'Maybe I don’t want to always be a learning experience for you. Maybe we just haven’t realised how different we are, how different our worlds are.’ [loc. 2083]
Amar Iqbar is Muslim, gay, and about to get married to a white guy. His family learn the latter two facts from a message in the family WhatsApp. They are not impressed: elder sister thinks he's mentally ill, younger sister cries, one brother stays quiet and the other says he 'can't have no faggot for a brother'. Their father tells him 'Look to God to forgive you'. All of which demonstrates why he hasn't come out to them before, and also provides a concise summary of typical attitudes in a second-generation Bangladeshi family in contemporary London.
Amar is still dealing with grief after his mother's death, and has always been troubled by the conflict between his faith and his sexuality: and then he discovers he's about to lose his job at a small independent bookshop. It doesn't help that Joshua, his boyfriend, stands by while Amar is (as he sees it) insulted by his future mother-in-law, Josephine. Luckily, Amar still has friends, and one suggests therapy...
This was an easy read, often repetitive, but a good window onto a culture that isn't my own. The least credible aspect of it for me was the therapist who never says the wrong thing or suggests anything unreasonable! I liked the sense of Amar discovering who he was without the filter of family or relationship, and I liked his new 'found family' and his realisation that there's more to Islam than the faith he grew up in.
I read this in sync with a friend and felt more sympathetic towards Amar than she did. I also found the culture clash more interesting -- the sense that at least some of Amar's behaviour (such as avoiding difficult conversations) is cultural. At one point when therapy is suggested, he replies 'it just seems like kind of a white people thing. They feel sad and then they go and see a therapist and pop a couple of antidepressants. No offence. That just isn’t how we do things in my family, in my culture. There aren’t just some magic words that make everything okay.' [loc. 970]. And yet the therapy is what saves him.
I bought this in June 2022, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.