Cul-de-sacs of the mind

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Stay in your lane?

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1. Reading

The first street I lived on was not a lane, but a cul-de-sac. Those neat English places with the square lawns and stifling atmospheres where you enter the exact same way as you leave. Impossible to lose yourself in such a place – you would think. Though it was new, like many aspects of the dangerously nostalgic Thatcherite era in which I grew up it possessed an old name: Tudor Gardens. Which may conjure up gouty kings charging across ornamental gardens while their most faithful advisors plot against them behind the rose bushes, but was in fact a typical suburban street of semi-detached houses laid out in the leafy outskirts of southwest London. Volvos in the driveways and BMXs thrown down on the lawn, spokes still turning. Kids cosplaying He-Man at the garages. Jellies setting in the fridges. The famine in Ethiopia on the BBC Six O’Clock News. 

If I were to stay in my lane, would this be the one?

The first characters I fell in love with were Snoopy, Fraggles, Garfield, Mr Spoon, Zippy, George, Bungle and Basil Brush. Blue Peter was twice-weekly nourishment – we were the generation who asked Father Christmas for double-sided sticky tape. My parents seemed to spend most of the decade in front of The Jewel in the Crown, often laughing in a way they did not laugh elsewhere, sometimes not at all.  As for books, I never walked past a wardrobe without wondering if Narnia might be behind it, just past the mothballs and fur coats. The first peach I encountered was the giant one James and his band of garden bugs set sail on. I identified with Anne of Green Gables and Flat Stanley, despite having neither red hair nor a body half an inch thick. Dickens, Austen, the Brontës and Salinger…. I munched my way through each one like the hungry caterpillar, in whose insatiability I also saw myself, though in retrospect it was in me that the holes were made.

For nowhere in my surroundings – or for the purposes of this essay, on my lane – did I see myself. And though I was as hungry for representation as the caterpillar was for his ice cream cone and pickle, when I did eventually find what I was looking for, it was in the words of African-American writers – Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. Not the stern Indian writers on my parents’ shelves, whose great sprawling tomes reminded me of the mother country I didn’t understand that in turn didn’t understand me, and of the good daughter of India I would never be.

None of us lives on a single lane – even if you’ve had only one address your entire life, and I’ve had many. Especially if you happened to grow up in a time when your own kind – whatever that means! – was either stereotyped, misrepresented or not there at all. Staying on your lane requires stasis – that would be the staying bit – but the world changes as surely as the neighbours. We can each of us list our passions and influences, lanes on which we’ve lived, avenues of enquiry that have been travelled and the cul-de-sacs in our minds that have formed. Even then we cannot be wholly summed up. The best books know this.

Stay in your lane! Whenever I hear the phrase it’s in the tone of a demand made by an anxious mother. Watch out! Be careful! And I always want to bat back – with the Wrigley’s gum-chewing insolence of the gobby kid who grew up in 1980s London – which one? 

2. Writing

When I started writing my first book I hadn’t thought much about any of this. I was pregnant after all, and not thinking much about anything beyond folic acid, sleepsuits and what muslins were actually for. After the baby came, things got serious on and off the page. I took voluntary redundancy from my staff job as a journalist, and instead of sleeping when the baby slept, I wrote. I knew exactly what I wanted this book to be – a collection of nine essays about the nine months of pregnancy and birth, intimate, strange, lyrical and rippled with references from books, films and art. Sylvia Plath, Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Anna Karenina, Joyce’s Ulysses, Morrison’s Beloved and Gone with the Wind. These were the lanes down which I ran, a newborn on my muslined shoulder and determination in my eye. 

I wrote the first three essays and got an agent, who sent them to editors at the publishing houses of my dreams. Faber, Granta, Canongate … one by one they rejected my book. It wasn’t quite right for them. It wasn’t what they expected. They’d never read anything like it. It was too literary. They weren’t sure where on the bookshelves it would sit. They couldn’t see it appealing to anyone except pregnant women. Or my favourite – it was too niche. This said of birth; an experience so universal it’s happened to literally everyone! 

All this I now understand as code for: stay in your lane. The problem was that I wasn’t writing an ‘Indian’ book. Which was both intentional, and also a reflection of the type of Indian I was (in short, an untypical one). It mattered to me enormously to write that book from my own perspective – as a bisexual British Indian daughter of immigrants – without ever once explicitly referring to it. I saw the way straight white male writers wrote with zero explanation, that there were no lanes for them in which to stay, that the whole world was theirs for the taking, and made the conscious decision to seize some of that freedom for myself.

The truth is, staying in my lane would be dishonest for me. It would involve scrubbing out that childhood on a white suburban cul-de-sac called Tudor Gardens, and all the lanes that followed. And the life, for that matter. My partner is a white working-class Scottish woman. Our children are mixed race. We live in an area of terraced houses called – wait for it – ‘the colonies’. I love men and women, James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Arundhati Roy, Scotland and England, India and Britain. Above all, when I sit down to write every day, it is the road to freedom I walk. Even if you grew up on a cul-de-sac, there is always more than one way in and out.

© Chitra Ramaswamy

Chitra Ramaswamy

Chitra Ramaswamy is a journalist and author.