A Walk on the Flip Side of Hip Indian Culture

An MTV VJ wears rhinestone bindi dots on her almost- bare breast. A pop star decorates her hands with henna. A coffee shop makes instant chai from powder and nonfat milk. All things Indian became all things hip a few years ago, appropriated by a culture that barely understands the significance of the dots or the dye.

Anyone who has ever thought of this current India-mania as a sign of our culture’s open-mindedness and its fascination with things exotic should take a walk through Meera Syal’s East London, where most of her latest novel, “Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee,” takes place. It’s a different world, the flip side of Indian hip. Traditionalism reigns. Marriages are arranged. Daughters are considered visitors in their parents’ lives. Clothing is gaudy and ostentatious, worn by women for whom starvation was once “a reality rather than a fashion statement” and who now delight in their flabby arms and tummy rolls, symbols of their material success. It is a long way from the streets of East London to the catwalks of New York, where clothes-hanger-thin models strut the runways in dark-colored Calvin Klein saris.

Syal, a British satirist and actress, understands this cultural schizophrenia. Her much-acclaimed “Anita and Me” captures the moment when a 9-year-old girl, daughter of the only Punjabi family in the British mining village of Tollington, watches her town’s (and her own) innocence shattered by racial strife. “Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee” takes place 30 years later; in this interim of time, lines have blurred, cultures overlapped.

“Life” is the story of three longtime friends, British women of Indian descent, trying to find their way through the margins of their worlds. “We needed each other as audience,” one of them reflects; “we confirmed each other’s fragile normality.” There’s Chila, “Poor Chila,” who turns the community that thinks her slow, thick and unmarriageable on its head by marrying handsome and moneyed Deepak. There’s Sunita, once a promising, opinionated law student, now oppressed by her roles as wife and mother, her cellulite her only political stance. And there’s Tania, the “Modern Girl,” a filmmaker who has “drifted into uncharted ocean with her English man and snappy Soho job.” She wears her Indianness like a well-worn leather jacket that is discarded as soon as it becomes stifling.

“Life,” Chila’s mom once warned her, providing this book with a handle and her daughter with a much-needed caveat, “isn’t all ha ha hee hee, so if you know there’s going to be a few tears, you might as well try and enjoy them.” To a soundtrack that is a combination of nostalgic bhangra, hip-hop, R&B;, and, as Sunita labels it, “this new fusion stuff . . . Indo-garage-funk-thingy,” the women trade off narrating the story, chronicling the changes wrought by internal and external forces that push, pull and reshape both their friendship and their perception of themselves. The energy of their orbit is magnetic; Chila, Sunita and Tania are drawn close and then thrust apart with a violent, unanticipated force.

The catalyst here is a documentary that Tania is producing in a last-ditch effort to save her job, a film about “tans” (as her boss labels people of Asian ancestry) who became unwitting disciples of “the new religion of the millennium” at the same moment they vowed to love, honor and in some cases, obey. Tania makes her friends--and their husbands--the stars. They are flattered by the attention, the chance to be immortalized, and think little of the consequences--until they see themselves on the screen, dissected into nervous chatter, wringing hands, twitching knees. Their bodies betray their failures. With edgy shots and some slightly underhanded camera work, Tania exposes the fault lines in their relationships that they have tried so hard to suppress. And in doing so, she opens a series of fissures in the lives of her friends that cannot be easily mended.

If we take the advice of Chila’s mother, and we accept what life isn’t, then a question hangs in the air like breath on a winter morning. It spirals and circles through the pages of this novel: If life’s not ha ha hee hee, what is it, then?

The answer has little to do with whether we choose a new world or an old, a hip urbanity or a hackneyed provincialism. It can be found in the shelter of a mother’s arm, a husband’s understanding glance or a friend’s gentle embrace. It is something we’ve heard before but which takes on a new facet in Syal’s capable hands. Life is about becoming. We grow up being the people that others want us to be. We become ourselves surrounded by the people we have chosen to love.