a convenience shop.

Sahota’s children—aged eleven, nine and seven—are experiencing a very different kind of childhood, one where they enjoy piano lessons, where they are members of different squads, and where they are integrated into a diverse commu­nity. Theirs is a childhood of harmony and stability compared to Sahota’s more volatile one. Class has always been a preoc­cupation in his novels. His 2015 Booker-shortlisted The Year of the Runaways (a political novel about migrant workers in Sheffield) and his 2021 Booker-longlisted China Room (where the narrator travels to Punjab to unearth a family secret) have brown protagonists, but to Sahota what is more important is that all his characters tend to be working class. Unlike his pre­vious novels, which often moved out of the UK and to India, The Spoiled Heart is rooted in England.

Tying together his fiction and life, he says, “I’ve always felt class was going to have a bigger impact on my chances in life than race was going to.” Sahota who is “of the left” uses The Spoiled Heart to address not only his concerns about class, but also how the left-wing has failed the working class. He explains, “I think anti-discrimination is obviously really important. But I’ve always thought class was more important, class was foundational and without material means and financial means it’s really hard to achieve anything in the world. Actually fighting for equality is more important than fighting for diversity. Diversity is important, but equality is even more important.” In the UK, while he appreciates the country’s increasing diversity, he is concerned about the grow­ing gap between the rich and the poor.

He fleshes out this argument in The Spoiled Heart through the characters of Nayan and newcomer Megha and their battle over the leadership of the union. It is interesting that both have Indian origins, though Megha is much wealthier while Nayan’s parents ran a convenience store. Nayan has a “very class first, class centric leanings,” whereas Megha believes that anti-discrimination, anti-racism should be the centre of left-wing politics. To Megha, Nayan is a “brown, working-class maverick”, whereas for Nayan there is “no such thing as the white working class, there is only the work­ing class”. While Megha and Nayan’s ideological combat is aired at the lectern, Sahota also brings in a gender angle to it offstage. To a reader it is apparent that Sahota favours Nayan over Megha, however he succeeds in making them both believable as both are completely fallible. Nayan is a victim of his past, just as Megha is a prisoner of her present.

Having always written characters who were poor or working class, Sahota says, “Megha is probably the hardest character I’ve ever written.” This has nothing to do with her gender, but more with her background, he adds, “Megha is the first upper middle-class character I’ve ever written. I am just like, how do you think, how do you even make sense of the world when you’ve grown up with so much privilege? I found her really difficult. Which tells me how class is the foundation.” In his initial drafts, Megha was a much more “vicious” character, but through edits and conversations with his editor, he succeeded in making Megha a more sympathetic character. On the other hand, a character he feels “desperately sad” for is Nayan. He says, “His real tragedy is that he just can’t come to terms with his pain and that’s the reason for his downfall.”

While the ideological battle of the novel plays out between Megha and Nayan, a more intimate battle is waged between Nayan and the new (old) entrant to the town Helen Fletcher. A single mother, Helen, returns to the town of her childhood with her now teenage son Brandon, who was the victim of an online mob attack. Helen, a care worker, and Brandon, a talented chef deprived of opportunities, drag their own secrets and pasts to the town. The overlap between Nayan and Helen’s past pro­vides the talons of the novel. While Nayan carries the grief and guilt of his mother and son who perished in the fire (his marriage did not survive the loss), Helen is also burdened with an abusive mother and absent hus­band. The reader unravels the many threads of the narrative and the cross connections between the characters through Sajjan the narrator.

When Sahota started writing The Spoiled Heart, Sajjan was not part of the story. He initially wrote the novel from a third-person perspec­tive. But he realised that in a novel, which often seems like a room of distorted mirrors, where differ­ent characters are seeing different perspectives and different versions of reality, he needed an “external presence” to tie it all together. He says, “Sajjan is a detective kind of character and writers are like detec­tive characters. Every book is like a detective story. The reader is always trying to work out what the heart or the mystery at the centre of the novel is. Sajjan is like an alter ego of me that stalks and haunts the story.”

The many secrets (and half-truths) of the characters of The Spoiled Heart forces readers to reevaluate how well (or not) we know the people in our own lives. Nayan might think he knows his father, a toxic patriarch now reduced to a dependent codger, but he will realise that there is more to the man. Each character also carries his/her own guilt. Nayan’s over the deaths in his family, Helen’s about things she might have done in the past, and then even the parents of the narrator have their own secrets. Guilt in The Spoiled Heart propels some characters forward, while others are stuck in a quagmire of regret.

SAHOTA FOUND THE writing of The Spoiled Heart relatively easy compared to his previous novels as he was so submerged in the themes of the importance of class. He wrote the novel with an urgency and was carried forward by a “dread­ful energy,” which ensured that he finished the first draft in just about six months. The rewriting and editing, of course, took much longer.

A math graduate, Sahota did not come to writing through an expected route. He was a “late reader, but then almost immediately, a very heavy reader”. He says, “Books weren’t really part of our home life, books weren’t part of everyday discourse at home. So, it just took a while to get to the novels, but once I found them, it was quite easy.” A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry fulfilled him when he first read it, in his twenties, as he was swept away by its sweeping narrative. He still enjoys seeing his children immersed in the plot and character, of Harry Potter for in­stance, but as a reader (and writer) that kind of conventional novel holds less appeal for him now.

Once he took to reading, he quickly veered towards literary criticism. He wanted to work out the mechanics of a novel, how and why it works, and how it influences a reader. Literary criticism became his education in humanities, where he observed how style and language intersect and how they tell of a larger politics. He adds, “I did maths and maths is a very classless subject. The humanities are a very bourgeois area of study. Maths and sciences are quite classless. Your background doesn’t matter.”

He started writing his first novel at 24, Ours Are the Streets, a story of political radicalisation, which was published in 2011, when he was 29. Since then, he says, he has been fortunate to have found editors who let him write what he wants, and readers who enjoy his work. With his fourth novel, Sahota can safely say that he can now manage the technical aspects or engineering of the novel. He has the experience to know where things are going wrong in the writing, and the confidence to fix it, even if that means starting afresh. The difficulty lies in maintaining novelty. He says, “I suppose the hardest thing is just as I don’t want to read the same novels again, I also don’t want to write the same novels over and over again. Each novel has to present a new challenge in structure and form. I’ll never write another novel like The Year of the Runaways again, that big, almost classical kind of Victorian story. Because the thought of it bores me at the moment.”