LESSONS IN LOVE AND OTHER CRIMES, Elizabeth Chakrabarty: Excerpt

We are delighted to feature an excerpt from Lessons in Love and Other Crimes by Elizabeth Chakrabarty (The Indigo Press), which is shortlisted for the 2022 Polari First Book Prize. The winner is announced 15th November: https://www.bl.uk/events/the-polari-prize

LESSONS IN LOVE AND OTHER CRIMES

‘One of the most gripping and powerful books I’ve ever read; I feel so represented as a queer, brown woman.’ — Nikita Gill

An innovative hybrid of auto-fiction, crime fiction and critical race memoir, this multi-layered yet compulsively readable novel is inspired by the author´s real and extended experience of serious racial harassment, as well as exploring her search for justice and for love<

**Shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2022**
**Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022**

Tesya has reasons to feel hopeful after leaving her last job, where she was subjected to a series of anonymous hate crimes. Now she is back home in London to start a new lecturing position, and has begun an exciting, if tumultuous, love affair with the enigmatic Holly. But this idyllic new start quickly sours. Tesya finds herself victimized again at work by an unknown assailant, who subjects her to an insidious, sustained race hate crime. As her paranoia mounts, Tesya finds herself yearning for the most elemental of desires: love, acceptance, and sanctuary. Her assailant, meanwhile, is recording his manifesto and plotting his next steps.

Inspired by the author’s personal experiences of hate crime and bookended with essays which contextualize the story within a lifetime of microaggressions, Lessons in Love and Other Crimes is a heartbreaking, hopeful, and compulsively readable novel about the most quotidian of crimes.

‘A story you won’t be able to get out of your head.’ — Cosmopolitan

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Lessons in Love and Other Crimes by Elizabeth Chakrabarty

Extract: p.25

I don’t know how it’s going to end. Even now I’m home here in London, it’s unfinished, so when I think about it even for a second I’m back there: the most unpleasant, humiliating, frightening experience I’ve ever had. I don’t know who was behind it, what they wanted. I don’t know whether they’re still out to get me.

I haven’t told anyone my absolute fear, can’t say it aloud: I’m frightened for my life. I thought being at home would make it go away, but it hasn’t. Fear follows me like a shadow. When I open doors, I go carefully, worrying who might be waiting there, what might happen next. When I hear footsteps behind me in the dark, I walk faster, clutching my mobile in my pocket, ready to dial the police once more. Then my heart beats faster and faster, like it’ll break through my skin, my body telling me I’m alive I’m alive, despite what’s out there, who’s out there.

Who’s out there? That’s still the question.

Waiting for whatever happens next, the unknown, curtail show I live. Early on I was told to be careful about revealing where I am, especially on social media. But that was going to be difficult: I’m a writer and performer, I have to publicize what I’m doing, events in public places.

The police officer said, ‘Well, just use it in a limited way, do what you have to do. Make sure friends know your whereabouts.’ Then, ‘Do you have a partner?’

‘Um, not at the moment.’

I understood why she asked, but my answer made me feel worse. I had been dating but nothing that had gone anywhere.

She asked the obvious question: ‘Is there anyone who might have a grudge against you, a colleague or an ex-partner?’

I’ve had my fair share of difficult relationship endings, but no one I know would treat me like this, at least I hope not. What’s happened has even tainted my memory of love, like love is a kind of mental illness.

I shook my head.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m not sure about anything at the moment. It’s difficult to trust people, but I can’t think of anyone I know who would do this.’

I wish I had someone, someone who makes me feel safe, to love and be loved by, but I don’t. I’m on my own. What’s happened has made meeting even beautiful strangers fraught. The idea that someone who has seen me around, probably spoken to me, could do that makes me wary of people even offering me a drink when I’m in a bar, or asking me out. But now friends say I have to get on with living, and love is what’s missing. Love might annihilate the memories. Perhaps.

When I came back to London, I called the police officer to let her know, and to find out what would happen to my case now.

‘We’ll keep it live. It’s an ongoing case as we haven’t found a suspect or suspects.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘If anything happens again, call me, or if I’m off duty, quote the crime number, and obviously if you feel in danger, call 999.’

It’s still weird to link dialling the emergency services with being at work. When I first told friends about the incidents, some found it shocking, but others didn’t, having experienced so much racism themselves in various workplaces. Some white acquaintances listened but didn’t say anything, perhaps not knowing what to say, or not understanding, never having experienced racism, how it feels: degrading, frightening and soul-destroying, and inextricably linked with living in this country.

It continued for years. I stopped talking about it. People can only stand so much of others’ trauma before they change the subject and talk about things that are inconsequential when you’re experiencing serious racial harassment. Sometimes talking about it is like repeating it all over again, re-traumatizing, increasing my fear over when it might happen again. Not talking about it is a kind of coping mechanism, though that means dealing with it alone. 

In this era of social media, even if I don’t constantly post where I am, it’s easy to track people down with Google. When I say ‘people’, in that abstract way, what I mean is me. It’s funny how I find myself doing that: thinking about my experience in the abstract, like I’m writing an academic paper, with all the distance of not using the word ‘I’. Yes, I have a compulsion to write about, or rather through this, what I’m living. I think about it almost all the time, like I would a relationship. That feels weird.

When the incidents were happening to me, management, colleagues and my union did the right thing to monitor and protect me as much as was possible at the time; however, for me it is a continuum of my experience of racism over a lifetime. Racism is what happens to ethnic minority employees in the workplace, just like in our everyday lives.

Reading back what I’ve just written reminds me of character types in TV crime series, from the whistle-blower who, even after they’ve left an organization, is haunted by whoever is out to get them, to the police officer on the victim’s side. That’s strange after all these years on demos to stop war or protest against racism, when the police were often the enemy, rushing at peaceful demonstrators or dragging us into police vans. Yes, now it’s strange I have the police on my side.

I have followed the expected trajectory, from school to university to work, but no one brought me up to deal with racism, the fear and anxiety, not being able to sleep, not knowing what to do. I’m probably repeating myself, but the experience of racism repeats, so it becomes a pattern, and that forces me to think about it even in my day-to-day life. The unknown follows me around, even inside my home. Like I’m a character in a crime novel, and the person out to get me feels close by.

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Extracted from Lessons in Love and Other Crimes by Elizabeth Chakrabarty (The Indigo Press), which is shortlisted for the 2022 Polari First Book Prize. The winner is announced on 15th November: https://www.bl.uk/events/the-polari-prize 

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Elizabeth Chakrabarty’s debut novel Lessons in Love and Other Crimes was inspired by experience of race hate crime, and was published in 2021 by the Indigo Press, along with her essay, On Closure and Crime.

Elizabeth was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022 for Lessons in Love and Other Crimes. In 2022 she was also shortlisted for the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction, and her story will be published in an e-anthology by Comma Press. She was shortlisted for the Asian Writer Short Story Prize in 2016, and her story ‘Eurovision’ was published in Dividing Lines (Dahlia Publishing, 2017). Her poetry has been published by Visual Verse, and her short creative-critical work includes writing published in Glänta, Gal-Dem and New Writing Dundee, and more recently, in Wasafiri, and the anthology Imagined Spaces (Saraband, 2020). She received an Authors’ Foundation Grant from The Society of Authors (UK) in December 2018, to support the writing of Lessons in Love and Other Crimes, and she was chosen as one of the runners up for the inaugural CrimeFest bursary for crime fiction authors of colour in 2022.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing