‘Mum, even if you’re allowed to combine what you take, which I doubt you are, together you’re still ten kilos over.’
‘Ten kilos?’ I could make out the shape of the ceremonial dagger under her Indian suit. ‘What’s that? A few bags of sugar.’
I explained that ten kilos was quite a lot actually and that the Uzbeks weren’t renowned for their happy-go-lucky attitude. Then I unzipped the case. The contents made me gasp, like I did when I flipped open the back of my first watch. It was hard to believe that so much could have been packed into such a small space. Among the expected clothes and toothbrushes and prayer books and documents, I could see two coconuts, a box of Typhoo teabags, a box of Rice Krispies, a pair of my old Prada trainers, three prayer books, six unsewn women’s suits and six men’s shirts still packed in cellophane.
My initial impulse was to ask how on earth my Prada trainers had ended up in the case, but as I could guess why – Mum had decided they’d make a good gift for my cousins in India – and as I know the importance of choosing which battles to pick with my mother, I instead raised the issue of the cellophaned shirts. I recognized them as the currency of Punjabi hospitality. Every time a Punjabi Sikh visits any relative on any special occasion, the host is obliged to give the visitor one of these shirts, plus a woman’s suit, plus some cash. The woman’s suit is generally unsewn – a section of material out of which a salwar kameez can be made. The amount of cash, for some superstitious reason, is usually £21. Meanwhile, the shirt generally has two characteristics: it is wrapped in plastic and is utterly unwearable. The only thing a recipient can do with such a garment, with its bizarre combination of browns and greys, stripes and pointy collars, is to pass it on as a gift to another relative. By the look of these shirts, they had been in circulation since 1973.
‘Mum.’ I tried to speak evenly and calmly. ‘Why?’
‘I can’t visit people empty-handed, can I?’
‘But, look …’ I pointed at a sticker on one of the shirts, and, struggling with my tone and my Punjabi vocabulary, continued. ‘Made. In. India. This is like taking retah to the … what’s the word? … in English they call it the desert. Maruthal? Yes. Like taking retah to the maruthal. They’d be cheaper to buy out there. Especially if you factor in what you’ll have to pay for taking them, because you know you’ll be charged for the extra weight …’
The mention of a possible fine did the trick. After all, this is the woman who will walk a mile to save 50 pence on a 10kg bag of onions, who will carry the 10kg bag of onions home on a bus and on foot rather than pay for a taxi, who considers carrier bags an extravagance. She allowed me to pluck the shirts and women’s suits from the case, but clutched her chest as I did so, as if each abandoned item was a child she was having to give up for adoption. There followed lengthy negotiations over other items, but eventually the job was almost done and I was left to trim off the final few kilos, with the warning: ‘But leave the coconuts – okay?’
With Mum gone, my editing became more brutal. Two of the three prayer books went. The teabags and Rice Krispies went. But then, underneath the cereal boxes, I came across something more surreal than even the coconuts: two 2kg boxes of East End Vegetable Margarine – ‘made with 100% vegetable oil, no animal fat’. Incredible. Mum had allocated a fifth of her allotted luggage weight, on her flight from Birmingham to Amritsar with a five-hour stop in the horrific-sounding metropolis of Tashkent, to … margarine.
I laughed, made a mental note to tell Laura about it later, and tried to think of a possible explanation. Maybe she was planning to make chapattis along the journey to my father’s village? Perhaps there was some superstition related to margarine? I flicked through my mental database of Punjabi folklore.
It was good luck to mutter ‘Waheguru’ before you embarked on any task.
It was bad luck to wash your hair on a Saturday or a Tuesday.
It was bad luck to look at the moon.
It was bad luck to sneeze when setting off on a journey (a nightmare when you have allergies, like I do).
It was bad luck to step on money.
It was bad luck to leave one shoe resting on another.
It was bad luck to point your feet at a picture of a guru or a prayer book.
It was bad luck to spill milk.
It was good luck to scoop up the placenta of a cat that had just given birth.
It was bad luck for a nephew or niece to be in the same room as an uncle from their mother’s side of the family in a thunderstorm.
No. I couldn’t remember anything margarine-related …
But picking out the boxes with the intention of storming into the living room and remonstrating, I found they were lighter than I’d expected. They rattled too. Phew. Mum was using the boxes as containers. She hadn’t lost the plot completely. I opened one and found it contained medication: Mum’s herbal pills for her migraines; non-herbal pills for her arthritis; antidepressants; vitamin supplements; paracetamol. The second one was heavier, and contained five boxes of tablets. The brands emblazoned across them meant nothing to me. But the name on them did. Jagjit Singh. Dad.
I thought this peculiar because my father is rarely ill. He has diabetes, but the condition is managed well. I had a fuzzy memory of him once being prescribed sleeping pills. But I thought that was a temporary thing. Indeed, I couldn’t remember a single time that he’d complained of feeling sick. Couldn’t recall him ever having a lie down during the day, for that matter. Ferreting around the box for a clue, I found an envelope addressed ‘TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN’. I was a ‘to whom it concerned’, so I opened it. It was a note from Dad’s GP, Dr Dutta.
