Sathnam Sanghera
The Boy with the Topknot
A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Illustrations
1. Life of Surprises
2. Vertigo
3. Love Will Tear Us Apart
4. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
5. Sign Your Name
6. Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime
7. Mad World
8. Doctor! Doctor!
9. Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)
10. Something Got Me Started
11. You Got It (The Right Stuff)
12. This Is A Low
13. Devil’s Haircut
14. Two Rooms at the End of the World
15. I Remember That
16. Summer of ’69
17. Stay (Faraway, So Close)
18. Unfinished Sympathy
19. It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over
20. If You Don’t Know Me By Now
21. Postscript: Freedom (Back to Reality Mix)
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
My mother cooking
With Rajah
Assembling outside an aunt’s house in Newport Street, Park Village, before a cousin’s wedding, me in Mum’s arms
With Puli and Bindi in the back garden of a relative’s house in Grays
With my father during a visit home from Cambridge
Clockwise from left to right: Bindi, Rajah, Puli and me
Chacha
Bindi’s husband and youngest son playing Monopoly
With George Michael, in my brother’s bedroom, during Rajah’s brief period of Wham! fandom
My mother’s sewing machine at the factory
At home in Prosser Street with my mother and Rajah
SBS bank statement
Puli
My mother with a grandson
My mother and father shortly before they were married
My mother’s parents
My father’s parents in Bilga, with two of my father’s brothers and one of his sisters
My parents’ wedding
My mother enjoying yet another Wolverhampton wedding
With Lucky (in the foreground) and Pussy (on the shed roof)
One of my classes at Woden Primary School
‘On holiday’ in Grays with my family
My mother in Wolverhampton in the seventies
With Rajah and my father’s parents, in Prosser Street
Early bouffant
Rajah’s wedding to Ruky, with my other siblings and assorted relatives
Section from medical notes
Letter from psychiatrist
My paternal grandfather, in India
Puli leaves home after her second wedding
Corner of Prosser Street and Cannock Road
My mother’s note
Bindi and my mother
My family before I was born
Graduation
My mother, Ruky and Ruky’s daughter
My father
All photographs taken from the author’s personal collection, with the exception of the photograph on p. 263, reproduced by permission of Wolverhampton Archives & Local Studies.
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE BOY WITH THE TOPKNOT
‘This is not just another misery memoir, or provincial coming-of-age story. It is a meditation on mental illness and cultural difference, told with enormous compassion and the most unexpected dry wit. The climax had me on the edge of my seat. What a painful and joyous voyage of discovery Sathnam Sanghera has been on in the last few years, and how perfectly he recreates it for us!’ Jonathan Coe
‘As charming as it is wrenching, as funny as it is haunting, this book is wonderfully unlike any other’ Andrea Ashworth
‘Gripping and entertaining, horrifying and tender … The bravery with which the author relates events that most other families would seek to hide means that his book throbs with honesty, frustration and pathos’ Hardeep Singh Kohli, The Times
‘As the facts emerge, Sanghera’s speedy wit gives way to bursts of anger and anguish … It is testament to the emotional connection he forges with the reader that we end up caring deeply’ Meg Rosoff, Guardian
‘An absorbing, ongoing drama, played out on the page … full of gentle, hyperbolic wit … Could not be more enjoyable, engaging or moving’ Kate Kellaway, Observer
‘Funny and revealing … warm, witty, neurotic, self-deprecating … In bearing witness to his family’s experience, Sanghera has brought to us rare news of working-class life, of living with mental illness and of overwhelming filial love … How far he’s come, you think, against such odds, and you want to punch the air and cry at the same time’ Lynsey Hanley, Sunday Times
‘A touching, revealing account of two worlds – Sikh and English, and the Midlands of the Eighties – as well as an intimate portrait of life lived with mental illness’ Andrew O’Neill, Daily Express
‘Instead of simply telling his parents’ story, Sanghera charts the various emotional processes involved in its telling. It digs into some dark areas, but this is a hugely enjoyable book’ Natasha Tripney, New Statesman
‘A rigorous and thoroughly intelligent rebooting of the misery memoir that recalls Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and deserves to do as well’ Time Out
‘Witty, poignant and affectionately rude about inner-city Wolverhampton, this book confronts some of the key issues about multicultural Britain while acting as a painful and touching family memoir’ Martin Warrilow, Birmingham Post
‘An incredibly moving memoir and a compelling read … This funny, heartfelt memoir reveals the distressing history of Sanghera’s family while celebrating the love that kept them together’ Marie Claire
‘Sanghera must be a time lord – or, at the very least, a time tailor – so seamlessly does he weave together disparate strands of his life from different decades … There is no shred of misery or self-pity in this story, rather an endearing and intelligent humour which provokes honest laughter and absolute respect’ Imran Ahmad, Daily Mail
‘Holding up his own human failings, Sanghera strives to overcome the chasm between his urban, modern life and the cloistered, uneducated life of his parents. His warm, largely happy memories of sibling fun, George Michael posters and first kisses shine through, while his witty take on Wolverhampton from 1970 to today is priceless’ Zena Alkayat, Metro
‘The most moving debut we’ve read in ages’ Elle
‘Marvellous’ Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times
‘Like some of the very best books, it defies easy categorization … I’d recommend it to absolutely anybody – it’s charming and illuminating’
Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in the West Midlands in 1976, Sathnam Sanghera attended Wolverhampton Grammar School and graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first class degree in English Literature. He joined the Financial Times in 1998, and worked as its chief feature writer and a weekly columnist, before moving to The Times in 2007. Published in hardback as If You Don’t Know Me By Now, The Boy With the Topknot was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2008. He lives in London.
