The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘Can’t remember,’ I admitted eventually, in bad Punjabi.

  The cabbie rolled his eyes. At least, he rolled the one eye I could see.

  ‘I think my father’s village is somewhere near Jalandhar,’ I added, realizing as soon as I’d uttered the words that they were as helpful as saying a town was ‘somewhere in the vicinity of London’.

  The end of the cabbie’s moustache twitched. I knew what he was thinking: idiot bilayati, doesn’t know anything about his own culture. I glowered back in a way that intended to convey: you’re in England now, make some kind of effort to learn the language of your new home – before developing a sudden and keen interest in the view from the window. We were travelling down from the town centre to my parents’ suburb in the south of the town via the Dudley Road, a corridor lined with Indian doctors’ surgeries, Indian sweet shops, two Sikh temples – one for the Jat (farmer) caste I belong to, the other for those of the Chamar caste – Indian supermarkets, Indian barber shops, Indian insurance brokers and Indian jewellery shops. You could, if you lived here, never deal with anyone who wasn’t Indian. And my parents rarely do.

  Eventually, having driven past an uncle’s house, around the corner from my parents’, and an aunt’s house, just up the road from my parents’, we pulled up outside the semi-detached I spent my teens in. The fare came to £5.90 and I passed a tenner through the passenger window: ‘Make that £6.50, mate.’

  He repeated the amount back to me in Punjabi, in an incredulous tone. ‘Sade chhe pornd?’

  For a moment I couldn’t figure out why he was scowling. Was it that I was addressing him in English? Or had the unnecessary and admittedly moronic ‘mate’ proved grating? It’s not a word I normally use, but it springs from nowhere when I talk to men from lower socio-economic groups. Plumbers, builders, all C2DEs get it, which is ironic as I hardly have any mates in these professions at all. But eventually the penny dropped. He was cross because he thought I was asking for £6.50 in change. I’d forgotten people don’t tip in the West Midlands.

  ‘Nai, nai,’ I said, cringing. ‘I mean take £6.50. I’m giving you a sixty pence tip. You know …’ For some reason I had switched back to English, albeit with an Indian accent ‘… EXTRA. BONUS. THANK YOU.’

  What seemed reasonable in a mental calculation sounded derisory uttered out loud. He took the money, flipped the change back in my direction without taking the tip, and screeched off with the closest thing you can get to wheelspin in a 2.4-litre diesel-engined TXII.

  In the hallway, there was the familiar aroma of chopped onion and cardamom and an unfamiliar hush. I’ve got used to it recently, but the quietness would often take me by surprise in those days. A part of me expected it to be like it was when I was a teenager: my brother playing R. Kelly in his room; my two sisters squabbling in their bedroom; Mum crashing pans in the kitchen; Dad watching TV in the living room. But standing there, my eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the light, all I could hear was a tape recorder murmuring prayers in the kitchen, and four plastic fish bopping around epileptically in the made-in-China twenty-inch-tall aqua lamp placed on the phone stand. Opposite the lamp – probably a present from one of my market-trading relatives – hung a framed and flashing picture of the Golden Temple, and at my feet lay a set of bathroom weighing scales and two ancient brown suitcases, a reminder of the reason for this particular visit home: my parents were heading off on one of their biennial trips to India.

  Needless to say, this was no impulse trip. Like most Punjabis, my parents don’t really do spontaneity. Even a picnic in the park requires several hours’ preparation: an hour to make the necessary dal and samosas; half an hour to pack the necessary dal and samosas into Tupperware boxes; and an additional hour or so for complaining about ailments (my mother’s favourite pastime) and watching BBC Parliament (my father’s favourite). For them, the relationship between the distance due to be travelled and the preparation required is exponentially proportional – a return journey to the Subcontinent being planned with the kind of precision and detail that NASA usually reserves for launching a space shuttle, the intention to travel to India being announced at least twelve months before anyone gets near a plane. The brown suitcases had been half-packed when I’d last visited.

  I swayed on the spot, psyching myself up for what was to come: the switch from West to East, South to North, English to Punjabi, rationality to superstition, smoked almonds to salted peanuts …

  ‘Mum?’ I said it with a slight Indian accent. ‘Dedi? Main aa gaya.’

  Dad appeared first. Slouched and barefoot, he walked up to me slowly, shook my hand, patted me on the back and returned soundlessly to his armchair in the living room. Next, Mum came out of the kitchen smiling, looking broad in a chuni, a scarf and a shawl, and gave me a suffocating hug. She then took me to a sideboard in the kitchen, where she had laid out, waiting for me, a large cauldron full of birdseed, a tin of spinach, a packet of kidney beans, and a tin of plum tomatoes. First, I was instructed to wash my hands and run them through the birdseed. Then I was told to touch, in specific order, the packaged foodstuffs. Finally, she fetched a single large red chilli from the larder, squeezed it between her fingers, and, after circling it around my head five times, set it alight on the gas stove.

  Centuries of superstition have probably gone into each element of this ritual, none of which I understand fully, but the birdseed would subsequently be scattered in the local park, an act of inter-species charity designed to bring luck; the spinach, kidney beans and plum tomatoes would be donated to the temple – again, to bring luck; while the burning of the chilli was meant to get rid of ‘nazar’, a concept loosely translating as ‘evil eye’, which you can supposedly contract if you are admired in any way. Other Indians choose to ward it off by hanging fresh green chillies over doorways or wearing anti-evil-eye bracelets.

  While the chilli snapped and crackled, my mother, contrary to her nature, didn’t utter a single word, and as she stood with her hands held up in prayer, I padded off to the living room. The wall dividing the two downstairs rooms has now been knocked through, and the main room is wide and airy and filled with large sofas. But then it was cramped, with a line of chairs bought in an office clearance sale against one wall and a short settee opposite the TV, which itself stood next to a large set of double-glazed patio doors offering a view of the expansive lawn. Dad was dozing on the settee behind a curtain drawn to protect him from the midday sun. I sat down next to him, removed the remote from his hand, and flicked away from the Welsh Assembly coverage he had been watching until I found a music programme.

  Before I’d even had time to begin despairing at the state of modern pop, Mum had produced a lunch consisting of aubergine curry, lentil curry, mango pickle, chapattis, Indian salad, concentrated orange juice, and a Penguin bar. She watched as I began to eat and halfway through the first chapatti asked how many more I would like. I said one, knowing she would give me at least two more than I asked for, and she went into the kitchen and came back with three, knowing that I would have asked for two fewer than I actually wanted. As I ate, she attempted to increase the number of chapattis that ended up in my belly (‘You’re fading away!’) by taking some away while I was part-way through them (‘That one’s gone cold,’ ‘Oh dear, forgot to smear butter on that one’) – until the sum of the fractions amounted to seven chapattis.

  Thus weakened, and unable to move from the pink sofa because of the bolus dilating my intestine, I listened as Mum began listing her latest maladies (a new crick in her neck, a throb in her knee), bringing me up to date with what she had been up to (a combination of visits to the temple and looking after the adored grandchildren), handing over the day’s mail for translation into Punjabi (a letter from the dentist, a leaflet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses), and asking whether I’d called or liked any of the nice Sikh girls whose telephone numbers had been sent to me in recent months.

  On receiving the inevitable ‘Not really,’ she sighed long-sufferingly, stated once
again that any girl would do, as long as she was the right religion, right caste, right age, right skin colour, right height, right profession and displayed the traditional skills of cooking, knitting and sweeping, and then launched into one of her monologues. This, among other things, informed me that my cousin Harjit was up on an assault charge (‘That boy will never learn, but he says the police hit him first’), my cousin Sukhjit had bought a house next to his parents (‘Such a good boy, looking after his parents’), my cousin Daljit had been arrested for brandishing a sword in a petrol station (‘You’d think a taxi driver would know that petrol stations have cameras’), an uncle on Dad’s side of the family was having a bypass (‘Thank God my heart is one of the few bits of me that still works’), a girl at the end of the road had been spotted talking to a boy on the Dudley Road (‘No shame, those girls, no shame’), the white woman down the road was being divorced by her husband (‘No sense of family, those goras, no sense of family’), my cousin Hardip had secured a £70,000-a-year job after graduating with an accountancy degree (‘Why couldn’t you’ve studied something useful?’), the council had put up signs saying people couldn’t feed pigeons in the park any more (‘What harm do a few seeds do? They’re God’s creatures’), my cousin Jasbir in India had been injured under the hooves of a bullock (‘He may have been drunk’), and a boy who had been in my class at primary school had got married to a nice simple village girl from India (‘Will I live to see your children?’) …

  The monologue went on and on and on, through the remainder of the music programme, through the BBC News national bulletin, as I went upstairs to unpack, even as I went to the toilet.

