{"id":22284,"date":"2024-07-10T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/?p=22284"},"modified":"2024-12-18T14:51:09","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T13:51:09","slug":"life-isnt-all-haha-heehee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2024\/07\/10\/life-isnt-all-haha-heehee\/","title":{"rendered":"Life isn\u2019t All Haha Heehee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Is Life Fun When You Don\u2019t Always Look Twenty One?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I cursed myself when I denounced those \u2018book over movie\u2019 snobs, or maybe I\u2019m just pickier than I thought. Meera Syal\u2019s second novel Life isn\u2019t All Haha Heehee <\/em>feels like a kind of unofficial biographical sequel to Anita and Me<\/em>. Although Life isn\u2019t\u2026 <\/em>deals with heavier themes, it still has that dark comedy which she does so well. Her prose is, as always, unquestionably phenomenal,  but the BBC miniseries adaptation fell short for me. The characters just didn\u2019t match<\/em> the ones in the book. Okay, okay, I\u2019m a hypocrite. Now go read the book first.  <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life isn\u2019t\u2026<\/em> follows the lives of three best friends who grew up together in the Punjabi community of East London. Sunita the once-activist who is a failed law student and unhappy wife. Tania, former school yard scrapper who is now an aspiring TV\/film director. Then there is Chila, dictionary definition sweet, but not the kind that fails the Sexy Lamp test. The story opens with Chila\u2019s wedding to Deepak, a joyous event since her family had written her off as too dumb to be marriageable. It is Chila\u2019s innocence which inspires Tania\u2019s boss to give Tania her own film project. A documentary about love in the South Asian community. This tokenism which is the antithesis of what Tania wants to build her career on, is precisely what launches it. But her film\u2019s success also ignites a series of betrayals leaving the three women to fight for their own happiness amidst splintered friendships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, Syal puts the South Asian experience at the forefront without isolating readers, or worse, writing something hollow where the reader is merely observing the \u2018other.\u2019 Sorrows, joys, and struggles are borderless even when they come in different shades. Despite\u00a0 landing on different paths, it was once an unspoken rule of their friendship that the three women would be united by\u00a0 shared domesticity: husbands, children, and as Chila said, getting old and saggy together.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately the phrase \u2018you let yourself go\u2019 is as much an accusation as a lament. So many scenes in both versions had me cringing, like when her husband Akash calls Sunita a cliche, dumpy housewife after she cuts her hair and loses weight. The pressure of having to do and be everything and please everyone – all before the inevitable decline into crone-hood at thirty six – was frustratingly relatable.  The constant references to Tania\u2019s beauty is just further proof of an uncomfortable truth. Audiences would rather learn about a culture  from someone who is an approachable mix of exotic and conventionally beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sadly, this nuance and even the darkly humorous aspects were lost in the adaptation or conveyed in flat, plot exposition-type dialogue. The miniseries gives too much space to their messy love lives when love is just a foil for how complicated it really is to live life on your own terms. That said, don\u2019t write off the series entirely. It\u2019s part of a body of work where the heavy lifting isn\u2019t done by South Asian cliches of colors, one-dimensionally crazy parents, and spontaneous dance numbers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, don\u2019t forget how rare and refreshing it is to read a story where women in their thirties are still searching for happiness instead of comparison shopping for nursing homes.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meera Syal’s Life isn\u2019t All Haha Heehee follows the lives of three best friends who grew up together in the Punjabi community of East London. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":22279,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2444,103],"tags":[2211,2257,2259,2607,2264,2263,2608,2609,2552,2556,2258,2261,2423,2260,2262,1395],"class_list":["post-22284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poco_lit_space-en","category-review","tag-anita-and-me","tag-bbc","tag-book-versus-film","tag-east-london-en","tag-female-friendship","tag-housewife","tag-leyton-en","tag-life-isnt-all-haha-heehee-en","tag-london-en","tag-migration-en","tag-miniseries","tag-mother","tag-poco-lit-space-en","tag-south-asian-experience","tag-wife","tag-women"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22284"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22336,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22284\/revisions\/22336"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}