Lust for life

Goodness gracious me, Meera Syal will shortly be starring in a telly ad and the beautiful, twinkly-eyed Asian actress and writer is not touting curry. No, we're talking good old Walkers crisps. In the forthcoming ad, Gary Lineker turns up for a Bollywood-style arranged wedding in Southall where he awaits his beautiful young bride. She turns out to be Granny from the BBC's The Kumars at No 42, the hybrid hit show that is part sitcom, part talk show.

Syal is not a major crisp fan, but she's dead chuffed to be doing the ad. She might get a lifetime's supply of Walkers, after all, which she deserves, since the modest creator of BBC2's cult comedy Goodness Gracious Me, the award-winning comedy Bhaji on the Beach and The Kumars says she never gets the freebies enjoyed by other celebrities. 'Where are they?' she asks, giggling. 'What am I doing wrong?'

The ad will also pay for the likes of Anita and Me, the film of her first novel for which she waived her fee. Furthermore, it will give a kick in the teeth to all those other advertising executives who, says Syal, steer clear of multi-racial casting. There is more to an Asian person's day than rice and poppadoms, and she has turned down numerous offers to do curry ads as a result. 'We do have periods and headaches and drive cars, just like everybody else,' she says as we talk in the conservatory of her five-bedroom Edwardian townhouse in Leytonstone.

The desire to be like everybody else was the sole preoccupation of the young Syal when she was growing up in Essington, a mining village near Wolverhampton, in the late Sixties/early Seventies. That desire is captured in the restrained, gentle and humorous film adaptation of Anita and Me in which Meena, 12, is desperate to be like her blonde, bosomy, boy-pulling best friend Anita. Who can blame her? To be an Asian immigrant in Seventies Britain was hardly the stuff of dreamy childhoods.

'The racism was upfront,' says Syal, whose schoolteacher parents emigrated from New Delhi in the early Sixties. 'There were no scary people burning crosses on your lawn. People called you "wog" or said, "Let's go Paki-bashing." It wasn't institutionalised and hidden,' she says with no trace of rancour, 'it was out there. But it was always when you least expected it.'

Undeterred, Syal went to grammar school, before studying English and drama at Manchester University. And although Anita and Me is based on her childhood, Syal's cultural awakening was less seismic than Meena's. 'It was more gradual,' she says. 'I was lucky to have parents who are proud of our culture. They gave me lessons about how to defend myself.' Such as? 'If anybody says anything to you, don't let them get away with it; nip it in the bud.

'With me it was wit and humour, that was my passport,' she says, the hard vowels in 'passport' a rare reminder of her Black Country upbringing. 'Not only did humour deflect bullies, it invited people into your world. I realised at a very early age that humour was a powerful weapon, that people who make you laugh are admired. You want to be their friend. I was quite a little scrapper,' she adds, with a characteristic puckish grin.

A sense of humour could protect the young Asian outsider, but it couldn't hide the truth. 'One day I woke up and realised England was never going to accept me, so what was I going to be? A self-hater all my life? No, I decided to celebrate who I was, to celebrate the differences.'

She's done so ever since, with great financial success (she is worth £4 million according to this year's Asian Rich List), especially in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Bombay Dreams, for which she wrote the script, and which opens on Broadway next year. She sees her ten-year-old daughter who, thankfully, has neither the desire nor the need to try to be like everyone else, doing the same. 'To be how I was then was to be invisible,' says Syal, who points out that the Asian girl wanting to be her blonde best-friend paradigm has reversed. 'It's the other way around,' she laughs. 'My daughter had a Bollywood birthday party last year. The girls were in heaven. They've all been to see Bombay Dreams. The clothes that are being celebrated now would get me and my mum spat at in the street. That's the irony.'

Welcome as it is to Syal, Bollywood chic mystifies her older relatives, most of whom still live in the West Midlands. 'So many times I've watched telly with my mum and my aunties. "What,"' she says, putting on Granny's Indian accent, "'is so special about that? We've got that.'" They're seeing their culture becoming mainstream, fashionable.'

Does she mind? Does she worry that Bollywood chic, like our interest in 'ethnic' writers such as Monica Ali or Zadie Smith, is just a passing phase? 'No! We'll still be here when the fashion's over and everyone's moved on to Mayan Indians or whatever.' Besides, she'd rather be part of a trend than a social pariah. 'Having been deeply unfashionable and unwanted, this is preferable, to some extent. If talented people get a chance to be seen because they're Asian, I don't have a problem. Their talent will keep them afloat when the fashion's over.'

