You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
Let's call the whole thing off!
Songwriters: Ira Gershwin / George Gershwin
There are far too many words for the humble potato and tomato and who doesn’t like a good bateta nu shaak or is it bateka? Even in Gujarati the language many things are pronounced differently too. I came across one of Parle Patel’s skits on Instagram about hando, ondhwo, andhwo, and it started me on a quick research. What do you call potato and tomato in your language? I got a huge response on social media, for our staple go to starch and the fruit that’s disguised as a vegetable.
Why am I raising this, well I know I’m a Gujarati Indian, and I’m also East African born. There are 23 languages spoken in India alone and when you add the people who like me are living in the diaspora - UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UAE, France, Portugal, Netherland, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Fiji, Japan, Surinam, Guyana, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, the name for potato and tomato are too many to count.
Why have I spent so much time on this? Culturally the people from the Indian subcontinent have many similarities, but we also have many differences. When I was searching for stories from someone like me I read R. K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh, Mulk Raj Anand, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi. Not quite like mine. Stories of displacement, the yearning to go back, remaining neither in one country nor the other, the ‘peripheral man’ as V. S. Naipaul called them.
People like me have a different story to tell, we’re not on the periphery, we know nothing of the land of our ancestors.
Would you compare Thomas Hardy to E. M. Forster or Charlotte Bronte to Jeanette Winterson, they write similar stories of heroines. Why, then do publishing houses and the gatekeepers of our stories have a token writer of colour but have stacks and stacks of authors from white, middle class, men. I’m not complaining about male writers, but even the earliest books I read to find a place to belong were from Indian men. When I came across Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. My heart fluttered at last, a story I could relate to about growing up in England. But that feeling subsided, and I was back on the elusive search for stories of people like me. Some diaspora authors wrote stories that gained success, Chitra Banerjee Devakurani, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, and a recent discovery, Elif Shafak. It also gave me the courage to write my story, not through a publishing house but through self-publishing. So I say to literary agents and publishing houses, there are many stories from many unknown writers. Give them the opportunities to tell them. They might not fit your specification, a blogger, an academic at a university, a journalist, a presenter, an actor. They might be a working class mother of five, who finds time in her busy life to write beautiful prose, but doesn’t know how to seek that agent, submit a short story to a competition, attend the many book writing courses.
Where Have We Come Finalist in the Wishing Shelf Book Awards
Book award and validation
After writing this piece I received news that Where Have We Come, Book Two of the Reena & Nikesh Duet is a finalist for The Wishing Shelf Book Awards. Did I feel the same as when the paperback arrived, not the same, but I’m on a high. The finalists are picked by readers, not literary agents, or editors, but people like you and me, who read for pleasure, groups who discuss books, groups who want to escape.
Writing drafts for Where Have We Come and My Heart Sings Your Song
Writing Dialogue - a useful show not tell - writing tool
I’m currently writing my second duet in the university series, and this book has a dual point of view. Every time I write a thought or dialogue for one of the protagonists, they keep starting their thoughts and conversations with Christ!, sometimes in exacerbation, sometimes in frustration. Should I embrace their use of the word, I’ve tried taking it out, but their voice doesn’t sound authentic to me. Every reader will have different connotations on using that word, but that's okay, I want a reaction.
Umi, in the Reena and Nikesh Series, said a word often when she was shocked and angry. She watered it down to effing when she was in company. But it suited her character, a rebellious Gujarati girl, from London.
I made some amazing friends when I was at Demontfort University and one friend said this to me, ‘Do you want to come with?’ The first thing that came in my mind was come with what? Wine, food, a friend. No, he was asking if wanted to go to the party with him.
Y’all coming?
Hey Bhagwan!
Fabuuulous
Eee, tha’s a reet gladly brew, tha
Tra ra, a bit
What does this tell you about this character? I don’t have to say they are from Texas, India, Craig Revel Horwood, Yorkshire, Midlands, you can tell by the way they speak. So as a writer I experiment with dialogue, add an extra something, take a word out there, my grammar checker shouts out the mistake.
So continuing with a play on words and their meanings, here’s an extract from my standalone inspired by Jane Eyre, Made in Heaven for Me.
The child’s little fingers tore at the paper. She lifted the small box and enquired, “What is this called in English?”
“A telephone box.”
“And the car?”
“That’s a London taxi,” I answered, smiling, and my heart swelled.
“Ooh, a red bus. Is this from London, too?”
“Oui, that is a bus,” I replied.
She repeated the words, rolling them in her mouth to familiarise herself. “Bus… bus… ooh, that’s like bus bus.” She giggled at the joke; the words meant ‘just enough’ in Gujarati.
I liked her straight away; she was inquisitive and outgoing, switching from French to Gujarati without hesitation.
A little poem that arrived in my inbox from Sarah Ismail, a play on the English language and how words are there to play with our minds. Amazon
When the English tongue we speak.
Why is break not rhymed with freak?
Will you tell me why it’s true
We say sew but likewise few?
And the maker of the verse,
Cannot rhyme his horse with worse?
Beard is not the same as heard
Cord is different from word.
Cow is cow but low is low
Shoe is never rhymed with foe.
Think of hose, dose, and lose
And think of goose and yet with choose
Think of comb, tomb and bomb,
Doll and roll or home and some.
Since pay is rhymed with say
Why not paid with said I pray?
Think of blood, food and good.
Mould is not pronounced like could.
Wherefore done, but gone and lone –
Is there any reason known?
To sum up all, it seems to me
Sound and letters don’t agree