Summary
The chapter begins with Meena hinting at some dramatic climax, soon to come. “If I had known what was going to happen […] that my childhood would begin ebbing away with the fall of the autumn leaves, I could have prepared myself better,” she says.
But first, Meena describes the relative calm of the summer months leading up to the hinted conflict. First, Mr. Kumar gets a promotion and—to Meena’s excitement—the family will use the additional money to make a trip to India. Then, Meena’s baby brother Sunil speaks his first words, pleasantly surprising his family by speaking a mixture of Punjabi and English. And lastly, because Mrs. Kumar and Nanima begin taking regular day trips, Meena is left free to play with Anita and her friends.
Meena had expected Anita to undergo an “emotional crisis” following the sudden departure of her mother, Deirdre, but instead Anita remains “as brassy and belligerent as ever.” Meanwhile, Anita’s sister, Tracey, has grown increasingly quiet, and never leaves the house when her father is home. Although Meena and Anita hang out regularly at Sherrie’s farm, they rarely talk, and instead spend their days in a “companionable silence.”
One day, Mrs. Kumar and Nanima spend an afternoon cleaning out Mrs. Kumar’s suitcases of Indian clothes and familial documents. Mrs. Kumar is looking for the necklace that Nanima gave to Mrs. Kumar as a marriage present—that is, the one Meena stole and lost at the Big House. Mrs. Kumar begins to suspect that Anita stole the necklace the night when she visited for dinner, but Meena denies it, “a little too quickly.” Mrs. Kumar lets the matter drop, even though Meena feels that Nanima has guessed the truth.
Suddenly, the room begins to vibrate: from the window, Meena and her family see a procession of construction vehicles driving along the main road towards the local schoolhouse. They plan to demolish the school. Meena, along with many of her neighbors, rushes to witness the demolition. Even a BBC news team is on the scene. As the demolition begins, Sam Lowbridge and his gang drive their motorbikes in front of the news reporter, and Sam shouts into the camera, “If You Want A Nigger For A Neighbour, Vote Labour!”
Back at home, Meena wants someone to talk to about Sam’s racism. She feels alone in her pain, and yearns for the comforting presence of her cousins, Pinky and Baby. The following morning, Mr. Kumar reads from the newspaper: Mr. Rajesh Bhatra was attacked and mugged in Tollington, the perpetrators leaving him hospitalized.
Later, at Sherrie’s farm, Anita brags about her new bra to Meena and her friends. Sherrie tries to get a better look at Anita’s bra, pulling at the straps, but suddenly Tracey slaps Sherrie’s hand, saying “Don’t yow touch my sister, Sherrie!” Tracey continues, saying she’s seen an unnamed male touching Anita, too. Anita silences Tracey, and Tracey flees. Sherrie presses Anita for more information, and Anita reveals she has a new boyfriend: Sam Lowbridge.
Meena considers Anita’s relationship with Sam a deep betrayal, and Meena walks out of the stable. Meena mounts Sherrie’s horse, Trixie, and leads the horse in a full gallop towards a jumping rail. Meena is bucked from the horse, and she crashes to the ground. Severely injured and unable to move, Meena silently perceives the commotion as she’s transported to a hospital.
Analysis
In the opening line of Chapter 11, Meena forewarns the reader of coming conflict: “If I had known what was going to happen in my summer […] that my childhood would begin ebbing away with the fall of the autumn leaves, I could have prepared myself better” (p. 259). Meena’s allusion is explicit enough to prime the reader for drama, yet ambiguous enough to leave the reader guessing. And Meena intentionally delays an explanation: rather than immediately describing the promised conflict, Meena instead describes how the summer was, “for a while,” “idyllic” (p. 259); Mr. Kumar gets a promotion, Sunil begins to speak, and so on. Throughout the chapter, Meena continually postpones an explanation of the coming conflict—while repeatedly reminding the reader that it is, in fact, on the horizon, whatever it may be: “The next morning, the cracks appeared which would finally split open the china blue bowl of that last summer” (p. 275), she says. And later, “It all started because of Anita’s new bra […]” (p. 275). This last one, in particular, deepens the reader’s curiosity: how can so much tragedy stem from one new bra? The ominous unknown looms over the chapter, undermining Meena’s descriptions of family joy (for the reader knows the joy will have to come to an end, and soon!). These moments are useful reminders that Meena is an unreliable narrator, even if her distortions are simply to heighten narrative suspense.