  ‘… I’ll call you every day when we’re away …’

  ‘Mum, I’m on the toilet.’

  ‘… make sure you keep your phone on …’

  ‘Mum, I’m on the toilet.’

  ‘… otherwise, your father and I, we’ll worry …’

  ‘MUM. I AM ON THE TOILET.’

  Thankfully distraction arrived in the form of my three elder siblings, who, like me, were visiting, as custom and duty dictated, to wish my parents well on their trip to India. They came in age order, beginning with my eldest sister Narinder, known as Puli, followed by my elder sister Balbinder, known as Bindi, and my elder brother Jasmail, known as Rajah. My Punjabi isn’t great, but I’m proficient enough to suspect my siblings haven’t been lucky with their nicknames: ‘Puli’ means ‘cutie’ or ‘slightly dim’, depending on who you ask; ‘Bindi’ seems to be the word used to describe the mark that some Indian women wear between their eyebrows, and okra; and while ‘Rajah’ rather snazzily means ‘King’, it’s old-fashioned and my brother is forever trying to rebrand himself.

  I’m free of a nickname, but then I’m the family freak in most respects. My siblings got jobs straight after school and settled in Wolverhampton, whereas I left the town for university as soon as I could and never came back. My siblings were all married to spouses of the correct race, religion and caste by the age of twenty-one, whereas I, at twenty-four, was secretly dating someone of the wrong race and religion and of no caste whatsoever. And while they had two children apiece, I had … well, a rather large record collection, the highlight of which was every track ever recorded by George Michael.

  On arriving, Puli, a housewife, left her two kids and market-trader husband downstairs in the living room and went upstairs for a lie down. Bindi, also a housewife, left her taxi-driving husband and two kids downstairs in the living room and went to fix some food in the kitchen. My brother’s wife, Ruky, who was then working as a bank cashier but is now a driving instructor, joined Bindi, while Rajah, a middle manager, took a seat with his two kids downstairs and did what he always does best: looked way too good for his age. My brother has always been a handsome boy, but with the man-hours he puts in at the gym, and with the rest of us disintegrating at a great pace, the gap seems to be growing. Seeing him at home is sometimes like watching Brad Pitt making a cameo in EastEnders.

  The house had suddenly gone from being too quiet to being too noisy, with kids screaming and bouncing on the sofas and adults bellowing across the room at and over each other,* reminding me that while I found the quietness eerie, I preferred it to the mayhem I grew up in. When the noise reached such a pitch that I thought my hangover headache was going to turn into an aneurism, various Indian neighbours I hadn’t seen in ages, and in some cases had never seen before at all, started popping over with messages and parcels for their loved ones in the Punjab, the concepts of British Telecom and the Royal Mail evidently having eluded them during their decades of British residency. And then, when I thought the aneurism was going to morph into something even more catastrophic, various aunts and uncles started popping round too, to make last-minute deputations to my mother regarding an ongoing family dispute over inherited farmland in India – a dispute which seemed to have been raging longer than the Middle East crisis.

  Not that my parents seemed bothered: Mum multitasked calmly at one end of the living room, simultaneously dealing with visitors’ queries, complaining about her arthritis, and feeding two or three children; while Dad monotasked at the other end, blankly watching the Bollywood video channel that my brother had tuned into. Somewhere in the middle, I attempted to laugh off suggestions that my hairstyle and jumper were ‘gay’, tried to ignore the wild laughter that erupted whenever I uttered a word of Punjabi, resisted suggestions from various male visitors that we go and watch a blockbuster opening at the local multiplex or for a few drinks at the Glassy Inn down the road, and fielded a barrage of massively uninformed questions about my job (‘So you write things and they appear on telly?’) and my religious habits (‘You still go to the gurdwara every Sunday?’).

  Throughout, I obeyed the three fundamental tenets of my Sikh household: never confess to religious doubt (you may as well confess to paedophilia); never get annoyed with repeatedly explaining what you do for a living (unless you’re a doctor or an IT consultant, they won’t understand); and never admit to a male relative that you don’t want a drink.* In practice this meant omitting to mention that I’d never attended a gurdwara in London, that I’d already seen the film in question at a media preview, and ignoring the voice of the Londoner in my head saying: ‘The only white wine they serve at the Glassy Inn is a Chardonnay.’

  There’s only so much you can take, though, and when my mobile rang, and I saw that it was Laura, I instinctively walked out of the room, into the kitchen and out into the garden. Taking phone calls surreptitiously wasn’t the only thing I did to ensure the relationship was kept secret. The concealing also involved: never doing anything with Laura within a 100-mile vicinity of the West Midlands; going on arranged marriage meetings to keep up the pretence that I was looking for a good Indian wife; only giving my family my mobile number, so I could pretend to be at home when I wasn’t; keeping a flat of my own even though I was more or less living with Laura (just in case the family visited); and never introducing any of my family to any of my friends or vice versa.

  It turned out she was calling to tell me: (i) she had thrown up three times; (ii) she was feeling better now; (iii) she was watching A Room with a View for the thirtieth time; and (iv) she wished I was there with her. I wished I was there with her too, even more so when I returned to the mayhem of the house. Indeed, unable to face the living room, I decided to have some quiet time in the front room, occupying myself by making sure Mum and Dad’s luggage met the stipulations of Uzbekistan Airways, the airline they had chosen to risk their lives with.

  This was a simple task, complicated only by the fact that while Uzbekistan Airways stipulated that the packed suitcases shouldn’t weigh more than 20kg each, for some reason – perhaps it can be traced back to Partition, when many Punjabis were forced to pack everything they owned and flee for their lives – Mum wanted to take the collective belongings of Wolverhampton’s 18,000 Sikh residents with her. I plonked her battered suitcase – its age evident from the blue and white Pan Am stickers plaster
ed down the sides – on to the scales, and the needle lurched to an obese 35kg.

  Groaning, I re-entered the chaos of the living room to inform her. She was still sitting serenely amid the bedlam, engaged in conversation on the sofa with an auntie I didn’t recognize. They appeared to be talking at cross-purposes: auntie-I-didn’t-recognize conveying a complex and convoluted message she wanted delivered to the daughter of her great-uncle’s second cousin, who lived in a village just outside Jalandhar; my mum describing at length a new pain in her left shoulder. I shouted over the din and waited for a reaction. Some time later – Mum’s monologues are like ocean liners, they require time to change direction – she was peering at the scales over the rims of her large owl spectacles.

  Standing next to me, she seemed smaller than ever before. Mum has always complained of being old and tired, was doing so when I was four and she was thirty, but she was beginning to look it. I felt a pang of protectiveness, warm feelings blotted out with the ink of irritation when she defended her overpacking with a shrug and the remark: ‘But it’s the first time we’re going to India in two years!’ After a pause, she added: ‘Besides, there are two of us travelling, hunna.’

  I bit my tongue. I lose my temper so easily with my family, and can’t decide whether this is because my family are simply exasperating, or whether it is because I speak in Punjabi to them and my Punjabi skills are so poor that I get frustrated at my inability to express myself. * Trying to remember how to breathe, I placed my father’s suitcase on the scales. Fifteen kilos. Under-weight. Typical, I thought. It’s astonishing how little my father owns – in the whole house, the only thing he uses for himself is one cupboard, which rarely contains more than a few jackets, trousers and jumpers. He owns no records, no books, no photos, no documents, no mementos. Anyone sifting through his things would think he didn’t exist. And sometimes it is like he doesn’t exist: while at five foot ten and fifteen and a half stone there’s a lot of him to see, he pads around the house as soundlessly as a cat; he is as spare in his remarks as a monk, and more often than we’d probably admit, we forget he is there.