Review of Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan – A tender love story beyond borders | imaginary

“to“Love is not easy…it is both the disease and the medicine,” says one character in Manish Chauhan’s meditation on modern love. This poignant and perceptive coming-of-age story, about two strangers who become conflicted lovers, is a powerful portrait of the lived reality of immigrants in Britain, and of love as home, hope and destiny.

Newly arrived in England after an arranged marriage to British-Indian Rajiv, Meera feels increasingly out of place when she discovers that Rajiv harbors secrets and is in love with someone else. On Belgrave Road in Leicester, whole days pass “without seeing an English person,” and Myra feels “disappointed that England was not as foreign or mysterious as she had hoped.” She takes English lessons, finds companionship in her mother-in-law and fills her days with household chores, but nothing changes her deep loneliness.

Tahlil is an asylum seeker from Somalia, who along with his sister Somaya joins their mother in Leicester. He works as a carer at home and on a cash-and-carry service while waiting for the Home Office to approve his asylum application. With a checkered past and an uncertain future, he feels untethered and distrustful of the world around him. That is until he sees Mira, who has started working as a cook in the sweet shop next door.

What follows is a tender and true love story, fragile and arguably forbidden: “In the space of a few passages, the world began to shrink around her.” In a classic “Will It, Won’t It” that keeps the reader on edge, the novel is about the unknown: the fragility of their individual future and of course their future together, “how unprepared he was, how unprepared they both were for their own happiness.”

In the face of this uncertainty, and through Mira and Tahlil’s family and their parents—who endure that often elusive experience called life—Chouhan cleverly shows the stark contrasts in beliefs between generations. Mira’s mother believes that “the body is the vessel of truth – every feeling, every struggle woven into its flesh and bones.” Now, as Mira looks at her mother-in-law, who is suffering abuse at the hands of her husband, she wonders whether those words are true, or whether “the body is as susceptible to deception as anything else.” Tahlil also questions his mother’s words when she says, “Sometimes you have to wait. What was meant to be yours will always be yours.”

Although Chauhan rehearses some familiar narratives about South Asian men and arranged marriages, he also shatters one of the deepest stereotypes in South Asian fiction: the evil mother-in-law. Mira’s deep connection with her Sasso is an intergenerational portrait of two South Asian women navigating the trials and tribulations of immigrant and family life. In the end, what emerges between them is a strong brotherhood and a keen duty to care for each other. Small gestures of love — oiling each other’s hair, making food — turn into radical acts of protection and liberation in a home where men make their presence felt with a heavy hand or a rough tongue, so much so that when Mira considers abandoning her marriage, it is this loss that we grieve prematurely.

Shawhan’s short novels have already received acclaim, and with Belgrave Road, the debut author has proven that he can also sustain a well-crafted and plotted novel over 350 pages. This border-crossing, immigrant love story with no anchors (“Every time someone moves to a country, they leave a part of themselves behind. We end up homeless. We don’t belong anywhere”) is full of heart and heartbreak, and defiantly explores the fates we write for ourselves.

At one point, Tahlil’s father told him “that the past was like a piece of thread, sewn inside a person’s heart. One could never be completely free of it.” Belgrave Road shows us that sometimes, the promise of the future is all it takes to fight the ghosts of the past.