Sugarbread

About the book

Sugarbread is the second novel by the Singaporean writer Balli Kaur Jaswal, first published by Epigram Books in Singapore in 2015. It was written before her first published novel, Inheritance, and began life as her honours thesis in creative writing at Hollins University in the United States. When Epigram Books launched a prize for unpublished manuscripts, Jaswal went back to the draft, revised it, and the book was a finalist for the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015.

The novel is set in Singapore in the early 1990s, with chapters that reach back to 1967, and it follows a Sikh family through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. It is a quiet book about big subjects: what it means to belong in a country where you are a minority, how mothers and daughters misunderstand each other, and how food carries the memories a family cannot speak about. The title comes from a dish the heroine invents for herself: toasted bread sprinkled with sugar.

Sugarbread was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize, and it remains the book Jaswal's Singaporean readers mention most often to her. It came before the international success of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, and it is the novel that established her as a voice of the Punjabi diaspora in Singapore.

Pin and her family

The central character is Pin, short for Parveen, a ten-year-old Sikh girl who attends an elite Christian school in Singapore on a bursary. She lives with her mother Jini and her father, a hotel security guard, in a small flat. Her mother is withdrawn and elegant, and she keeps telling Pin that she must not grow up to be like her, without ever explaining why.

The household changes when Pin's grandmother Kulwant, known as Nani-ji, comes to live with the family. She brings strict Sikh observance with her: a portrait of a watchful Guru on the wall, new house rules, and a kitchen that turns traditional and monotonous. Jini, who once cooked widely and expressively, retreats into routine dishes, and Pin begins to read her mother's moods through her cooking.

The novel alternates between Pin's story in the early 1990s and chapters about Jini as a child and young woman in 1967. Told in the third person and the present tense, Jini's sections show a very different Singapore, a city of kampungs before the skyscrapers, and trace how the secrets of one generation echo into the next. Pin does not solve her family's mysteries by the end.

Why must Pin not become like her mother?

The question drives the novel. Pin adores her mother and cannot understand the warning, so she looks for answers in the one place her mother cannot hide: her cooking. When Jini is happy, her food is varied and generous; when she is troubled, it narrows to the same few dishes. The kitchen becomes the place where the family's unspoken history is kept, and where Pin learns to read it.

The answer, when it comes, is bound up with Jini's own youth and with the choices the women of the family were allowed to make. Jaswal does not spell it out in a single revelation; the truth surfaces in small pieces, through Jini's memories and through the objects Pin finds at home, like her mother's gutka, a Sikh prayer book wrapped in a handkerchief. The novel asks the reader to put the pieces together alongside Pin, and to understand why a mother might warn her daughter away from her own life while loving her fiercely.

The three women carry the book: Pin, Jini and Nani-ji. Jaswal has said she wanted to explore the tension between traditional and modern mindsets, and that each woman represents a different one. Their clashes are the novel's engine, and its tenderness comes from the way Jaswal refuses to make any of them simply right or wrong.

Food and faith in the novel

Food is the novel's central image. Jini retreats to the kitchen when the world presses on her, and the dishes she cooks, from Punjabi home cooking to the foods of Singapore's markets, map her state of mind. Pin, meanwhile, develops a taste for Singaporean street food, a small claim to a life of her own. The sugarbread of the title, toast sprinkled with sugar, is Pin's own invention: a dish that takes what her heritage gives her and makes something new from it.

Faith runs alongside food. Pin takes her religion seriously and literally. At her Christian school, teachers urge the girls who are not Christian to pray to their own god during morning assembly, and Pin explains that her God would not be at the school at all: he would only listen if she had her head covered and was sitting on the carpeted floor of the gurdwara, listening to Punjabi prayers. The passage is funny and sad at once, and it captures how a child tries to fit two worlds together with the only logic she has.

Language is part of the same divide. English is the only language allowed at school, and Pin thinks in English as soon as she leaves home each morning, while Punjabi belongs to home and the temple. The novel shows, without lecturing, how a child can lose fluency in her mother tongue while gaining the language her school and her country demand.

ਲੇਖਕ

Balli Kaur Jaswal was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia and the Philippines as well as Singapore, following her father's career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She studied English at Hollins University in the United States, graduating in 2004, and later held the David T. K. Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. She taught English in Australia and at an international school in Istanbul before becoming a full-time writer in 2016.

Her first published novel, Inheritance (2013), won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2014. Sugarbread followed, and then Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017), which became an international bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, and The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters (2019). Her fifth novel, Now You See Us, appeared in 2023. Identity is the thread through all of them: as Jaswal has said, she has not strayed far from Punjabi female characters because there is still so much work to do in telling their stories.

Reception and legacy

Sugarbread was a finalist for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. Reviewers praised its voice: the Straits Times called it a complex, layered story worth multiple re-reads that fills an important gap in Singapore literature with its portrayal of the Punjabi Sikh community, while The Hindu described it as comfort reading, refreshingly free from the nostalgia that can weigh down diaspora novels.

Not every reviewer was uncritical. The Hindu noted that the mature voice of the book sometimes strains against a ten-year-old's point of view, and the Straits Times found the foreshadowing of the central mystery heavy-handed. But the novel has lasted: Jaswal has said that for many Singaporean readers it remains their favourite among her books, the one that told them they were not alone. Her editor at Epigram Books went further, suggesting it could become Singapore's To Kill a Mockingbird.