The World Unseen

A Story of Love, Resistance, and Changing Your Reality

Some stories live inside us long before they’re written down. For me, The World Unseen was one of them.

My parents and grandparents are of Indian heritage, but were born in South Africa - my dad in Cape Town, my mum outside Pretoria. Although I grew up in London, that heritage was very real to me. My parents’ second language was Afrikaans; when my sister and I were growing up, it was Afrikaans they used to talk about things we weren’t supposed to hear, even ahead of Gujarati. They longed for the tastes of home - Fig jam, Peppermint Crisp Chocolate Bars, Biltong. Anyone coming through London from ‘South’ which was what we called it, was asked to bring these things with them…

More than that, though, their stories—being moved because an area was now designated ‘white’; or my Dad’s delight at getting into White Cinemas because he was fair-skinned enough to ‘pass’…these stayed with me in a deeper way.

An extra layer on top of colonialist, racist oppression was the fact that the women in my family, especially my grandmother and her generation, also often suffered the indignity of being treated as second-class citizens because they were women in a patriarchal system maintained through Indian customs - marrying young, working in the home, with no financial independence or say in anything outside raising the kids. The sights, smells, tastes of life back then were reminisced about in a way that made me feel I could have been there…

The Novel of The World Unseen

It felt natural to me to start writing this narrative. But I didn’t feel drawn to pure biography. Rather, I wondered what it might take (in a fictional world) for someone like my grandmother to even consider that she could have a choice - any choice - in her life decisions. And that question - what would it actually take to shake your reality that much? became the foundation for the story of The World Unseen.

The book and then the film are set in South Africa, 1952. After the formalisation of apartheid in 1948, the separation of people based solely on the colour of their skin dictates every aspect of life, dividing communities, enforcing a brutal hierarchy of race and gender, eroding humanity. For Miriam, our window into this world, and a devoted Indian housewife, life is confined within the walls of expectation, and that means the walls of her home and the countryside shop she runs with her husband. She moves through her days tending to her family, adhering without questioning the rigid traditions that confine her. She has never dared to question them or even wanted to—until she meets Amina.

Amina is based on a real person that I heard my aunts and mother talk about - a girl who refused to live conventionally back then, who drove taxis for a living and (gasp!) wore trousers. I was entranced by this person I’d never known and never would know - growing up feeling out of touch with the expectations of my community, even in London, she was a lodestone, an idea that, no matter what, you could find a way to be an individual who might think and live differently.

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Up next: Miriam’s world is about to change—but what does it take to challenge everything you’ve ever known?