For my family
‘Out of darkness cometh light’
Wolverhampton motto
Author’s note: This is a true story, but I have altered some names and other details to protect the privacy and conceal the identities of certain individuals.
1. Life of Surprises
Drinking alone needn’t necessarily be a lowering experience. If you’re in the right place,
say Paris or New York, in the right bar, somewhere with pavement tables or window seats, and in the right frame of mind – having just made a couple of billion from shorting the US dollar, for instance – I imagine it could be quite pleasant kicking back with a whisky sour, watching those less fortunate than yourself (i.e. everyone) shuffle past as you sit snug and smug in your tailored Gucci suit.
But sipping neat vodka smuggled into your mum’s house in a promotional Fitness First rucksack, dressed in a lumberjack shirt that cost £7.99 fifteen years ago, and peering out at a double-glazed view of Wolverhampton, a town which was once the beating heart of Britain’s Industrial Revolution but whose only claim to fame now is that it is home to the headquarters of Poundland, ‘the UK’s largest £1 retailer’, isn’t so cheerful.
This isn’t where I pictured myself as a thirty-year-old. But then very little of what has happened recently was planned, and I certainly didn’t expect to do what I’m going to do next. You see, after a few more weeks behind this Argos flatpack desk, and a few more bottles of this Asda own-brand vodka, I’m going to type up a letter I’ve been drafting, in one way or another, for half a lifetime. When I’m done, I’m going to send it to someone in India who, for an almost unethically small fee, will translate it into a language I can speak and understand but cannot read or write, and when he is done, I’m going to get him to read it out over the phone. Finally, if satisfied with the diction and the tone, I will hand it over to the person I love more than any other and let the contents break her heart …
Perhaps the biggest surprise in all of this is the sense of resolution. I always thought that when it came to the crunch, at the moment of assassination, I would, as I always seem to at critical moments, consider the consequences and flounder. But while there is a powerful urge to run away, there is a stronger determination not to let yet another opportunity for a better life drift by. And, unless I’m very much mistaken, this shortness of breath, this tightness in my chest, isn’t due just to anxiety, but to excitement also. Excitement borne from the knowledge that this is necessary and I am right.
Things were very different six years ago, when I was twenty-four. I worked for a newspaper then, a job in the media, writing about the media; I had a girlfriend – let’s call her Laura, and let’s say she was a TV producer – and I didn’t split my time between London and my parents’ home in Wolverhampton as I do now. In those days, coming to the West Midlands was a monthly, sometimes fortnightly occurrence. And the weekend it all began, I was due to come to see my parents after a guilty gap of nine weeks.
If memory serves, on the Friday night before I set off there was a dinner party at Laura’s flat in north London. All the guests, like us, worked in the media, the menu consisted of recipes from Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef, and discussion ranged from complaints about Tony Blair’s religiosity, to complaints about the celebrities we’d respectively met, to extended moaning about how we wanted to quit our lousy highly paid jobs, which allowed us to meet our heroes, wangle backstage tickets and hold the high and mighty to account, in favour of less stressful, more meaningful lives as bricklayers in the Outer Hebrides.
Throughout, I stayed true to three fundamental tenets of middle-class London life: never confess to religiosity (you may as well confess to paedophilia); never admit to being impressed by a celebrity you’ve met (you may as well confess to paedophilia); and always moan about your job (it seems the price of a flash job in your twenties is self-loathing). In practice this meant suppressing the fact that there was once a time when I prayed for an hour every day, concealing the fact that I’d entered the number of every celebrity I’d ever interviewed into my mobile phone, and ignoring the voice of the Indian immigrant in my head which, during the Hebridean bricklaying fantasies, kept on muttering: there’s a lot to be said for an office job and an opportunity to contribute to a money purchase pension scheme.
The evening ended with a spilt glass of red, a group rendition of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ and the embittered charity worker living upstairs asking whether we knew what time it was. It was 3 a.m. Laura and I were in bed soon afterwards. And, five hours later, I was reaching blindly for her Jacob Jensen alarm clock, dragging myself out of her John Lewis bed and brushing the cobwebs from my teeth with her Paul Smith toothbrush.
I fixed myself a breakfast of muesli and unconcentrated orange juice and, on hearing deathly murmurings drifting from the bedroom, went in to say goodbye.
‘You okay?’ She had a sweet way of sleeping curled up in the middle of mattresses.
‘Feel. Sick.’
‘You drank two bottles of wine.’
