Ours Are The Streets by Sunjeev Sahota (Picador, £12.99) (From York Press)

Ours Are The Streets by Sunjeev Sahota (Picador, £12.99)

11:10am Saturday 15th January 2011 in Books By Stephen Lewis

Local writer Sunjeev Sahota’s first published novel is a searing account of how an ordinary young British Muslim turns into a would-be suicide bomber. He spoke to STEPHEN LEWIS ahead of a talk at York library next week.

“I’m not going to have the chance to say all the things I wanted to in this my first entry,” writes Imtiaz Raina, the central character of author Sunjeev Sahota’s gripping first novel Ours Are The Streets.

“Inshallah, it’ll get easier from now on. It wants to. I want to leave something behind for you all – Becka, Noor, Ammi, Qasoomah, Tauji, Abba too. I guess knowing you’re going to die makes you want to talk. But right now I can hear the voices of angels in my ears and they’re calling me to prayer.”

Quite a chilling line, that, about the voices of angels. Because Imtiaz is a young man who is gearing himself up to do something terrible. He wants to give his life for his faith. He wants to be a suicide bomber.

Not that there’s anything particularly special about Imtiaz. He’s an ordinary young British Muslim – a husband, a father, the son of loving parents – who grows up in Sheffield, and speaks and writes with a Yorkshire twang. Sunjeev’s book – written in the first person, as if by Imtiaz himself – is an attempt to understand what turns this young man into the kind of person who could contemplate something so dreadful.

It is a riveting read, by turn poignant, tender, funny and utterly chilling, that probes deep into the psychology of this increasingly troubled young man. It is a journey to Pakistan to bury his father that leads to him becoming ever more alienated and angry with the country in which he grew up.

It is just the kind of thing you might expect to be written by a young British Muslim from the north of England who is trying to understand the mentality of those such as the London bombers.

Except that Sunjeev is not a Muslim, he’s a Sikh – the clue should be in his name. The 29-year-old grew up in mainly-white Chesterfield, not Sheffield; he is wonderfully middle class in his education and attitudes (maths degree from Imperial College, passion for Russian literature, job as a marketing manager for Aviva in York); and he’s never been to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

His world and experience is about as far from that of the young would-be suicide bomber in his novel as it is possible to be, in fact. So why write about such a topic?

He was living in Leeds at the time of the 7/7 London bombings, about a mile away, he reckons, from one of the four men who carried out the attack led by Mohammad Sidique Khan.

Not that that gives him any special insight into the minds of such young men, he admits. But everyone was, naturally enough, talking about it.

He remembers seeing the YouTube video Mohammad Sidique Khan left to say goodbye to his daughter. And it got him to wondering: how could a man who seemed quite compassionate towards his family do what he did?

The fact that he came from an entirely different background to many young British Muslims only added to the challenge, he says: he can’t imagine anything more boring than writing about himself. “Writing for me is all about understanding otherness, stepping outside myself.”

The challenge he set himself – with almost a mathematician’s rigour – was to try to understand how his central character, Imtiaz, could have gone from being an ordinary young man to a potential suicide bomber. His research consisted of reading articles on the psychology of suicide bombers – and reading Dostoeyevsky. The great Russian writer was better than anyone at probing the darkest recesses of the human mind, he says, in novels such as Notes From Underground and Crime And Punishment. Raskolnikov, the young student in Crime And Punishment, is the classic case of the tortured young man who tries to work out a morality for himself, and does something dreadful because of it.

In Ours Are The Streets, it is clear that Imtiaz already has a strong sense of failure, alienation and not belonging before he ever goes to Pakistan, Kasmir and Afghanistan and meets the charismatic men who lead him down a new and terrible path.

How accurate a portrayal the novel is of such a man he has no idea, Sunjeev admits: luckily it’s a novel about a particular individual, not an attempt to portray a type. He himself has absolutely no sympathy with the journey his character goes on, he stresses. “You cannot justify taking someone’s life, whatever the perceived wrongs.”

Instead of sympathising with his character, he set out to portray him dispassionately. “I wanted to just examine how it could happen. I wanted to have a firm, unsentimental gaze at something, and then write about what I could see.”

• Ours Are The Streets by Sunjeev Sahota is published by Picador, priced £12.99.

• Sunjeev will be at Explore York Library and Learning Centre at 7pm on Thursday to talk about his book.