Nanima

Nanima is Meena Kumar's maternal grandmother, a woman who arrives from Punjab mid-novel carrying nothing that Tollington can easily read — no English, no familiarity with the English Midlands, no interest in performing assimilation — and yet reshapes the entire emotional landscape of the book within days of her arrival. Physically, Syal presents her as small and frail, her body marked by age and the long flight from India, yet her bearing carries an authority that quiets the household. She wraps herself in her sari with complete unselfconsciousness, moves through the Kumar home on her own terms, and observes the world around her with shrewd, unhurried eyes. She is entirely herself — and in a novel preoccupied with the agony of not knowing who you are, that makes her extraordinary.

Nanima has no arc in the conventional sense of someone who changes; her function is rather to be a fixed point around which Meena changes. She arrives after the novel has built to a pitch of tension — Meena's friendship with Anita deepening into something morally compromising, the Kumar family's respectability increasingly strained, and Meena's identity caught painfully between her Indian home life and her desire to belong to white Tollington. Nanima's motivation, as Syal makes it clear, is simply love: she has come to see her daughter and granddaughter, and she brings with her the resource of memory and story. Her Partition narratives do not arrive with didactic intent; she shares them because they are hers to share, and because she senses in Meena a child hungry for exactly this kind of inheritance.

The scene in which Meena and Nanima communicate for the first time through gesture, laughter, and mutual recognition — without a shared spoken language — is one of the novel's most carefully rendered. Syal insists that meaning passes between them fully, establishing that identity and love do not require the white, English-language framework Meena has been straining to inhabit. Nanima's storytelling sessions, in which she narrates episodes from Partition and family history in Punjabi while Meena listens and half-understands, function as a counter-narrative to everything Tollington has taught Meena about where she belongs. These are not polished, finished stories but living testimony, and Meena receives them as such. The goodbye scene — Meena weeping as Nanima departs for India — is the novel's true emotional climax, more raw than anything involving Anita, because it is unambiguously real. The departure leaves Meena bereft but also fundamentally altered: she now has a self to return to.

With Meena, Nanima enacts a form of acceptance that no other character in the novel offers. Where Mama worries about Meena's behaviour and reputation, and where Anita exploits Meena's need to belong, Nanima simply sees Meena and approves of what she sees. This unconditional quality contrasts with the conditional, performance-based approval that structures most of Meena's social world. The bond is wordless but not mute — it operates through stories, touch, shared meals, and the frank exchange of glances.

With Mama (Daljit), Nanima's presence is quietly revelatory. She is the source of Mama's values — the pride, the warmth, the fierce protectiveness — but without the anxiety that English life has layered over them. Seeing Nanima allows the reader, and Meena, to understand Mama more generously: her propriety is not mere snobbery but an inheritance, now slightly distorted by the pressures of immigrant respectability.

Against Anita, Nanima functions as a structural opposite. Their brief overlapping presence in the novel highlights how little Anita has genuinely offered Meena versus how much Nanima gives effortlessly. The unravelling of Meena's infatuation with Anita and the deepening of her bond with Nanima occur almost simultaneously, and Syal does not make the contrast subtle.