Publication Details
Bali Rai (2004) Rani and Sukh: a modern tale of love and vengeance. Corgi Books ISBN 0-552-548 90-1
The Author
Bali Rai lives in Leicester where all his books have been set. He has a written four novels for Corgi: Rani and Sukh, (Un)arranged Marriage, The Crew and The Whisper. His two early books focus on generational gulfs and cultural differences within family and society.
He writes powerfully about the teenage experience of 21st century multiracial urban life. His characters are convincingly streetwise; his stories uncompromising and challenging. He has won a number of book awards and prizes.
Curriculum Context
The teaching suggestions for Rani and Sukh are suitable for KS4 and older. It contains strong language, explicit sexual content and episodes of violent behaviour.
It would be particularly appropriate for students studying Romeo and Juliet or as part of a unit on romantic/tragic fiction.
It could be read to introduce discussion about a number of contemporary issues affecting young people's lives: cultural difference, parental authority, teenage sex, revenge, interfamily hostility, peer group rivalry.
Also the way friendship, loyalty and love can bridge differences of culture. A good introduction to the work of Bali Rai would be to read his short story ‘Beaten’ in Walking a Tightrope New writing from Asian Britain edited by Rehana Ahmed (Young Picador).
Synopsis
Rani and Sukh is closely based on Shakespeare's ‘Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.’ There are constant references and allusions to the play.
A substantial flashback in the middle of the book to the early 1960s in the Punjab explains the origins of the hostility between two families that lies at the heart of the contemporary story.
A brief prologue set in a Punjabi village describes a young girl taking her life and that of her unborn child. We know that the father of the child is already dead; before she dies she looks for him in the sky.
‘She noticed a bright star directly above her. Above the well. It was him. She knew it. Already he was waiting, just as he had always promised, in those stolen moments among the long ears of corn, and out here at the very spot where she stood’(5).
This direct reference to Romeo and Juliet warns the reader of the tragedy to come.
‘ Come gentle night…
Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night... (Act III.2).
In the first chapter, the reader is introduced to Sukh as he talks to his friend Jaspal on the school playground before they go in to an afternoon of GCSE English and maths.
Sukh is in love, ‘Rani Sandhu was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen … she looked just like a Bollywood actress’ (p 9). In the second chapter, Rani tells us in the first person how she has fallen for Sukh, ‘I was thinking about that boy, Sukh, who I kept smiling at for no reason at all … He was so fit’ (p 12). She does not know how to approach him. Her friend Natalie suggests that she should ask him out. Her reply, ’I can't - my family ain't exactly the most liberated people …’ (p 14) indicates the problem that is going to shape the rest of the novel.
They do of course, come together and begin to go out as a couple. They are both seriously in love with each other, but Rani in particular realises the risks she is taking. In her conventional Sikh family choosing a boyfriend with a view to a long-term relationship is out of the question.
In her claustrophobic, suburban Leicester home, despite the fact that this is the 21st century, she and her mother have well-defined domestic roles and rules.
Her father still believes that it is for him to choose a partner for her. Like Juliet she is trapped by her family. As the two grow closer the risk they are taking increases. They must hide from prying eyes; family friends and close relations.
Sukh seems to come from a rather more relaxed background, however. His elder sister Parvy has left home and has a flat in the centre of town.
This flat becomes Sukh and Rani's refuge, representing what could be possible for them in the future when they have finished their GCSEs and moved on to college.
Sukh has a number of cousins and it is while playing football with the local league that he begins to become aware of the serious antagonism between his own large family and another local family.
Violence flares up between the Sandhu and the Bains families. The way they insult each other reminds readers of Shakespeare's Montagues and Capulets.
Rani is spending more and more time with Sukh in Parvy's flat; the relationship has become serious and it is no surprise when Rani discovers that she is pregnant.
Natalie, her best friend, spells out the options to Rani who decides to keep the baby. Sukh is even more in love and will always stand by her.
When Parvy suddenly returns from the USA, the couple decide to enlist her help in breaking the news to their families. When Parvy hears Rani’s family name, however, she is really shocked at their ignorance and innocence.
