‘Do you work in a factory?’ Something makes me think that dads work in factories.
As she does so often, Mum answers for him. ‘Yes, son. Your Dedi’s off to work.’
‘Can I work there when I grow up?’
‘Of course, son.’
‘With Dedi?’
‘You can do whatever you want.’
And then, as soundlessly as he came into the room, he’s gone.
For more than two decades I would refer to this memory if anyone asked whether my father ever worked. Yes, I would say. He was working when I was three. He was working in a factory. If they pressed for further information, I would add: yeah, he worked at the Goodyear tyre factory in Wolverhampton. I’m not sure where I gleaned this detail from. It was, in part, true. My father did, for a period, work at Goodyear’s. But by this stage he had been unemployed for six years. If anything, that morning he was off to New Cross Hospital. If anything, he was going to have his weekly injection of Modecate, otherwise known as fluphenazine decanoate, which belongs to a group of drugs known as phenothiazine antipsychotics and acts by blocking receptors in the brain.
3. Love Will Tear Us Apart
As soon as my mobile began vibrating on the arm of Laura’s sofa, I knew it was going to be bad news. People don’t, in my experience, ring at midnight unless there’s been a death, unless they’ve been drinking alone and have decided it’s time to share some home truths, or unless they’re a newspaper editor calling to explain that you’ve referred to a musical called Bombay Dreams as Bollywood Dreams fifteen times in a piece being published tomorrow about … Bombay Dreams.
In the event it was worse than all these things combined.
‘Aareet Sathnam?’
‘Hi …’ I couldn’t place the voice ‘… who’s that?’
‘Jugi …’
‘Jugi?’
‘Jugi … your bua.’
‘Oh.’ One of my army of aunts, who had moved from Wolverhampton to Newcastle fifteen years earlier, who, disconcertingly, had learnt to speak English (with a Geordie accent) in the meantime, and who, even more disconcertingly, had never rung me before.
‘I’m neet botherin’ you, am I?’
‘No, no, no … How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks. Long time, no speak.’
Long time, never speak, more like, I thought, before realizing from the resulting static on the line that I’d said it too. ‘I mean, it must be what … um, four years?’ I always seem to say things were four years ago when I can’t remember when they were.
‘Longer mebbies.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it to er … your …’ God, I’d forgotten the name of someone I used to play with every day ‘… daughter’s wedding. Was away with work.’ Liar, liar, pants on fire.
‘Y’mean Manjeet’s wedding?’
‘Sorry, your son’s wedding. Last year.’
‘You shouldn’t be sich a stranger. You know, if you ivvor wanted to cum up an’ spend a weekend wi’ us …’
‘Yeah, thanks …’
‘So where’bouts in London d’ya live?’
‘Central London.’
‘Where’bouts?’
‘Oh …’ I could never risk an unannounced visit ‘… in the middle … quite near Big Ben.’
‘Nice. Hope you don’t mind me calling.’
‘Not at all.’
‘I’m just worried about yer mum.’
‘Mum?’ I had been splayed across the sofa in post-work exhaustion but suddenly bolted upright. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I’ve just come back from Wolves an’ she was very upset.’
‘Upset? Why?’
‘Someone told her something about you.’
‘Something about me?’
‘Someone told her you’re going out with a gori.’
‘What?’
‘Someone told her that you were seeing a gori.’
‘Who said that?’
She gave the name of a distant relative, and my calves began to perspire: something I’d never experienced before. ‘I’ve nivvar seen her so upset – she’s neet even eating.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Christ.’
‘So?’
‘—’
‘Hello?’
