psychoraag
reviews
Saadi's all the rag
Reviewed
by Angus Calder
 “Namaste
ji, salaam alaikum, sat sri akal, welcome tae The Junoon
Show. Ah’m Zaf, zed ayy eff – an yer listenin’
tae Radio Chaandnii oan wavelength 99.9 meters ...”
When Suhayl Saadi’s collection
of short stories The Burning Mirror appeared three years
ago, grateful readers noticed, among his very varied prose
repertoire, a superb ear for Scottish speech. In his first
novel, the ventriloquist goes his dinger. Zaf’s idiolect
mingles Weegie patter with phrases and curses from several
sub-continental languages, French, Gaelic, and, of course,
guid auld Scots.
Radio Chaandni has been licensed
to operate for three months out of a Glasgow community centre
– a former church. Psychoraag is mostly Zaf’s
last broadcast on the “graveyard shift”, midnight
to six. He DJs The Junoon Show, so called because junoon
means madness, sharing his own craziness with maybe just
a few hundred mad listeners.
Normally they phone in requests
– but not on this steamy hot night. From his tight
cubicle, Jaf is transmitting his own personal choice. This
ranges from mainstream rock, through music from Punjab,
Bengal, South India, to Celtic items and, at the novel’s
climax (which is a climax – Zilla, a former lover,
junkie and prostitute, invades Zaf’s studio and shags
him) the console is giving forth 20th century avant garde
classical, composer unspecified. Meanwhile, downstairs for
most of the night, Zaf’s equally crazy Scots-Asian
colleagues are dancing to different tunes at the farewell
party and occasionally swarming up to invade his space.
The records play on and on, whatever is happening.
Extensive allusion to music is nothing
new in fiction. The ideal reader of Irvine Welsh must know
about rock, Iain Banks has shown similar propensities, and
to understand Rankin’s Rebus fully we need to share
his taste in discs. But is Saadi, structuring his whole
novel round records, imposing too much? I think not. Saadi
makes his music live vividly for us through its connotations
for Zaf, and more than once you may wonder if he hasn’t
invented a track entirely. Is it true that a 100 years ago
some servant of the Raj recorded a high-class hooker called
Janki Bai singing a sad song of love in the old language
of North India, interspersed with verses in “difficult,
semi-archaic, Lucknow Urdu”?
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Saadi’s seven-page small-print
glossary is in some ways regrettable. But it does contain
a lengthy note on the word “raag” which explains
what Saadi is up to. “A pattern of notes in Indian
music used as the basis for melodies and improvisations
… Personalised descriptions enable a musician to unite
his or her personality with a particular mood and instil
the same in the audience.”
This novel is Zaf’s raag.
His imagination swoops over the vast spaces of Eurasia,
from Bengal to Caithness, overviews with wry wit the immigrant
Asian predicament in Glasgow, collapses into intimate memories
of joy and humiliation, always trying to take his listeners
with him. Towards the end, we get Zaf’s blazingly
original take on Glasgow, as he imagines roaming the city’s
streets in the coming day.
Intercut is the tale of Zaf’s
parents In the late 1950s, a young Lahore engineer, Jamil
Ayaan, deserts wife and son to flee with his boss’s
wife Rashida, in a little Ford car, for the Afghan border.
Thence, they drive across Europe, to enjoy their love in
freedom – and pick Glasgow, where Jamil can only find
work in the sewers and the romantic dream wilts in a reek
of chip fat amid the glowers of Govan Orangemen. Jamil is
now institutionalised with dementia, obsessed with the rats
he encountered underground. The parents are part of the
novel’s inner pentangle along with Zilla, the ruined
Pakistani maid, and Zaf’s current partner, Babs, a
feisty biker blonde nurse from Galloway.
Babs is made to seem more “whole”
than the others. Were Saadi less subtle we might be made
uneasy by Zaf’s reiterated, “incorrect”,
craving for whiteness, Scottish rootedness. But this is
a complicated man, a layabout semi-estranged from his parents,
with a degree in ethnology and an extra ordinary historical
imagination, suffused with a sense of his own tiny worthlessness
yet making with music a spirituality for himself which somehow
explains and assuages everything. Psychoraag is not just
Midnight’s Children-meets-Trainspotting because Saadi
is more thoughtful than Welsh or Rushdie.
We are all, so to speak, Janki Bai’s
Bairns. To say that through music all humankind unites at
the deepest level in joy and sorrow, subsuming both the
ecstasy of Jamil’s illicit romance and the pathos
of his ending, is sociologically credible and existentially
exactly so. We all die sooner or later. Music flows on.
25 April 2004
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