Meanwhile, the experiences of Syal's daughter also suggest a positive cultural identity. 'I see the pride she has in her culture: Panjabi MC gets into the charts, Gareth Gates and the Kumars get to number one. Six Miss Worlds in the past ten years have been from India. All of that is feeding her and her view of herself.'

As for Syal, who separated from her journalist husband Sekhar Bhatia four years ago, her self-image is chirpy on the outside, chirpy on the inside. 'I'm probably an optimist,' she adds, before pointing out that being a single mother requires a magician's multitasking, that writing is 'a lonely furrow' and being a 40-year-old Asian actress with curves is not always a barrel of laughs. But if she wants a man to share these pressures with her, she certainly doesn't let on.

Clearly, Syal won't settle for second best, in any area. 'I've hit a kind of glass ceiling,' she says of her work. 'People think they know what you can do so you can't get that stage further. I want to work with people like Mike Leigh and Max Stafford-Clark. I want to move on, as every actor does. The irony of being a woman is that just at the point when you've become so damn interesting - when the world and motherhood has changed you, and you know so much more about yourself - the parts start drying up, if you'll pardon the expression.'

We rant about reality TV ('What next: Celebrity Warts?') and laugh about the popularity of costume dramas 'in which I'll never get a part,' she says. 'Ooh, put me in a bustle, it'd be wonderful.' Then she talks about what really fires her, and it ain't youth culture. 'I'm not really interested in twentysomethings. I'm interested in fifty-somethings, though. That's why I'm drawn to older characters. Let's write for them. We're very ageist.'

Although she's supposed to be writing her third novel, Syal is mid-screenplay, having recently adapted her first novel, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 'an unconventional love story between an Indian woman and an Irishman'. Meanwhile, she's trying to finalise some projects. 'I'm in that awful stage where I'm hawking my arse around.' Dainty she is not. 'It's development hell. One project was turned down. I've got no acting work till September - nothing's come up that's interesting enough.'

Syal is a sparky trout, and I'd say age is in no danger of withering her. She fears for her vital statistics all the same, hence the exercise bicycle and weights in a spare room. 'I train a couple of times a week, to keep the ravages of time away,' she says apologetically. 'I do it in front of the telly. I play netball, too,' she says. But she's not body-obsessed. 'I'm living with what I've got,' she giggles. 'I'm never going to be Kristin Scott Thomas' - an actress she admires for 'making good choices and for living abroad'.

Then she's off again. 'Vanity is the worst thing an actress can have. If you're worried about whether you look fat in a swimming costume, you're not thinking about what you should be thinking about. We're supposed to hold a mirror up to life, not make people feel they're a bag of shite. Thank God we haven't got as bad as the Americans where everyone's the same shape. California is like being in the village of the damned. It's really weird. Now Judi Dench, she's stunningly beautiful. She put on a swimming costume for Iris. Thank God! I see beauty in so many people, not in silicone chests and perma-tans.'

There's something girlie and likeable about Syal. Maybe it's because in her work, as in her conversation, she so deftly deals with the issues that matter to her. Or maybe it's because she relishes life so. 'There's something to be said for being glad to wake up in the morning,' she says when I ask if she ever finds juggling work and family overwhelming. 'It's an adventure. The script of my life is not one I would have chosen, but few people's are.' Only now, during this reflection, is the more sonorous, sorrowful Syal revealed. 'The story is the justification for the journey,' she continues. 'There is a part of you that wants to have made sense of it all and, for the duration of a play or a book, the chaos has a meaning. Everyone is trying to construct that meaning. The hardest bit is accepting that it is chaos; we all think it shouldn't be, but it is. There is no pattern and not necessarily any justice. You have to find your peace within that.' Syal seems to have found her inner peace. As for her external self, it's mouthy, saucy and openhearted. She loves people, and the communal living of her childhood lives on. She always cooks for 20, not two - 'just in case friends drop by' --and her door, she says, is always open.

Ask Syal what her high points are and, for a moment, she doesn't know. 'There are loads, loads,' she says. She's about to launch in when she remembers she has to collect some sari blouses from her dressmaker. 'He forgot to put hooks on them!' she giggles. Anyone else might find this irksome. Not Syal, whose irresistible knack for turning life's details on their heads and getting a laugh out of them strikes again.