She tells them the story of what took place in Moranwali in the Punjab in the early Sixties. It is the tragic story of Billah Bains and Kulwant Sandhu and the reason for the current feud between the two families thirty years on.
This is another version of Romeo and Juliet; the structure is very similar except that the two families are the best of friends at the outset and two of their teenage sons, Mohinder Sandhu and Resham Bains, are particularly close.
However, when Resham's younger brother falls in love with Mohinder's sister the most terrifying retribution is paid, leaving both families without a son and daughter.
Rani and Sukh listen to this story with horror. The parallels with their own situation are only too obvious. At first, neither of them believes that in contemporary Leicester where they live in comfortable prosperity that the families will not accept what has happened. Indeed, they feel that it may serve to bring them together again.
The second half of the book re-enacts the horrors that befell Romeo and Juliet and Billah and Kulwant. Sukh and his father turn to the local priest for support, just as Romeo and Billah did to no avail. Rani is locked up by her family who are out to seek revenge.
Her older brother Divinder, already a serious criminal, is determined to retrieve the family honour, izzat, just as his uncles had over thirty years ago.
Natalie devises a cunning plan to rescue Rani and for a brief moment it seems possible, just as it does in the story of Romeo and Juliet and Kulwant and Billah, that all will be well as the couple are reunited and the two families are reconciled, that Mohinder Sandhu and Resham Bains will be able to resume their old friendship.
There is in fact a tragic ending as Sukh loses his life in a savage revenge killing by Divinder Sandhu. Over a year later this harsh ending is softened as we see Rani, following in the footsteps of Parvy, evidently working in the USA with her baby son.
A new start and a break with tradition perhaps, but whether there is an end to the family feud and the possibility of reconciliation is left to the reader to decide.
Themes and Issues
• Generational differences
• Cultural differences
• Romantic love
• Vengeance and retribution
• Loyalty and friendship
• Family honour
Characters
In Leicester:
• Rani Sandhu: first person narrator, about to take her GCSEs
Has fallen in love with Sukh Bains. Is worried about her appearance and curvaceous figure.
• Sukh Bains: bright and sensitive teenager with high hopes for the future.
• Mohinder Sandhu: Rani’s father, owner of a successful business. Intolerant, insecure, a bully at times. Very protective towards his daughter.
• Resham Bains: also a successful businessman but more relaxed and tolerant than his old friend.
• Rani's mother: generally bullied by her husband and sons, very intolerant, speaks poor English, and finds it difficult to understand or accept her daughter's life.
• Natalie: Rani's best friend, streetwise, mature, extrovert and hopes to go to drama school. Rani envies her for her good looks and lovely figure.
• Divinder (Divy) Rani’s oldest brother. He is a thug and a bully who has practically taken over the running of the family business. He is hard on Rani.
• Parvinder (Parvy) Sukh's older sister. A confident mature woman who, despite parental misgivings, has left home, owns her own flat and often works in the USA.
• Sukh's cousins and friends: he plays football in a team which has many members of his family as well as friends. They seem rather an irritant; often immature, prone to drinking and frivolous behaviour.
In Moranwali 1960s, a very poor rural village in the Punjab. Life is hard, the community is tight-knit.
• Mohinder Sandhu: a hard-working teenager on the family farm.
• Resham Bains: his friend; they work and play together.
• Kulwant Sandhu: Mohinder's younger sister who is in love with Billah.
• Billah Bains: Resham's younger brother
• Nimmo: a low caste woman who helps Kulwant plan to escape from the village.
• The priest, Gianni-ji: to whom Billah turns for help.
Setting
• Time: early 1960s and contemporary
• Place: Moranwali, Punjab; Leicester: Sukh's home; Rani's home; their secondary school; Parvy's flat; Natalie's home; the football pitch.
Structure
A prologue, set in the Punjab in the early 1960s will be followed up at a particular climax in the novel, by a full telling of the events that took place at that time and the consequences for the protagonists, Rani and Sukh, in the present.