‘—’
I really should’ve known what to say given that I’d been worrying about something like this happening every minute of my waking life since I’d come to London and started dating Laura. Actually, to be strictly accurate, I really should have known what to say given that I’d been worrying about something like this happening every minute of my waking life since I started university, which may seem odd given that my three years at Cambridge, as well as being marked by a precocious amount of journalism, a gut-destroying number of microwaveable macaroni cheeses, a retrospectively depressing number of early nights, a certain amount of lovely punting to Granchester, and a surreal period as music editor of the university newspaper, during which I confused the readership by commissioning articles on Michael Jackson and Suzanne Vega in the middle of the Britpop phenomenon, was characterized by a total failure to have sex with anyone or anything at all. I’m still not sure how it happened – the George Michael posters can’t have helped – and because three years is a bewildering amount of time for a young man to not get his end away, I’m not keen to dwell on it. But somehow, during this spell on the plains of the Sexual Sahara, my mother still managed to torment me for having inappropriate relationships.
Two incidents are etched into my memory like torture scars, the first of which occurred during a rare evening when an attractive young woman – an actress, no less – penetrated the almost visible forcefield of my sexual desperation and spent a night drinking in my room. Needless to say, the attractive young actress in question wasn’t there to see me: she was a girlfriend of a friend, who was also there. And, needless to say, the drinking done was of the timid variety: over the course of several hours, the three of us may have polished off half a bottle of gin between us. But one thing led to another and when the attractive young actress revealed that she did voiceover work to make money on the side, in my drunken stupor I suggested she record a sexy message for my answering-machine.
I forgot about it until the next day, when I returned from my morning lecture to receive a distressed call from Ruky, my brother’s wife, informing me that Mum had rung me, heard the voice of a gori simpering on the line, and had taken to bed in tears, convinced I’d betrayed my upbringing and culture by hooking up with a white girlfriend. Explaining the reality of the situation was almost as agonizing as having to explain a girlfriend. I’m not sure if Ruky believed me, but she passed the story on to Mum, I erased the message, and after a week of passive aggression, Mum was almost prepared to talk to me again.
The second incident occurred on the day of my graduation, when a day already steeped in the melancholy of partings, and, yes, the harrowing realization that I really had managed not to sleep with anyone for three whole years, took a turn for the worse when a former female housemate, unaware that even Punjabi husbands and wives don’t make physical contact in public, broke through the circle of my family to plant a congratulatory kiss on my cheek. In the chilling instant that followed – Mum’s cold scowl, her brow scrunched up in wrath – I felt what it might be like to have her affection withdrawn. It was like standing naked on an Alaskan peninsula, in a blizzard, on a patch of disintegrating ice, while being encircled by polar bears.
Given this, I suppose it was no surprise that when my biblical period of involuntary celibacy finally ended I approached my new romantic life with a certain degree of paranoia. And I realize now that for everything I did consciously to ensure my family didn’t know about Laura – continuing with the arranged marriage meetings to keep up the pretence, only giving my family my mobile number, keeping a flat of my own, etc. – there was something I did unconsciously to strengthen the walls between my two lives. Is it a coincidence, for instance, that I never
visited Indian areas of London? That I developed no close friendships with Punjabis? That I was touchy-feely in private, but had an aversion to public displays of affection? It makes me cringe now to think how quickly I would let go of Laura’s hand if offered it on walks, how I would kiss in public with my eyes wide open, always on the lookout for someone who might spot me, how I would sometimes tell myself the relationship didn’t matter, that I could end it whenever I wanted, without difficulty.
But gradually, I realized I was deluding myself: I was in deep, and had to start thinking about whether I should tell my mother I wasn’t going to have a marriage, arranged or otherwise, to a Jat Sikh girl.
And of course, when I was with Laura in London, there was no debate. Every time she made me laugh, thrilled me with her appetite for life, it was obvious I had to do it. Almost every day I would hear a song or see a film or read a book or watch an episode of EastEnders which reinforced the clarity of the situation: you have to live with the person you love; individual happiness is everything; you can’t live your life for other people. But the moment I considered the consequences and practicalities of actually talking to Mum about it, I lost my nerve.