This patient has been registered on my panel since 1969 and was re-registered in 1993. In fact, he is known to me from 1969. He suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. (He is often confused and cannot communicate facts and his wife has to assist him.) He is on regular treatment of injection and tablets (which he often forgets), and his wife has to keep an eye on his medication. He also suffers from diabetes for which he is having regular checkups and treatment. He is visiting his family in India and he is going for a short visit.
Blinking at the words, I thought: fuck. Schizophrenia.
And then: Christ. That’s what my sister Puli must have too.
2. Vertigo
So I didn’t realize my father and eldest sister suffered from schizophrenia until my mid-twenties; I didn’t start confronting what this meant until my late twenties; and it is only now, at thirty, that I feel the need to talk about it. How did this happen? How can someone grow up with two members of their family suffering from a severe mental illness, the most severe mental illness around, without realizing it? How can someone discover this fact and then not try to find out more for another five years?
If the following attempt at an explanation reads like a set of flatpack assembly instructions it is because there’s something about my family – maybe it’s the sheer number of characters, or the melodramatic nature of Indian family life, or the havoc schizophrenia causes in families – that makes talking about it come out in the form of lists. I’m still not entirely sure why I was so ignorant and then chose to remain ignorant, but at the moment it seems that the reasons included:
Cluelessness. I’m not talking about everyday cluelessness here – the kind that leads people to believe that Marilyn Manson is a woman, or that George Eliot was a man. I’m talking about an epic, wide-screen, high-definition, Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound cluelessness. When I was six or so, I remember asking my eldest sister Puli, who would later fall ill herself, why it was that our dad didn’t go to work like other dads. ‘He’s diabetic,’ she replied. And for the next two decades diabetes’ was the word I mumbled if anyone enquired about my father’s unemployment or strange habits.
The language divide. Punjabi, the language my parents speak, is the one I learnt first. However, I left home nearly twelve years ago and have since become less and less proficient in it, so much so that now, even asking for a glass of water
sometimes has me burbling incoherently like a GCSE French candidate on a daytrip to Calais. I can make myself understood, but subtle conversations about delicate matters are difficult. Moreover, since my parents cannot read or write English – and since my father is entirely illiterate – they’ve never had the word ‘schizophrenia’ to give me, although this is less of an excuse with my sister, who is entirely proficient in English.
Relative youth. As the youngest member of the household, any questions I did pose were often batted away on the grounds that I was ‘too young to understand’. On some occasions this was undoubtedly true – I was young and I was stupid – but I realize now that there were occasions when the expression was used as a way of shielding me from uncomfortable truths.
The sometimes subtle nature of the illness. The term ‘schizophrenia’ may bring to mind images of young men smearing themselves in faeces in lonely bedsits and pushing hard-working media professionals under the wheels of oncoming trains, but in actual fact, most of the time, when sufferers are receiving treatment, and when they are taking their medication, the symptoms can be subtle. Or, at least, subtle within the context of my family’s perpetually raging soap opera.
Lack of inquisitiveness. This may seem an odd, perhaps even perverse, trait in a journalist who is paid to ask intrusive, often very rude questions of strangers, but if you do something for a living, you don’t necessarily do it in your spare time. There are people, for instance, who race motorbikes who don’t have a licence to ride them on the roads, and chefs who rarely cook for their own family. Similarly, I would dismiss information even volunteered by my relatives with a grunt, a tendency accentuated by the enormous size of my extended family (there are so many relatives there’s often no point in even trying to keep up with the news), by the lack of self-examination in Punjabi culture, and by the difficulty most children have in seeing their parents as personalities. Which isn’t to say we don’t see and love them as parents. But when it comes to thinking about them as human beings with ambitions, motivations and stories of their own … those closest to us are often the people we know least well.
Self-absorption. As will become evident.
An aversion to delving into the past. As will become evident.
Procrastination. There were occasions during the five years after I discovered Dad’s illness when I thought I should find out more. Saying goodbye to my parents the morning after finding that note, I even asked Mum if she would mind me asking her about their past when they returned from India, and Mum, after a slight pause which suggested she considered the request a little peculiar, said she wouldn’t. But on their return I was paralysed by inertia – surely the strongest determinant of male behaviour alongside lust – and did nothing.
Low pain threshold. I’m not quite at the stage of getting all the news I need from the weather report, but I am a coward. I avoid news reports about disease like the plague. Gritty episodes of Channel 4’s Dispatches about rape and murder are likely to be dispatched in favour of MTV. And I’d rather have my face rubbed in dirty nappies than read a misery memoir. It’s not that I don’t care. I just find depressing things … depressing. The technical term for this is probably: denial.
Wariness. As far as my religious mother is concerned, or at least as far as I think my religious mother is concerned, I’ve never had a girlfriend, I’ve never had sex, I pray every day and I keep away from meat and egg products on Sundays and Tuesdays to appease the ancestor spirit who apparently roams the Punjabi farmland I will one day inherit. In order to keep things this way, I was reluctant to get too close in case I ruptured the walls I’d built between my two lives. It was safer to restrict conversation to the banal.