The novel is in three parts:
• in the first part Rani and Sukh fall in love
• In the second part, Parvy reveals the history of their two families
• In the third part, the horrific consequences of her story, take place in a violent re-enactment of the earlier event.
Frequent references to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet deepen the sense of unease that the reader feels about the possible outcome.
• Beginning: in the moonlight, a young girl flees the wrath of her family. She runs to an ancient well, thinking only of her unborn child and the promise her lover had made to her, ‘You will find me up there, at night. The brightest of all the stars. Waiting for you.' And then she falls.
• Opening: Rani and Sukh both express their infatuation for each other but do not know how to communicate this to each other.
• Inciting moment: their decision to spend time together in Parvy's flat.
• Development: as they spend more and more time together they become adept at avoiding prying eyes. Their pleasure in each other's company grows and their confidence in the rightness of their relationship increases. Sukh is occasionally disturbed by feelings of unease that he cannot explain.
• Climax: Rani's discovery that she is pregnant and the realisation that they will have to take the consequences of their action.
• Denouement: a failed attempt to bring reconciliation to the two families ends in tragedy.
• Ending: as with the previous story of the events in the Punjab there seems to be no possibility for any reconciliation between the two families.
• Epilogue: Rani and her baby son are perhaps the key to future reconciliation but they are far from home and she is still mourning the death of Sukh.
Narration and point of view
Rani and Sukh is written from a number of different points of view:
• An omniscient narrator provides a third person account of the historic details of the events that took place in Moranwali;
• Rani is a first person narrator, revealing her thoughts and feelings
• Sukh’s story is told through third person narration, often through lively dialogue with his mates or conversations with Rani.
Language
The young people in the Leicester setting use a confident teenage non-standard dialect:
‘Man, she is wicked. Like one of them Bollywood actresses. Fine.’
Sukh was sitting on the steps that led up to the concrete tennis courts by the side of the school talking to one of his friends, Jaspal.
Jaspal laughed and shook his head. ‘Rani? You know what her name means, don't you?
‘ Yeah - it means “queen”, don't it?
‘ Exactly, Sukh. Queen. She probably loves herself, you get me? (p 9).
On the football pitch his cousins are constantly playing with language:
‘ Why all the fightin’ and shit-- it's just a footie game, innit? asked Sukh .
‘Don't worry yourself, Sukhy,’ Ranjit told him. ‘There’s history here, man -- them bastards got it coming.’
‘What history?’
‘Never mind -- you is too young, innit. Just lef it- ain't nuttin’ happening anyway. Most of them mans is just talk, you get me?’
Sukh shook his head at Ranjit's mix of accents and wondered what the hell he was talking about (pp 62-63).
Teaching Suggestions
Aims
• To encourage wider reading of contemporary fiction.
• To provide opportunities to relate these texts to their own experience through discussion, drama and writing.
• To consider how effectively Bali Rai portrays teenage relationships and language.
Discussion topics
Although Rani and Sukh focuses on generational relationships in a specific Asian community, the issues that it raises are timeless and universal concerns for young adults: marriage, family loyalty and honour, peer group feuding and rivalry, hatred, friendship, respect for parents, abortion, ambitions, friendship, coping with the values of an older generation.
It would also be interesting to compare the way of life, only a generation ago, led by Rani and Sukh's parents in the Punjab. Students might be asked to consider why their parents seem to find it difficult to comprehend their children's behaviour now that they are in Leicester.
It would be interesting to think about a day in the life of Kulwant Sandhu and Billah Bains in the 1960s and to compare it with what they know about Rani and Sukh in 21st century Leicester.
Topics that might be considered:
• climate and clothing
• housing and education
• employment
• material possessions
• religion
• music and cars
• mobile phones and e-mail and their function in the plot
• the characters -- particularly Natalie and Parvy as role models for Rani
• a closer discussion of the structure of the plot. Students could be encouraged to map this in different ways
• a detailed discussion, with reference to their own language, of the language used at different points in the plot
• a consideration of the different points of view in the novel. Students could be asked to take an episode and write it from a different point of view
Further developments.
