The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  I read it and conveyed the information: it was a card from the Wolverhampton City NHS Primary Care Trust, reminding him he had an Out-Patient Appointment to see Dr Patel, apparently a psychiatrist, on Monday at 1.20 p.m. in a month’s time, in Bilston.

  ‘The appointment is for Monday at 1.20,’ I said. ‘A month from now.’

  ‘Monday at 1.20?’

  ‘Yes, Monday at twenty past one. In four weeks.’

  ‘Four weeks?’

  I thought about what I might be doing then. If I was at work, I might be having lunch with a contact or a PR, or asking someone important to run through a typical day in their life.

  ‘You know what, Dad? I’ll come with you.’

  ‘On Monday?’

  ‘Hahnji. On Monday in a month’s time. After lunch. I’ll remind you.’ He looked surprised.

  ‘Won’t you be in London?’

  ‘No, Dad, I’ll be with you.’

  In yet another first, I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it.

  5. Sign Your Name

  If we’re to believe the experts – and I’ve trudged through the books – the fact that my father didn’t ever take me fishing or teach me to ride a bike or at any point take me aside and tell me father-to-son, or even man-to-man, about the birds and the bees, means he was a ‘passive type’ father, which, in turn, means I was ‘under-fathered’, which, in turn, means I had problems with bedwetting and soiling as a child and have grown up having difficulties with emotional expression, aggression and/or under-confidence.

  While I can see how over-mothering could screw you up – my current predicament may even be a testament to the fact – I can’t say I’ve ever felt under-fathered and damaged as a consequence. I know there is a view nowadays that if a dad doesn’t offer his children everything a mother offers, up to and including breast-feeding, he’s not doing his job right. But if you asked children what they want and need, I think you’d find the answer was simple: time. The best offering a father can make his children is himself, and in this respect mine was fantastic. He was always around. He was there at breakfast and at teatime. He was there, because of our admittedly potentially psychologically damaging sleeping arrangements, all night. He was the person who took us to dentist’s appointments, to the library, and during the school holidays he took my brother and I to the park every single day, standing watching at what we thought was a brook, but was in fact a sewage outlet, as we raced around and around and around on our bikes.

  He also walked me to school every day. Several times a day, in fact: he would be with me on the ten-minute walk from home to school in the morning; on the ten-minute walk back from school to home at lunchtime; on the ten-minute walk from home to school at the end of lunchtime; and on the ten-minute walk back from school to home at the end of the day. Factoring in the fact that he had to walk for ten minutes, in order to walk me for ten minutes – like so many Indian children I had a predilection for mathematics – at least eighty minutes of his day were dedicated to walking me to and from school.

  By the age of seven, when I started primary school, and the casual tartan smockwear my mother made me wear to Woden Infants was replaced with the Woden Juniors’ uniform of grey shorts, grey shirt and red tie, I was old enough to make my own way. And, this being an age before kiddy-fiddlers were believed to be lurking behind every parked car, most children across Park Village did so. But when, on my first day, Dad appeared at the front door as usual – five minutes early, staring at his watch, repeatedly checking his pockets for his housekeys, as usual – I took his hand gratefully. So terrifying was the prospect of a new school and so feeble my hold on reality, I may well have ended up in a distant borough of Birmingham had he not assisted.

  This is another thing that adults often get wrong about childhood: yes, it is the most carefree time of your life, but, at the same time, if you consult the small print of your memory closely enough, you’ll probably recall it was also the time you could be at your most anxious. Your problems might have been smaller and fewer, but your ability to deal with them was correspondingly weaker, and something like moving schools – even to a school next door to the one you had been attending for four years – could feel like the end of the world. It certainly had me breathing bricks of fear.

  Which was not to say there weren’t things to be excited about. I liked the new uniform, especially the elasticated tie and the rather girly grey slip-shoes, which, with the protective metal studs that had been hammered into the heels, made me feel like a tap dancer as my father’s hands guided me to the school gates. Also, having listened to my siblings talk about their time there – they were all at Heath Park High by this stage – I was excited by the prospect of pottery, the possibility of learning the recorder, and school trips to stately homes and museums. At Infants, we only ever seemed to be taken to Dudley Zoo, a prospect that was beginning to make us as listless as the primates shivering behind bars.

