Another Culture 
 One reason we read is to get inside other cultures and see their relationship to our own. India, for example. I have read many novels about the British Raj (into which my father was born), many more about post-colonial India, and still more about the Indian diaspora, as immigrants, rich or poor, try to make new lives in Britain or America. On the face of it, Sunjeev Sahota's novel is of the latter kind, following four young Indians over the course of a year in Sheffield, a grimy industrial city in the North. But by some extraordinary magic, its effect was less cultural dislocation than to take me deeper into a particular minority culture--that of Punjabi-speaking Sikhs--than I think I have ever experienced in an Indian novel before, let alone one set on the illegal-immigrant fringe. 
 Sahota's main tool is language, and his utter refusal to compromise. Here is a passage almost at random: "Afterwards, Narinder touched her forehead to the ground, said, 'Waheguru ji ka khalsa, waheguru ji ke fateh,' and accompanied her mother to the gurdwara, to spend the afternoon doing seva. [...] That was why her bibi and baba sent her here. Sometimes she performed the kirtan while Bibi Jeet Kaur played the harmonium...." For the most part, Sahota avoids the usual practice of fiction writers, putting in a foreign phrase or two for local color, and then immediately translating them. He simply assumes that you will understand them--snatches of what I take to be Punjabi (with occasional Hindi and Urdu), words for religious devotions, clothing, food, the basic furniture of everyday life. For a long time, they are indeed foreign, for the most part incomprehensible. But you read on for the story, and eventually the extended immersion method has its effect. You begin to understand, not merely the meanings of words, but something of the culture, beliefs, and value systems that lie behind the strange terms. 
 Each of the three main male characters is in Britain either illegally or on some borderline status. Tarlochan (Tochi), a Chamaar (untouchable) fleeing caste discrimination, has been smuggled in by truck. Avtar is on a student visa, but is working miles from the college in which he is nominally enrolled. Randeep, who is trying to earn the money to marry Avtar's sister, has gone through a sham marriage with a girl called Narinder, whose family are already English residents, hoping to get a permanent visa when the year is out. The first few chapters showing their lives in Sheffield, sharing a squat and working on minimum-wage jobs in a kitchen or on a building site, are interspersed with seventy-page chapters giving flashbacks to their lives in India, each brought low by misfortune or tragedy. 
 I must admit that the strangeness of language and culture, the relentless accumulation of bad luck both in India and England, and a certain difficulty in keeping the three men straight, made the first half of the novel heavy going. What kept me with it was Sahota's ability to tell a story--and his underlying compassion, painting his characters with sympathy, even when they have to do despicable things in order to survive. But then, at almost the halfway point, a miracle occurs. This is the chapter "Narinder: the Girl from God," in which we learn why she, coming from a middle-class family and engaged to a considerate and prosperous young man, should decide to put everything on hold and go to live in a threadbare flat in Sheffield, in a pretense marriage to a man she virtually never sees. 
 Narinder is a lovely human being. She is also deeply religious. It was only when reading her story that I fully realized that all the characters are, at least nominally, Sikhs. Inspired by Narinder's story, I looked up something of their beautiful monotheistic religion, whose tenets are summed up by Wikipedia thus: "The fundamental beliefs of Sikhism include faith in one Creator God, unity and equality of all humankind, engaging in selfless service, striving for social justice, and honest conduct and livelihood while living a householder life." You can see these qualities in Narinder, though they take a while to emerge. But you also see that the novel as a whole poses a challenge to these values. What happens to Randeep, Avtar, and Tochi is far from social justice--much of the worst that happens to them is at the hands of their own community--and whatever honesty and selflessness they had at the start is sorely tested. And as she gets drawn deeper into their lives, Narinder too begins to question the God she had taken for granted. 
 So far had I become immersed in this other culture, that Narinder's doubts did not read as a critique of some alien religion that I did not believe in anyhow, but as fundamental questions about the meaning of God. Not just the Sikh Waheguru, the Christian God, or Allah, or Yahweh--though all of these and more--but the concept of whatever moral principle we use to order our lives. And, alas, the godlessness of a world bent on bringing it down. It is a sad book, at times an almost perversely nihilistic one. But in the end, it is a profoundly moral exploration of life, all our lives. And that is precisely why I read great literature.