The closest I would get to raising the subject with her was to make an incredible fuss whenever there was a story on the TV news or in the papers about a forced marriage or honour killing. On the surprisingly frequent number of occasions this happened, I would turn up the telly, or cut out the piece in question, and translate loudly, emphasizing the most dramatic bits, in the hope she would concede that the values which led to such violence were absurd.
‘They hacked her into pieces just because she wanted to marry a Muslim!’
‘Her brother strangled her with a skipping rope!’
‘They stabbed her eighteen times before cutting her throat and made her little sisters watch!’
Mum would always, because she is intelligent and curious, listen to the details of the stories carefully, and she would always, because she is kind and humane, express horror at the violence. But I could never get her to state explicitly that the morals behind such honour crimes were wrong. Her sorrow was that of an American president apologizing for civilian casualties in a necessary war against terror.
As time passed, it became evident that if I did anything, it would have to be dramatic. I would have to throw the equivalent of a petrol bomb, and if the petrol bomb didn’t work, I would have to throw another. Among the options I toyed with were: taking a foreign posting with work and disappearing with Laura; presenting my marriage to Laura as a fait accompli; having a baby – if there’s one thing Mum understands, it is the importance of looking after children; marrying a Sikh girl who was in a similar situation, and then living with our respective white partners in secret; putting it about that I was gay, but then presenting the much more palatable reality of my heterosexual relationship; and contracting a near-fatal illness, during which I declared that my family’s acceptance of my relationship with Laura was my last dying wish … only to recover suddenly.
I guess you should be careful what you wish for, because, one day … I contracted a near-fatal illness. Namely, neurocysticercosis, a brain parasite. I probably caught the bug from an undercooked pork dish I ate on a visit to central America or India. Apparently, once inside my stomach, tapeworm eggs in the meat penetrated my intestine, entered my bloodstream and travelled to my brain, where they caused scarring, swelling and focal epilepsy. But even then, in hospital, half senseless with fever, pneumonia, daily lumbar punctures, and, as it turned out, a near-fatal reaction to the anti-epileptic drugs I’d been given, I still didn’t confront my mother. Somehow, I managed to keep the illness from my family, and when it became too serious to hide, I managed to arrange it so that few of my friends bumped into my family during visits. In my sick state, I even managed to make sure my flatmate at the time printed out pictures of Guru Nanak from the internet and put them up around the flat we shared.
You see, when it comes down to it, death is a more appetizing prospect than crossing my mother. I recovered completely, only to anguish further.
Not that I was ever short of advice. Close friends who knew about my predicament seemed to raise the subject at every dinner party. Or maybe I raised it at every dinner party. Either way, maybe because the love versus family duty thing is a universal dilemma, or maybe because Indian and Punjabi family life has been so demystified by the media, people seemed eager to provide suggestions.
But two things hampered the quality of the advice, the first being that most media portrayals of Punjabi family life, either in the form of all those news stories about Sikh fathers murdering their estranged daughters in the name of honour, or lighter depictions in programmes like The Kumars at No 42 or Goodness Gracious Me, didn’t really relate to my situation. I was hardly being forced into marriage to an Indian villager. What usually happened with arranged marriage meetings was that I was given the mobile phone number of an approved girl and asked to make my own arrangements to see her. It was less a case of forced marriage than blind dating with parental approval, egged on with emotional blackmail.
And the semi-comical fictional portrayals of Punjabi family life didn’t reflect my situation either. Take Bend It Like Beckham, for instance, a big Punjabi crossover hit. Lots of things in the film, which tells the story of Jess, a British Indian Sikh girl who struggles against her family’s orthodox mindset to fulfil her dream of playing professional football, tallied with my experience: the hysterical mother objecting to her daughter wearing shorts and ‘running around half naked’; the eavesdropping aunties; the despairing parent looking up to a picture of Guru Nanak and intoning, ‘What did I do in my past life?’; Jess pretending to be in Croydon when she was in Hamburg (I’ve done the Transatlantic equivalent); the pressure even from siblings and contemporaries to marry someone from your own culture; the chintzy furniture; the inevitable fight at the end of every wedding.
