Anita and Me (Grades 9–1) York Notes

Anita and Me is a ‘Bildungsroman’, a novel about a character growing up, whose title announces its main subject – Meena’s friendship with the older, white working-class Anita, which is central to Meena’s development. However, she also develops in three other ways: her attitude towards truth and fiction, her attitude to racism, and her attitude to herself as the daughter of immigrants. Syal connects all three to the friendship with Anita.

Even in the preface Syal highlights truth and fiction as a theme, when she uses viewpoint to play with the author’s role by presenting a false personal history for Meena. The main narrative starts with a more childish lie – Meena’s claim that she did not steal a shilling. She confesses to telling other children stories about being a princess, calling these ‘harmless fabrications’, but also to telling ‘whoppers’ to avoid punishment. Much later, she still makes up stories, as when she thinks the Ballbearing women deserve to be tricked about Nanima’s background and talents. However, Syal prepares us for the importance of Meena’s greatest temptation by giving her a visionary out-of-body experience. She is about to lie to the police, but her experience makes her tell the truth. This shows that she can now be honest when it matters.

When Meena meets Anita, she believes Anita’s lie about her father being a sailor: playing with fiction is something they have in common. When the friendship starts, Anita establishes its terms by walking off with Meena’s sweets, correctly assuming that Meena will follow. Anita, as ‘cock of our yard’, dominates, but Meena gradually becomes her equal, then outgrows her. Part of this process is when Meena mothers Anita, protecting her from what Anita’s real mother is doing at the fair. Meena also tries to comfort Anita after Deirdre leaves. Her rejection of Anita begins when she dares to call her a ‘stupid cow’ for admiring the racist Sam Lowbridge. Although the friendship resumes, Anita’s admiration for racism remains an issue. When Meena overhears her lightly calling Sam’s ‘Paki bashing’ ‘bosting’, this is the end of the friendship. Syal presents Meena’s emotional conflict and loss in the dramatic climax of Meena riding Trixie. Meena seems to injure herself deliberately in order to end the friendship.

Earlier on Meena has been shocked by racism, reacting to the elderly driver who insults her as if ‘punched’, the word choice showing her emotional pain. She reacts similarly to Sam’s racist heckling. Gradually, however, she toughens up, standing up to Sam, and accusing Mr Ormerod of cheating Nanima. When she hears of her Auntie Usha suffering the kind of racist attack that was becoming common in the early 1970s, she feels ‘both impotent and on fire’, the metaphor revealing her powerless passion. But by the time she has her climactic kiss with Sam, she feels ‘mighty’ compared with him, and is even able to pity him.

Nevertheless, Meena’s greatest change is in her sense of ‘displacement’ as the child of Indian parents in Britain. She wants to be like the white girls in ‘Jackie’, but Nanima boosts her self-image as an Asian girl at a time when there were few ethnic role models. After Nanima’s return, Meena says she ‘absorbed Nanima’s absence and Robert’s departure like rain on parched earth’. The simile shows she has thrived on her loss, so that her ‘displacement’ has ‘shrivelled into insignificance’. We might think, nonetheless, that the euphemism ‘departure’ for Robert’s death suggests she could not accept it completely.

Whereas Meena’s other changes are presented through action and dialogue, her new sense of self is revealed only in her self-description as narrator, so we have to take her word for it. Despite this, it is clear that her suffering has made her a stronger person, able to be herself, regardless of colour, and to be at home wherever she is.