  But there was a great deal more to worry about. Specifically, compulsory cross-country runs, which, according to my brother, involved running in your pants if you forgot your kit; compulsory swimming lessons, which, according to my brother, involved being thrown into a pool in the nude if you forgot your kit; and older kids throwing you into dustbins – in the nude too, doubtless – just for the hell of it. And then there were the teachers: Mr Burgess (no relation to Mrs Burgess, the corner shop owner), notorious for making children stand in corridors sporting a ‘dunce’ hat; Mr Ball, the headmaster, whose weapon of choice was apparently something terrifying called the ‘jimmy slipper’; and Mrs Caring, whose lessons seemed to revolve around a perpetual series of shouts, slaps and wooden rulers smashed against the backs of hands and legs. In my mind she was a combination of the Wicked Witch of the East and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the prospect of getting her as a form mistress made me want to go to the toilet repeatedly.

  I clutched my schoolbag tightly as I walked along with Dad, as if my life and dignity depended on its contents (which, in a way, they did), mumbled the Japji Sahib, the beginning of the Guru Granth Sahib Mum had taught me, and watched Dad hum to himself – Hindi songs I didn’t recognize from Bollywood films I’d never seen – click his fingers to some beat I couldn’t hear, and smile, at people going past, at nothing in particular. Dad’s hands were hairier and darker than mine – thick, yellowing fingernails curving down like the ends of banisters, his Seiko watch hanging loose on his wrist like a bangle – and at the school gates, I had to be prised away from them slowly. And then I would only let go when I caught sight of another member of the family: my cousin Pumi, the eldest of Chacha’s children, who was a year behind me at infant school, but had been bumped up this term. Her extravagantly looped and ribboned plaits made her instantly recognizable among the sea of oiled and shampooed heads. We stood silently against each other in the playground – she’d heard the stories about Mrs Caring too – speechless with nerves as older kids ran around us.

  It was a comfort having Pumi there. A member of the family was never more than an arm’s length away in those days. But as a teacher rang a bell at the end of the playground, I felt a pang of longing for my siblings. What was the point of having older sisters and brothers if they were always going to be at a different school, always out of reach, when I needed them? The self-pity turned into panic when I was put in a different group from Pumi, and sent down a disorientating sequence of polished corridors.

  But finally, behind the green door of the classroom next to the girl’s cloakroom, relief arrived in the form of my new form mistress’s kindly face rising like the moon against the blackboard, and the sound of her saying, warmly: ‘Good morning, class. My name is Mrs Jones.’

  ‘Good morning!!!’ we chimed back, an army of American cheerleaders. Twenty-six brown, black and white – though mostly brown – faces smiled in relief and adoration.

  ‘Now then, let’s see who we have here this year …’

  She glanced at her coffee mug. Or rather,
she appeared to be glancing at her coffee mug, but given that she was cross-eyed, was actually consulting the register.

  ‘Nicholas Cope?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Zareena Dhillon?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Debra Jones?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Kamaljit Kaur?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Kulvinder Kaur?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Sukhbir Kaur?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Arvinder Singh?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Baldev Singh?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Dalbinder Singh?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Tajinder Singh?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear …’ She put her red pen down on the table. ‘This won’t do at all. Now then … Can those of you called Kaur or Singh provide me with a surname, please?’ She picked up her biro. ‘Kamaljit?’

  ‘Sandhu, miss.’

  ‘Kulvinder?’

  ‘Dhaliwal, miss.’

  ‘Sukhbir?’

  ‘Bains, miss.’

  When she got to me I squeezed my legs together, pushed my hands deeper into my pockets, and fingered the remnants of the boiled sweets that Mum had given me to hand out, to help make new friends.

  ‘Sath-nam? Is that how you say it?’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ I lied.

  ‘Your surname?’

  ‘Singh, miss.’

  ‘Come on now, don’t be a silly sausage.’ A ripple of giggles across the room. ‘Everyone has a forename – mine, for example, is Hyacinth …’ More giggles. ‘Most people have a middle name … mine, for example, is Edna …’ Open laughter now. ‘Yours is Singh. And you should also have a surname or family name. Like Jones?’

  My mouth opened and closed like the goldfish in the tank at the back of the room.

  ‘Maybe you can ask your father or your mother and then let me know?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Maybe you could ask at lunchtime? Are you one of the children who goes home for lunch?’

