Saadi's all the raag

Psychoraag by Suhayl Saadi (B&W, 12.99)
Reviewed by Angus Calder in the Sunday Herald

CATEGORY FICTION
PUB DATE APRIL 2004
ISBN 1 84502 010 3
EXTENT 350 PP.
PRICE £12.99
FORMAT 216 x 138 H/B

Namaste ji, salaam alaikum, sat sri akal, welcome tae The Junoon Show. Ahm Zaf, zed ayy eff an yer listenin tae Radio Chaandnii oan wavelength 99.9 meters ...

When Suhayl Saadis 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. Zafs 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 Zafs 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 novels climax (which is a climax Zilla, a former lover, junkie and prostitute, invades Zafs studio and shags him) the console is giving forth 20th century avant garde classical, composer unspecified. Meanwhile, downstairs for most of the night, Zafs 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 Rankins 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 hasnt 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?

Saadis 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 Zafs 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 Zafs blazingly original take on Glasgow, as he imagines roaming the citys streets in the coming day.

Intercut is the tale of Zafs parents In the late 1950s, a young Lahore engineer, Jamil Ayaan, deserts wife and son to flee with his bosss 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 novels inner pentangle along with Zilla, the ruined Pakistani maid, and Zafs 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 Zafs 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 Midnights Children-meets-Trainspotting because Saadi is more thoughtful than Welsh or Rushdie.

We are all, so to speak, Janki Bais Bairns. To say that through music all humankind unites at the deepest level in joy and sorrow, subsuming both the ecstasy of Jamils 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