Anita and Me · GCSE English Literature

Plot

The adult Meena Kumar looks back on her childhood in the early 1970s in Tollington, a former mining village near Wolverhampton, where hers is the only Punjabi family.
Meena longs to fit in and becomes fascinated by Anita Rutter, a tough, older girl who leads the local children. Meena tells lies and sometimes steals as she tries to prove herself.
Her grandmother, Nanima, comes from India to help after Meena's baby brother, Sunil, is born. Nanima helps Meena feel proud of her Punjabi heritage.
Racism in the village grows. Sam Lowbridge, a local youth, makes racist remarks, and Meena later learns that Anita was with Sam's gang when an Asian man was attacked.
Meena is badly hurt in an accident and spends time in hospital, where she befriends a boy called Robert, who dies. She works hard, passes the eleven-plus exam for grammar school, grows apart from Anita, and her family leaves Tollington.

Identity and belonging, friendship, racism, growing up, family, and class and community.

Meera Syal published the novel in 1996. It is semi-autobiographical, drawing on her own childhood in a Black Country mining village.
Many families came to Britain from India and Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s. Meena's parents lived through the Partition of India in 1947. Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech (1968) stirred up anti-immigrant feeling, and racist attacks were common in the 1970s.

It is a bildungsroman, told in the first person by an older Meena looking back. This mixes a child's view with adult understanding and humour, showing how much she has grown.