Anita and Me, by Meera Syal, Flamingo: London 1997, 328 pp, £5.99 Reviewed by B. Skanthakumar Meera Syal skilfully conveys a sense of the wonderment and bewilderment of being a child and of reading the world through those eyes in one of the best and funniest books of the year.
Anita and Me is a loosely autobiographical tale of a pre-teen Meena, child of the only Indian family in Tollington, and her exploits with her idol and sometime friend Anita.
The immigrant experience of dislocation, culture--shock and racism is recent and raw enough to make it a rich seam, and Meera Syal the comedienne and script-writer of "Bhaji on the Beach", excels in an original and humorous way in mining it in her first novel.
Take Meena's wry account of when her "aunties and uncles" come to visit on the weekend.
Of course they aren't relatives but family friends to whom tradition and community demand this honorific be given.
But as their cars roll up on weekend visits disgorging the passengers and contents, Meena isn't sure her neighbours realise this.
"I could see our neighbours shift uncomfortably, contemplating the apparent size of my family and the fact that we had somehow managed to bring every one of them over Her preoccupation though is with her neighbours in the former mining village of Tollington and the changes wreaked on work and community in the 1960s.
The colliery had long since closed and in its place as main employer is a new... ball-bearings factory.
There isn't work for everyone there. Not the men who have been laid off and consequently lead an ethereal existence in their homes, "men in vests and braces, with rumpled hair who clutched half read papers and fiddled absent-mindedly with their testicles while their wives flung them hurried goodbyes", as they left for work.
It was the women whose labour was wanted, "women who do piecework and feel grateful, women whose nimble fingers would negotiate their machines, women who un-