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A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
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Allure of the road not taken
CORNER SHOP
By Roopa Farooki
368 pp. St. Martin’s Press $24.95
Reviewed by Dawn Kingsbury Attean
Fourteen-year-old footballer Lucky Khalil knows his destiny is to win the World Cup for England. And Lucky couldn’t be luckier; when he’s not practicing, he lives in a posh Knightsbridge flat with his lawyer dad and socialite mum. His room is papered with Star Wars posters. His granddad, Zaki Khalil, owns a corner shop in the dodgy end of Hammersmith where Lucky can get his magazines and sweets for free. Now if he could only figure out how to get into his girlfriend Portia’s knickers.
Lucky and the object of his affection, who is “almost a year older than him and possesses the specific and uncomplicated beauty that is occasionally produced by parents of mixed race,” met at the titular corner shop. Though she is underage, Portia often minds the store while Zaki, a compulsive gambler, is away at the racetrack. Zaki lives alone in the flat above the shop, where he keeps his door open to a revolving crew of totty married women.
Meanwhile, across town in her proper Knightsbridge home, Lucky’s mum Delphine, a Frenchwoman, has become bored with her impossibly ideal life. Though her friends only see her Prada-perfect façade, Delphine mourns the demise of her own career to become a West End housewife. Her husband Jinan (Zaki’s son), a high-powered attorney, leaves her daily to-do lists (“pick up suits at cleaners”) and specific instructions about which tomatoes to buy (beef tomatoes, not Romas). She goes through the motions, flits from gym to spa to Harrods, buys herself Crème de la Mer face lotion at 100 quid a jar, and yearns for an old lover who got away: her own father-in-law, the aforementioned Zaki.
Born and raised in the French countryside, Delphine later moved to Paris to attend university and study marketing. She accepts a high-level position in London, where by chance she meets handsome and dashing widower Zaki, a Bangladeshi immigrant and single parent to Jinan, in a taxi cab, dressed in a dinner jacket, on his way to an “important engagement.” He smooth talks Delphine into joining him for a “date”—which, much to her chagrin, ends up being not an art opening or a charity ball, but teenaged Jinan’s school play. And thus begins a passionate, wholly inappropriate affair:
It turned out to be one of those long, hot summers; a golden summer of the sort that only exist in memory. She accepted flamboyant gifts and the bunches of flowers left outside her door with dizzy delight; she drank far too much with him and giggled and misbehaved like a teenager. There was laughter and there was certainly lust, and treating the relationship with the frivolity of an affair, she ignored his baggage as much as she could.
She ends the relationship, and it isn’t until a decade or so later that Delphine and an all-grown-up Jinan meet again at a business meeting, start dating, and eventually marry.
But Delphine and Zaki have unfinished business, and they begin to use the corner shop as their love nest during the day while Jinan is working. Unfortunately, Lucky and Portia have the same idea. Worlds collide. Portia delivers an ultimatum and Delphine vows to leave Jinan. But her plans are sidetracked when her husband fakes a heart condition—only one of a series of roadblocks thrown up by suspicious Jinan.
Four years later, Part Two of the novel dishes up a failed suicide jump off the Tower Bridge, after which the heartbroken Zaki flees to France and finds solace in a “hippy (in both senses of the word)” older woman who shares his love of horse racing. Against all odds, Lucky has been tapped as third-string goalie for Team England in the World Cup match-up after a better player is injured. Portia has embarked on a promising modeling career and regularly does photo shoots for Brit fashion giants. Jinan is in line for promotion to his firm’s executive committee, and Delphine is.exactly the same.
Corner Shop, Roopa Farooki’s sophomore effort, is an engaging multi-generational tale that effortlessly captures the unyielding allure of the road not taken, but there are a few disappointments: the narrative lurches jarringly in the penultimate chapter, and its inclusion seems like an editorial afterthought. Also, the dust jacket was off-putting to this reader for its chick-lit-esque cover that mangles the London skyline (why, everyone knows that Parliament and the London Eye are on opposite sides of the Thames, dahling!). Likewise, I couldn’t quite figure out who the woman on the cover is supposed to represent—high heels and a salwaar kameez (a traditional Pakistani dress) suit neither Lucky’s girlfriend nor his mum, the genteel Frenchwoman. However, with a redesigned cover, Farooki may yet score a goal for England.
Dawn Kingsbury Attean works as a litigation paralegal to support her literature addiction. When not reading, Dawn also enjoys international travel, languages and linguistics, vegetarianism, animal welfare and motorcycling. She lives in coastal Virginia with her 'tweenaged son and four cats.
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