Review of CHINA ROOM by Sunjeev Sahota

 3.5 Stars

This novel, which appeared on the 2021 Booker Prize longlist, has two storylines.  

One is set in 1929 in rural Punjab.  Mehar Kaur is a Sikh child bride.  Along with two other women, Harbans and Gurleen, she is married into a family with three sons:  Jeet, Mohan and Suraj.  Because women are heavily veiled in the presence of men and must always keep their eyes cast down; because they have sexual relations only in the dark; and because Mai, the tyrannical mother-in-law, controls information and everyone’s actions, Mehar does not know which man is her husband.  While speculating as to the identity of her husband, she spends her days working with her sisters-in-law in what is called the china room. 

The second storyline is set in 1999.  Mehar’s 18-year-old great-grandson travels to India.  A recovering heroin addict, he initially stays with an uncle, but circumstances cause him to take refuge at the now-abandoned family farm where Mehar lived once she was married.  On the farm, he moves into the china room. 

Though the author doesn’t explicitly discuss connections, there are definite parallels between the two narratives.  Both involve young people who are displaced and isolated; both are affected by social strictures and expectations; and both are searching for freedom and some form of self-determination.  I couldn’t help but see the young man’s work on fixing up the china room as his attempt to fix the wounds inflicted on Mehar and his decision to “forge a life of my own choosing” as a way of honouring her. 

For me, the interest in the novel lay in Mehar’s story; her grandson’s feels much less developed.  Certainly, Mehar emerges as a memorable character.  She is intelligent, affectionate, curious, and strong-willed; it is heart-breaking to see such an independent spirit so powerless.  Some of the grandson’s experiences are also heart-wrenching, but there is insufficient development of his struggles.  Mehar earns the reader’s sympathy more than her grandson does, perhaps because, despite the pressures of prejudice, he has many more options; he chooses to isolate himself but has many opportunities for self-actualization.    

I liked how the novel shows how things have changed and yet have not changed.  For instance, Radhika has options which Mehar did not, but her friendship with Mehar’s grandson raises eyebrows; villagers are certainly ready to gossip about a man and woman seen together.  Just as Mehar had no choice in her husband, Kuku didn’t either.  Mehar knows that men can have affairs and emerge unscathed while women are punished for such behaviour, “her head shaved and her naked body paraded through the village on the end of a rope”; likewise, Kuku was “forced into a loveless marriage” while the man she loved “carried on affairs with whomever he wanted.  He had moved on and out of love with her.  She had never been allowed the means to do the same.”   

I enjoyed this book.  Apparently, it is based at least in part on the author’s family; the novel ends with a family photo described earlier in the novel:  “It was of my great-grandmother, an old white-haired woman who’d travelled all the way to England just so that she might hold me, her new-born great-grandson.  She’s looking down and smiling, unused to a camera’s eye, her chunni sliding off her head.”