And finally, I must thank my editor, Sarah Turner, for her infectious enthusiasm in championing my work; the team at Pan Macmillan for the tender care with which they have treated my manuscript; and my agent, Ayesha Karim at Gillon Aitken, for her support and advice.

AN INTERVIEW

WITH ROOPA FAROOKI

Bitter Sweets is about the impact of deception on family relationships. What drew you to this story?

I’ve always been fascinated by the dynamics of truth-telling within families, a fascination which began from observing how my own extended Pakistani/Bangladeshi family behaved. Like my character Shona, I noticed at an early age that certain things were left unsaid and unexpressed by tacit agreement for the sake of maintaining familial harmony, as though not discussing them somehow made them acceptable.

I quickly learned that this moral fog used to cover up awkward or uncomfortable realities was something shared by most families; whether motivated by kindness or convenience, the immediate instinct for many of us is to comfort and conceal with a lie rather than to hurt and expose with the truth. With Bitter Sweets, I wanted to tell a story about a family that uses deceit to hold their fragile family structure together across emotional, cultural, and geographical divides, to the extent that deception and double lives become something of a family tradition, inherited from one generation and passed to the next. Their journey is how they learn that the lies that are supposedly binding them are in fact keeping them apart.

Does deception play a prevalent role in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrant cultures?

I think that many Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrant families still struggle with the disparity between their traditional Eastern and Islamic values and those of the Western society in which they have chosen to live, to the extent that traditionally “unacceptable” behaviour such as homosexuality, dating, drinking, or gambling are not openly acknowledged by the first generation, forcing the younger and more Westernised family members into secrecy. That said, in Bitter Sweets the moral conflicts of the characters which lead them to deceive are not a result of religious dilemmas or culture clashes, but rather due to their very personal and ambiguous emotions.

Are your characters representative of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrant communities?

I lived in three areas of London with high proportions of immigrants—in Tooting, Bethnal Green, and Southwark, and drew inspiration from the locals that I met there, as well as from my own experience. Bhai Hassan’s sweetshop and Parvez’s successful restaurant business have many real-life equivalents in Tooting. However, my characters are middle class, which doesn’t yet represent the majority of immigrants; it was recently reported in the UK (April 2007) that as many as two-thirds of Bengali immigrants still live in poverty.

The novel opens with an arranged marriage in the 1950s—do arranged marriages still take place? How successful are they in your opinion?