Not only is tension built through Meena’s foreshadowing, but it is also intensified by the imagery and soundscape of the chapter. Prior to the chapter’s climactic ending, Meena describes the public demolition of Tollington’s schoolhouse: this is the rising action. This scene contains overwhelming sensory information. Meena hears a “far-off rumble, as distant and rolling as thunder, but unbroken and getting louder” (p. 268), which later becomes the “mechanical symphony” of construction diggers and Sam’s gang’s motorcycle engines. The sound grows so loud that the townspeople must shout to be heard: “If Anita had heard me, she did not care, for she was already holding a semi-shouted exchange with Sam” (p. 271). The imagery is similarly brimming: “suddenly filled with the flapping of hundreds of starlings who had taken hurried flight from the woods round the Big House” (p. 268) and “In less than a minute, it seemed the whole village had congregated on street corners, in gardens, hanging from windows and leaning on doorposts” (p. 269). Through these details, the physical environment begins to mirror the chapter’s narrative tension, deepening the reader’s anticipation.
The scene of the schoolhouse demolition is symbolic in multiple ways. As already cited, Meena begins this chapter by suggesting her “childhood would begin ebbing away” (p. 259). Taking this into consideration, the destruction of the school—given that it is a children’s institution—can be understood as a symbolic marker of Meena’s ending childhood; now both only remain in memories. More broadly speaking, the school’s demolition, specifically the community’s response to it, engages with a theme of spectatorship and tragedy being treated as spectacle. Throughout Anita and Me, we have seen examples of tragedy being treated as entertainment: Mr. Ormerod’s disappointment that the local church didn’t get to host Mr. and Mrs. Christmas’s funerals, or the racist black caricature at the fairgrounds shooting range, or Anita smiling while fighting Fat Sally. During the school demolition, the entire community comes out to watch, and even a BBC News reporter stands by to film the destruction. Although some community members protest, by and large, the people of Tollington simply watch the diggers destroy their school.
In the final climactic scene of Chapter 11—Meena’s horseback riding accident—Meera Syal’s use of two motifs, birds and film, helps to emphasize the difference between Meena’s expectations and reality. At different moments in Anita and Me, Meena is likened to a bird: for example, in the first chapter, Meena describes a dream where poplar trees “would talk to me urgently, telling me to open the window, spread my arms and flap over the fields to their waiting branches” (p. 13). This association of Meena with flight returns at the end of Chapter 11: when riding Trixie the horse, Meena feels “the rushing of air which filled my ears, my eyes and nose, entered my open mouth like a flock of birds, my cheeks flapping in time to their wings” (p. 278). In these examples, birds may be a symbol of freedom: following one’s dreams, weightlessly, and without any obstacles. This interpretation is supported by Meena’s motive for riding Trixie: to escape the pain of Anita’s betrayal (or, metaphorically, to fly away).
Film is a second motif, used similarly throughout Anita and Me, becoming a representation of Meena’s dreams, and alternative realities. For example, in an earlier chapter, we learn that Mr. Kumar was once solicited by a film agent, but that Mr. Kumar’s father disallowed Mr. Kumar from pursuing acting. Hearing this, Meena “became obsessed with what I had missed out on, being the daughter of a famous film hero. Maybe I would have grown up in a palace” (p. 82). Here, we see how film associates with Meena’s daydreams, and is fuel for an alternative reality in which her dad may have been a famous actor. Later, Meena, too, is likened to a film star: Mr. Kumar sees Meena in a photograph and says, “You have the soulful look of a movie star!” (p. 202). Yet, Meena confesses to the reader a different reality, saying, “I had not the heart to tell him I was mentally choosing my car upholstery” (p. 202-203). In this example, we see the rift between film and reality: where what appears on film as a “soulful” gaze is really just a mind distracted by mundane thoughts. These interpretations help us to understand film’s symbolic presence in Chapter 11: while riding Trixie, Meena says of the passing scenery, “the fields and farmhouse and tarmacked road, the distant motorway lights and the rooftops of my village all sped by like a revolving painted backdrop” (p. 278). This quote foreshadows the impossibility of Meena’s attempt to escape her pain on horseback.
Meena steers Trixie towards the farm’s jumping obstacles, and is bucked off the horse. Here, temporarily Meena does fly: she becomes one with the birds. But, of course, her flight is only metaphorical, for she must come crashing to the ground. Meena, with her leg broken on the ground, describes the sober reality of her accident: “I should have been in a film; in a film everything would have dissolved into hazy distant lines and I would open my eyes to the sound of distant birdsong and my tear-stained but relieved loved ones in a circle. But no, I was awake for every awful painful moment” (p. 279). In this quote, both of the discussed motifs return: film and singing birds. Meena has learned the hard reality, that flight is impossible, that her life is not a film.