But few of the scenarios in the film could have occurred in my family. If Jess had been one of my sisters, for instance, she wouldn’t have dared to have pictures of David Beckham up on her wall, let alone been allowed to play football. The scene where the Irish football coach is caught hugging Jess would have ended in Jess being disowned: whereas, in the film, Jess’s father just gets a bit moody about it. And as for the Benetton advert denouement at Heathrow Airport, where Jess and the coach kiss within eyeshot of the parents, and Jess says, ‘I’m back at Christmas … we’ll tackle my parents then.’ Well, hahahahahahahaha. My mother would have a heart attack if one of my siblings kissed their spouse in front of her.
Which brings me to the other thing that affected the quality of the advice: part of me wanted to give my mother what she wanted. Though I never would have admitted it to my friends, to Laura or even to myself, the biggest obstacle was not my family, but me. I saw myself as the dutiful son and I wasn’t ready to go from being the family hero to being considered the apotheosis of evil, aunties pointing me out to children as an example of how not to turn out. I also worried that the unhappiness caused by any confrontation with my mother, the grief that would overwhelm me if I was disowned, might poison the thing I was trying to preserve: my relationship with Laura. Would we become one of those couples who had chosen each other so much against expectations that we were always unsettled and edgy? Did I want to have children who would never know the culture and the family that had shaped me?
The more I thought about it, the more irresolvable the dilemma seemed. It was like being on a riverside, watching all the people you love drown and only having time to save one of them. I was torn, split down the middle like Bhai Mati Das, one of the saints depicted on the wall of the Cannock Road gurdwara, who declared that Islam was false, that Sikhism was true and was consequently sawn across from head to loins under the orders of the Mughal Emperor.
The one thing that might have helped would have been if someone in the family, or someone my parents knew, or someone I could introduce to my mother, had ‘married out’.
And I did know of some people – even some of my male cousins – who were surreptitiously dating English people. But time after time they chose duty over love, went from wanting emotional fulfilment to wanting a girl who was good in the kitchen and would agree to give up her career after childbirth. I took news of these betrothals badly. They would call expecting to be congratulated, and I had to give them the congratulations they expected, but what I actually wanted to do was shake them and ask: why?
At the time, the odds struck me as odd. Surely it was just bad luck that they all succumbed to family pressure. But I recently came across a study that confirmed my darkest suspicions. En titled ‘A Study of Changes in Marriage Practices among the Sikhs of Britain’, the thesis, completed in 1998 by Jagbir Jhutti of Oxford University, concluded: ‘In this study, no evidence of a complete assimilation into British society has been found. The study shows that rather than rejecting their cultural traditions, i.e. arranged marriages, the second and third generation Sikhs have played an active role in maintaining such traditions.’ In other words, I may have been as alone as I felt.
In desperation, I resorted to looking around my family for someone who might at least support me in the event of a confrontation with my mother. My brother was a natural person to consult, but relationships weren’t something we had ever discussed and I worried he would tell her. I thought I’d found an alternative when, during an interminable wedding, a respected elderly friend of the family remarked: ‘You know, we have to move with the times when it comes to marriage. We can’t behave like Punjabi villagers any more.’ But just as images of a white wedding flashed through my mind, me in morning suit, Laura in white, my family in the pews, he added: ‘For instance, if one of my sons wanted to marry a girl who wasn’t the right caste, I would try to understand it.’
The right caste?
He would TRY to understand?
The man had enjoyed a successful career in Britain, had spent nearly thirty years in Britain, and this was how far he’d come. The message came through loud and clear: marrying someone who was not a Sikh was the very worst thing you could do. I was as sensationally fucked as I had been sensationally unfucked at college.
The Boy with the Topknot Page 5