Strong links with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are evident throughout the text; similarities could be identified and discussed. This could offer an opportunity for drama and writing dialogue.
Students who are familiar with the play, could be asked to identify similarities and differences between Rani and Sukh and Romeo and Juliet. Those who have never read the play could be introduced to relevant episodes.
These could include:
• the significance of the star
• rival families
• arranged marriages
• help from religious advisers
• the old nurse and the old woman in the village
• a comparison of how clandestine meetings are arranged in both stories and what dangers these involve
• Students could be asked to look at why what seems to be an almost foolproof plan at the end of the three stories that will bring the lovers together again, fails disastrously
• They could compare the slightly different endings. In all three stories it is expected that the families will become reconciled in the event of the protagonists coming together. Students could discuss how far this seems likely to happen.
For students who have not read the play it might be useful to introduce them to The Prologue:
Two households both alike in dignity,
(In fair Verona where we lay our scene)
From ancient grudge, break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean:
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
A pair of star- crossed lovers, take their life:
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows,
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
Links could be made with Rani and Sukh. They could look at an episode that makes direct reference to the play.
‘ But, soft!’ She began, a big smile cracking across her face, ‘what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Sukhy boy, my son!’
‘NAT! What --?’
‘Sukhio! Oh Sukhio! Wherefore art thou Sukhio? Deny thy father and …’
Sukh groaned and considered finding the pebble that Nat had chucked through the window …
‘ What do you want, Natalie?’(176).
Detailed discussion of extracts from the text.
One of the main themes of Rani and Sukh is that of generational difference; the difficulty that parents and children have understanding each other's perspective.
This is a universal problem but one which is exacerbated when parents are adjusting to a new culture. But many teenagers will empathise with Rani, ‘I felt like I was living in an open prison’. The following passage could be the stimulus for discussion, dramatic improvisation or written work.
‘The ‘other girls’ my mum was talking about didn't exist as individuals that she actually knew. The phrase was a collective shorthand for all the ills of Western society - bad girls who tried to be English and went out with boys and got pregnant. Smoked like men and drank like them too.
The kind of girls who were the subjects of gossip between the older women at the gurudwara and all the family gatherings that occurred -- weddings, parties and even funerals. The girls who ran off with Muslim boys or left home and ended up in council flats, leaving their family izzat in the gutter.
There were countless stories about such girls and my mum was always warning the about the consequences of ‘messing about’, as she put it. To call my home life restrictive was not even halfway to the truth. I felt like I was living in an open prison. I was allowed out but always had to return at the end of the day’ (pp 38-39).
The following passage could also be a stimulus for a discussion about parental authority, arranged marriage and parents’ attitudes to teenage relationships generally.
‘It was nice to dream -- it was a way of putting out of my mind the reality of my life. My father would be more than happy to pack me off to the first rich Asian family that came knocking. People who ‘fitted’ our family; came from exactly the same background and had the same wealth.
I wondered what my dad would make of someone like Sukh and his family. He'd probably laugh to himself and tell me that Sukh's dad had sold his family’s izzat down the river in the quest to become ‘bloody goreh’. That his sister was a khungeri -- a whore, who didn't respect Punjabi traditions and thought she was different from other Punjabi women.
‘Apna aap nu sammage thei ki heh?’ He’d say. ‘Who does she think she is?’
(p 50)
Taking it further
There are many novels for young people that treat similar themes. The following could be recommended to students who have enjoyed the challenge of Rani and Sukh.
Rehana Ahmed (ed.) (2004) Walking A Tightrope. New writing from Asian Britain. Young Picador
Melvin Burgess (1996) Junk Penguin
Aidan Chambers (1999) Postcards from No Man’s Land Bodley Head
Adele Geras (2000) Troy Scholastic Ltd
Linda Newbery (20003) The Shell House Red Fox
Jeanne Willis (2003) Naked without a Hat Faber and Faber