Happiness. Despite the strain of having to keep my London life secret from my family, I was reasonably content. Loving my job, having interesting friends and being in a fulfilling relationship, the notion of going back to Wolverhampton, a town I was desperate to leave as a youth, to delve into my family’s problems with schizophrenia wasn’t appealing.
Looking back over these reasons, or excuses, it’s evident now that some factors played a bigger role than others, and the one thing that sticks out in particular is point 7, the aversion to delving into the past. If I was going to confront the fact of my father’s and sister’s illness, I was also going to have to rake over my childhood, work out whether everything was as it seemed, and I had no desire to do that.
The reluctance was in part down to the nature of my childhood memories, which, like most people’s, were chaotic, hallucinatory, varied in tone and detail, disconnected and littered with inconsistencies. Here I was, for instance, at the age of three or four, sitting in a bath with my two sisters. But how could this be? We didn’t have a bath or a bathroom until much later, when the dilapidated terraced house we grew up in, located in the inner city Park Village district of Wolverhampton, was renovated courtesy of a council grant. Here I was at the same kind of age being read a Mr Men book by Puli. But how could this be? I didn’t understand English until I started school, much later. Was she translating into Punjabi?
Then there was the fact that, while disconnected and incoherent, my memories were nevertheless generally warm. I know it’s fashionable nowadays to lay claim to a miserable youth, to confess to having been fed cat litter by your parents and posted off to Pakistan at thirteen to be forced into a marriage with a moustachioed sixty-four-year-old uncle. But I had a happy childhood and was pleased with the fact. Which isn’t to say there weren’t bad bits. There were tears and times during my adolescence when jumping off the Mander Centre car park seemed tempting. But most teenagers feel like that, and a childhood is what you choose to remember of it, isn’t it? A reappraisal through the prism of schizophrenia would have been an act of vandalism.
But the main reason for the reluctance to delve was that the past felt so disorientatingly different. The gap between my London and Wolverhampton lives was uncomfortable enough: travelling the 124 miles to Wolverhampton after a month or two often felt like flying in from a different continent. But travelling the 124 miles and twenty years from London to Park Village was like re-entering the earth’s atmosphere after a year in space. I’m getting a sick-making sense of vertigo even thinking about how to explain.
I suppose the obvious place to begin would be to point out the economic differences. In London, due to my career, I enjoyed a lifestyle of expensive restaurants, foreign travel, brushes with celebrity and nice cars. In Park Village, on the other hand, because my father didn’t work, because there were four children to feed, and as my parents were immigrants, we were poor. We never ate out, never owned a car – sitting in one was an event; ‘holidays’ were trips to relatives’ houses; once a week the whole family walked for an hour back from the town centre with shopping bags to save 80 pence in bus fare; we had no telephone, no video player; our furniture was second-hand; school uniforms were often hand-me-downs; my sisters made their own dresses. Because of a lack of space I shared a bedroom with my parents; we grew our own vegetables; birthday presents were Matchbox cars and 20 pence water pistols; our house was infested with mice, a problem our grandmother, who lived four doors away with the family of my father’s younger brother, my ‘Chacha’, tried to tackle with a cat (the unimaginatively named Pussy), which, being unneutered, quickly created the problem of an infestation of kittens; and one of my most humiliating memories is of taking my shoes off for a period of PE at primary school and two semi-crushed cockcroaches crawling out of them. Even the teacher yelped.
But while this relative poverty would be an obvious place to begin, it would also be a misleading place to begin. For while we were poor, we were poor in the way that Punjabi immigrants are poor. In other words, not really. My mother worked hard, making what she could sewing dresses at home; she was incredibly good with money,* we spent little, and as no one in Park Village was well off, we never felt poor. Like most Indians on our street, we even owned our house – my parents bought it in the seventies for a few hundred pound
s; we had no debt, and rather than go hungry, we were routinely overfed. On reflection, the more profound differences – I feel another list coming on – were:
Linguistic: I studied English at university and became a writer, yet most of my adult relatives didn’t speak the language.
Religious: in London media circles, admitting you believed in God was taboo, whereas I was raised a devout Sikh and even kept my hair long as a symbol of my faith.
Educational: all my London friends were graduates, whereas no one in my extended family had attended university when I was growing up.
Professional: only one member of my massive family had an office job in the Park Village days, whereas I socialized with no labourers, factory workers or tradesmen in London.
Culinary: in London curry was an occasional indulgence, but Indian food was the staple in Park Village, and fish and chips the occasional treat.
Literary: almost all my London friends talked about writing books, but I grew up in a world where no one read books, or owned them, let alone wrote them.
Geographical: everyone lived with their nuclear families in Park Village, and in most cases had their extended families living nearby too, but I could go for months without seeing relatives in London.
The Boy with the Topknot Page 3