Summary
The novel starts in the middle of a dispute between nine-year-old Meena and her parents. Meena’s parents have caught Meena eating candy from Mr Ormerod’s local grocery shop, and Meena’s father (Mr. Kumar) suspects wrongdoing: either Meena has stolen money from her mother’s purse, or she has shoplifted from Mr. Ormerod. Meena swears she did neither. So, Mr. Kumar decides to take Meena back to Mr. Ormerod’s shop; Meena’s father will talk with Mr. Ormerod to learn what happened, unless Meena confesses to her crime.
While Mr. Kumar and Meena walk to Mr. Ormerod’s grocery, Meena reflects on the local landmarks that pass her by. Through these reflections, the reader is introduced to Meena’s hometown of Tollington, a bygone mining town in West Midlands, England.
Meena looks back at her own home, one of many small cottages that form the winding, Black Country village. Here, she sees her mother hanging clothes to dry. Meena passes the “The Big House," a mysterious mansion that overlooks Tollington’s main road, and is owned by the proprietor of the abandoned coal mines. No one ever leaves the house, save for the occasional delivery truck. Soon after, Meena passes Mr. Topsy’s home garden, full of lush flowers and decorative gnomes, a garden that makes Meena envious: her own garden is solely functional, as Meena’s mother grows herbs to use in the kitchen.
As Meena and her father near Mr. Ormerod’s shop, Meena sneaks another candy from her dress pocket, thinking she can “swallow the evidence.” Her father catches her in the act, and though he remains silent, Meena can tell her father is furious. They arrive outside of Mr. Ormerod’s and Meena looks inside the shop window at a cigarette display. It reminds Meena of her first encounter with Anita Rutter, an older girl who later becomes Meena’s best friend: Meena had been looking at this cigarette display when Anita came from behind, pointing towards a sailor mascot on the display, and compared the mascot to her father, Roberto, who fought in the British Navy during World War II. Meena remembers seeing Roberto the next day at the bus stop, where he flirted with several neighborhood women. Meena was jealous of Roberto and how he “concealed his terrible tortured past” in the war. Meena wanted to be “a tortured soul.”
Back outside the shop, Meena looks from the sailor mascot to the rows of candy jars lining the shelf above. Mr. Kumar gives Meena one last chance to fess up and tell the truth about her candy theft, or else he will go inside and ask Mr. Ormerod himself. But Meena doesn’t take her father’s threat seriously: she knows her father doesn’t actually want to talk to Mr. Ormerod. (Apparently, Mr. Ormerod is a chatter-box who won’t shut-up about his political and religious beliefs). Mr. Kumar asks Meena one last time to tell the truth about the candy, but Meena remains silent.
Meena thinks of another secret she’s kept from her father, and how much angrier he would be with her, if only he knew: last week, Meena kicked a classmate in the face after her classmate made a racist joke; Meena gave the kid a bloody nose. Meena considers confessing now. She knows it’s only a matter of time before her mother finds out, because Meena’s mother is a school teacher at the neighboring infants’ school.
Stalling outside of Mr. Ormerod’s, Meena feels like everyone in the neighborhood is watching her, and she worries that her “personal failure” might become a “public shame.” Mr. Kumar begins to open Mr. Ormerod’s shop door, but Meena stops her father and says in a whisper, “I was lying.” The chapter ends with Mr. Kumar walking away in disappointment, “without looking back.”
Analysis
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to some of the major themes of Anita and Me. We see the subversion of gender roles in the Ballbearings Committee, a group of women who must work at a metal factory to support their unemployed husbands; the name itself, The Ballbearings Committee, might be seen as a tongue-in-cheek double entendre hinting at the swap of gender norms.
We see the weight of history in the setting of Tollington as a bygone mining town. Describing Tollington’s mining past, Meena says, “The mine and the village had been as intertwined as lovers, grateful lovers astonished by their mutual discovery” (p. 14). Extending the logic of Meena’s simile, Tollington is like a widow: its mine is now gone, and with it its love. The weight of history can be seen, too, in characters like Anita Rutter’s father, Roberto, a World War II veteran suppressing his “terrible tortured past” (p. 20), or the unemployed husbands of the Ballbearings Committee, husbands who Meena describes as “ghosts” (p. 20).
Lastly, we see a conflict of cultures embodied in the differing styles of garden preferred by Meena’s family and her English neighbors, the former preferring utilitarian and the latter ornamental. (And, importantly, Meena is envious of her English neighbor’s gardens, showing how she struggles to reconcile her English and Indian cultures).
One of the novel’s largest themes—the interplay between fact and fiction—is introduced in the epigraph, which prefaces the narrative that begins in Chapter One. In the epigraph, Meena, narrating as an adult, purports to share some of her earliest memories. Yet she shares memories impossible for her to have remembered: for example, the image of her parents arriving in Britain, when Meena was still “kicking” in her mother’s womb. Further, Meena admits to having an “alternative history” (p. 9) she uses when trying to impress potential employers, or white boys. And Meena ends the epigraph with a quote that directly addresses the theme of fictiveness: “I’m really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong” (p. 10). In many ways, Anita and Me is the “alternative history,” the “mythology” to author Meera Syal’s real history: Meera was raised in Essington, a real mining village near Wolverhampton, and protagonist Meena is raised in Tollington, an imaginary mining village near Wolverhampton. It is fitting that the novel’s action begins with Meena shouting, “I’m not lying, honest, papa!” (p. 11). Lying—sometimes to deceive, sometimes to make myths—will continue to appear throughout the remainder of Anita and Me.
Let’s consider Meena as a narrator. Even in the opening chapter, we can see Meena might be an unreliable narrator: she is digressive, regularly breaking away from the present action to share memories or thoughts, which allows her to distort the reader’s perception of time, or to foreshadow future events. The narration can be ironic, when Meena slips into naive, childish thoughts: for example, when she grows overly self-conscious of onlookers outside of Mr. Ormerod’s shop, saying “Everyone must have been watching, they always did, what else was there to do?” (p. 22). Meena also tends to use hyperbole and metaphor for comedic effect: for example, describing the Ballbearings Committee as a “tornado of perfume and smoke” (p. 20).
Comedy is an important part of Meena’s narrative. Often, author Meera Syal juxtaposes cruelty or tragedy with comedic language. Consider the simple description of Meena’s elderly neighbor Mrs. Todd, and her “colostomy bag in a sequinned pouch” (p. 14). Or, consider the moment when Anita describes her father getting awards for killing Germans in WWII, or in Anita’s words “blowing up Jerries.” Meena’s response is an ironic misunderstanding of the slang-term Jerries: “I wondered why he had taken a particular dislike for men with this name” (p. 17). Throughout Anita and Me, Meera Syal seems interested in the dynamics of comedy, and how comedy can be used to cope with hardship, or how it can sometimes trivialize hardship, like when Meena’s classmates laugh at a student for mistakenly believing the Midlands are called Black Country because “so m… many darkies… live there?” (p. 22).