‘Two?’ I kissed her on her forehead and passed the Evian from her bedside cabinet. ‘Why didn’t you stop me?’ She pressed the plastic bottle against the side of her face, as if trying to ease bruising.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Eugh.’
‘Drink lots of water.’
‘What if I die?’
‘Drink lots of water.’
‘How come you’re okay?’
‘Water, my dear.’
She put a pillow over her head and groaned: ‘Could you leave a bucket next to the bed?’
Leaving the flat, I headed off to what I called, with the compulsory irony of my trade, ‘the Paki shop’, where I picked up an edition of the national newspaper I worked on, to check whether they had run an interview I’d conducted with a prominent media personality. This being London, I made no attempt at small talk with the newsagent as I did so, and he knew better than to attempt banter in return, and on the way to the Tube station I proceeded not to give the time of day to: the embittered charity worker from upstairs, who was walking down the street in Birkenstocks, having most likely spent the morning washing lepers or helping violent lunatics reintegrate into the local community; the spaced-out German banker whom I’d never spoken to and who lived below Laura; the teenager whom I’d never spoken to and who lived with the Spanish architects next door to Laura; and the postman I had down as a madman because he was forever smiling and trying to wish people a ‘good morning’.
I fell asleep on the Tube halfway through my own article, woke up at Euston, and caught an overland train, on which I surrendered to my delayed hangover, waking up two hours later to the sight of rusty corrugated roofs and polluted land dissected by lines of poisoned, trolley-strewn canalways. Wolverhampton. I disembarked feeling even worse than Laura had looked, and felt worse still as I approached the taxi rank and remembered I was related to at least a third of the cabbies in Wolverhampton.
This may not, on the face of it, sound like a problem. But it plays havoc with Punjabi etiquette: the cabbie, on seeing you are a relative, will feel honour-bound not to charge you; but you, knowing the cabbie will have been queuing for some time for a lucrative fare, will feel honour-bound to insist he takes payment. Like so many social interactions in the Sikh community, the encounter will end in a kind of wrestling match, with one person trying to thrust money on the other, the other refusing to accept, and both people ending up offended and possibly physically bruised by the other’s persistence.
That afternoon, with my head throbbing, I didn’t have the stamina for such a showdown so ended up hovering around the taxi rank, variously pretending I was waiting for someone, pretending I was taking vital phone calls, and trying to catch glimpses of drivers’ faces without actually catching their eye, until I was certain my driver wasn’t an uncle or a brother-in-law. He was, however, inevitably, a member of the world’s fifth largest organized religion. Couldn’t have been any more Sikh, in fact: pictures of all ten gurus sellotaped on to the dashboard; incense sticks dangling out of air vents; a pair of miniature boxing gloves bearing the Sikh khanda hanging from the driving mirror. Moreover, his turban was Khalistan orange, suggesting militancy. And if he was anything like my militant Sikh relatives who also drove taxis for a living, there was a possibility he was carrying a ‘ceremonial’ sword under his seat for protection, though I tried not to think
about this as we pulled away, instead just tried to wallow in the happy fact that he barely grunted in acknowledgement when I announced my destination. Sweet silence …
… until the Ring Road, when he was suddenly overwhelmed by the loneliness of the short distance cab driver and the intercom sign flickered into life.
‘SO WHERE YOU FROM THEN?’
I dread this question in London cabs because it usually means me replying: ‘Wolverhampton’ … and the London cabbie responding with: ‘Ha. I mean, where are you from originally?’
I will then say: ‘I’m originally from Wolverhampton.’
The cabbie will say: ‘—’
I will then say: ‘You want to know which country my parents are from?’
The cabbie (usually pretty uninterested by now) will say: ‘Yeah.’
‘They are from the Punjab, in north India.’
‘When did they come here?’
‘Erm … dunno.’
‘Why did they come here?’
‘Dunno.’
The remainder of the journey invariably passing in awkward silence.
While the categories and vocabulary differ in Wolverhampton, I dread the conversation for the same reason: because the cabbie’s aim is to pigeonhole and classify.
‘I’M FROM LONDON,’ I shouted back in bad Punjabi.
‘Ki?’
I repeated myself, louder, more slowly, but in English.
‘You don’t speak Punjabi then?’ he asked in Punjabi.
‘Hahnji, I do,’ I said in bad Punjabi. ‘Just out of practice.’
The rear-view mirror framed only one eye, but I could tell his glare was one of disdain. ‘So where you from originally?’ he continued in Punjabi, regardless.
‘I’m originally from Wolverhampton,’ I said in bad Punjabi.
‘I mean … which pind? Your father’s village?’
I really should have known the answer to the question. The nature of Sikh migration from the Punjab into Britain – some villages were transposed, complete with their broiling caste strife, en masse – means I grew up hearing names of villages being bandied about. I even spent a fortnight at my father’s home in India during one of my university holidays. But so intense was my boredom during this trip – my extended family’s interest in me limited to asking how much I might earn on graduation, when I was going to get married and, in the case of my male cousins, whether English girls were easy – that I’d developed a mental block on the name.
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