By Sucdi Awale
After leaving Leicester in search of freedom, Manish Chauhan returns in his Leicester-inspired debut novel, Belgrave Road.
“The past was like a piece of string, stitched to the inside of a person’s heart. One could never be entirely free of it,” he says.
In the novel, Chauhan writes about the magnetism of memory; a sentiment that mirrors his life.
“I think I actually escaped from Leicester back in the day,” the Leicester-born writer reveals over a chat at the city’s branch of Waterstones. He has now returned as a published author after spending more than a decade as a lawyer in London.
Although his new novel is named after the road he grew up on, Chauhan doesn’t just write about what he knows. The novel explores cultures outside of the 42-year-old’s own Indian background, and he had to do some serious research to get there. “For me, writing is an act of empathy and also an act of discovery.” He uses fiction to explore lives and experiences that he otherwise might have never been exposed to.
Chauhan’s instinct for empathy didn’t materialise out of thin air. He was caught up in secondary school popularity contests that often placed him at the bottom of the food chain. “I wasn’t very laddish… people thought I used to walk funny, talk funny,” he recalls.
People’s perceptions of him as “weak”, because he wasn’t interested in sports, fuelled his curiosity about what it means to be an outsider. “I think when you’re the victim of something, you become more empathetic. Or at least, you should,” he says.
Chauhan became more instinctively observant because he was deemed “different” to his male peers – a difference that gave him a wider perspective of the world and people, from a young age. “I just find people really interesting,” he says, with a sweeping gesture of his hand.
While juvenile bullying might have shaped the didactic author he is today, the tension between Chauhan’s desire for freedom and a tight-knit Leicester community that had “strictly limited options” for him, led him to London.
“To be able to live your life and not worry about what other people think about it, I couldn’t see a way of that happening in Leicester,” he recalls with a faraway look on his face.
London offered him the anonymity that Belgrave’s overly involved communities could not. “People come there, and they sort of let go of their trappings,” he says about London, his current home.
Leaving Leicester was not about just about a change of scenery for Chauhan, it was about reclaiming control. His mantra – “take control of your own life” – shaped his decisions early on. From pursuing a law career to transcending expectations placed on him by the community he grew up in. “I would rather have my life than the lives of people who are… fitting in,” he shrugs.
He reflects on the drawbacks of growing up in close-knit communities: “If you don’t escape them, you inherit the bad stuff as well as the good stuff.” Being surrounded by too much familiarity, he argues, can make it easier for bigoted views to be nursed and passed on. “There’s no-one to challenge your world view” if you’re in an echo chamber of like-minded people.
In the spirit of expanding one’s worldview, Chauhan uses his empathy once again when writing a character of a different ethnicity from him. Belgrave Road tasked him with writing Tahliil, a Somali character. He diligently researched Somali culture to be able to write Tahliil, but he had to go through a process of confronting his own research – “all the stuff that I’ve learned about the Somali culture, what do I need to show in this novel to make him (Tahliil) feel real?” Ultimately, Chauhan worked from the understanding that people are people – “the things he (Tahliil) goes through, lots of people go through,” he concludes.
The author’s newfound independence in the big city didn’t immediately lead him to fulfilment. He spent years as a lawyer, unable to write with the demands of his initial job. “That was really frustrating me,” he says with an exasperated tone. All his friends knew that he had been working on a book for years, and he recalls thinking, “am I ever going to finish this book?”
He came closer to grasping fulfilment when he made the decision to leave his lawyer job for a less demanding legal path that would allow him more time to write. “If you want to do it, do it now,” he remembers telling himself at the time. “Once I’d made that plunge, I was confident.”
Perhaps for the first time since leaving Leicester, Chauhan had to let go of the reins but for good reason. The author had to leave his “little bubble” where he spent countless hours working on his now-published Belgrave Road, and allow for the editor’s comments, copy edits, and proofreading. He admits that he found it hard to let go of control in the publication process, but ultimately realises, “for it to get like this, loads of people have had a say in it”, as he places his hand on a copy of his book at a Waterstones branch in Leicester’s Highcross shopping centre.
He sits in that moment, having achieved two life goals he set for himself when he first started writing at 16. “I wanted to have a book of my own in Waterstones, and I wanted to write something that a stranger would read and be moved by.”
As fate would have it, a stranger approaches him a few moments later to share her compliments, which he accepts with grace.
The city that once confined young “people-pleasing” Manish, has become central to his work, with two more Leicester-based novels in the pipeline, each exploring a different area of the city. “You’ve managed to escape; you did well. That’s what he’d think,” he says about his younger self.
If our pasts are something we can never fully escape, Manish Chauhan has certainly found a meaningful way to return to it; with purpose and a story worth telling. “If I had to have a road for my life, I’d say this is it. Belgrave Road.”
