That relationship has obviously been fundamental to Syal, since her Punjabi parents upped sticks from Delhi and chose to settle in Wolverhampton, before she was born. One of my favourite books is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and in the collision of those two things I could see a new way of writing about the relationship between India and England.” At that point I hadn’t known India had the biggest surrogacy industry in the world. I was channel-flicking when I saw this documentary. I had rejected a lot of thoughts since my previous novel because I didn’t get that real tingle you should get. “But when I get one I do manage to finish it. “I have one good idea every 10 years,” she says. She orders a goat’s curd salad, though tempted by the mackerel that I choose, and we talk first about her new novel, the spark for which came from a documentary about a surrogacy clinic in India offering services mostly to childless couples in the UK. Syal lived in the East End for 25 years and has only moved to Highgate village in the last 18 months she’s still getting used, she says, to the slightly more serene pace of perfect spring days like this one. She’s not eating much she says, apologetically, and no wine, because she’s due to collect her seven-year-old son from school (she also has a daughter in her 20s from her first marriage). So she sits comparatively carefree in the sun outside the Flask in Highgate, north London, wondering a bit what she might do next. For the first part of that run she was making final edits to her third novel, The House of Hidden Mothers, a compelling story of surrogacy in London and Delhi, which was completed alongside filming of the second series of Broadchurch, in which Syal played the judge. The play is an adaptation of Katharine Boo’s book about life in a Mumbai slum and has been on at the National Theatre – “quite a curious marriage on paper,” Syal says with a grin, “but it works incredibly well”. For the previous six months she has been starring nightly – as an exuberantly foul-mouthed mother – in David Hare’s acclaimed play Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I meet Meera Syal in one of the brief pauses for breath in her polymathic life.
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