  Of course I was one of the children who went home for lunch. There had been a brief period at infant school, after Puli had filled out the appropriate forms, when I’d spent lunchtimes being served free school slop in the hut next to the playground, but, pathetically, I was poleaxed by homesickness – being away from my parents for a whole day seemed too long – and when I happened to mention to Mum that I thought I might have eaten a beefburger by accident, and that I’d been told off by a dinner lady for scooping up mash with a spoon (we didn’t use knives and forks at home), Mum reacted with the rage I’d hoped for, pronouncing that free or not free, no child of hers would be force-fed the Holy Cow with a fork. By the end of the week I was coming back home for lunch and a shiny set of knives and forks was sitting in our cutlery drawer.

  At the gates, I got the expected response from Dad: ‘Ask your Mum when you get home.’ Which is what I did, as Mum stood in the kitchen preparing chapattis, her apron shaded with flour, the paoncha of her salwar dipped in dust, a sabzi of carrots and potatoes on a rear hob and an iron griddle, a tuva, on a front one. Certain British staples – chips, beans, sausages – were creeping on to our menu by this time, any meal with an English element being labelled ‘dinner’ by Mum, and in some cases being combined with Punjabi staples (Mum’s Heinz Baked Bean curry was to die for, and tomato ketchup goes brilliantly with yellow lentil curry), but at lunchtime it was always Punjabi cuisine. Chapattis with curry. Flour and fat and gravy.

  Mum didn’t respond at all initially. She just pinched a globule off the mound of dough that had probably been kneaded that morning, patted and rolled it into a perfect circle, threw it on to the tuva, cooked it on both sides, flipped it on to a naked gas flame until the steam inside made the chapatti balloon, and then tossed it on to a waiting cloth. I interpreted the hesitation as a sign of tiredness: by lunchtime she would have done two hours’ housework, an hour of cooking, three hours’ sewing and got us ready for school. But it was probably exasperation. Mum hadn’t had much success when it came to registering the names of her children in England. Rajah’s full name, Jasmail, was mistakenly recorded as ‘Gasmail’ on his birth certificate, my illiterate father having been sent to register it. And while my first name is common among Sikhs, I’ve never met anyone else with an ‘h’ in the middle of it, a quirk once again attributable to my illiterate dad, or to the relative who wrote the name down on the piece of paper he took to the Civic Centre.

  ‘Your surname is Singh,’ she said eventually, running a slab of Lurpak over the most recently baked chapatti. ‘It means lion. A name shared by every Sikh man and a name to be proud of.’ She pinched another piece of dough off the globe. ‘Don’t you remember the story I told you?’

  I remembered the story. It was one of the many religious tales Mum told me at night, when my siblings were still downstairs watching telly, and we lay in the room above, my father on the double bed, my mother on the three-quarters bed pushed next to it, and me trying not to slide into the gap between. It involved Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth and most militaristic of the Sikh gurus, a test of faith involving the slaughter of a goat, and ended with Guru Gobind Singh pronouncing that all male Sikhs would henceforth share the surname ‘Singh’, and all female Sikhs would henceforth share the surname ‘Kaur’. I remembered the tale but it didn’t really help with my predicament.

  I waited for Mum to finish baking another chapatti before pressing further. She made cooking look so easy: whenever I tried making rotis – I would have to beg to be allowed, whereas my sisters were forced to learn – I could never get the dough to roll out evenly or transfer the chapatti from the sideboard to the tuva in one piece, and the bits that did make it would always end up burnt and tasting like the back of an oven. Mum would invariably attempt to rescue my effort by carving an animal shape out of the bit that looked least burnt and would try to reassure me with the remark: ‘Don’t worry, son, you’ll have a wife to cook for you.’

  As another steaming chapatti deflated, I decided to press my point by exploiting my mother’s instinctive and total respect for authority. ‘My teacher says I must have a family name,’ I ventured. Just in case this didn’t convey the urgency of the matter, I followed it up by pressing another of her buttons: implying that, somehow, we weren’t as good as other families in the neighbourhood. ‘All the other Sikh boys in class have one. You know Arvinder, who lives at the end of the street? His family name is Chahal.’

  She sighed. And shrugged. And then, with one hand on her hip, said: ‘Ask Puli when she gets home.’

  There was a wait before I could ask Puli. It was more than a mile to Heath Park High, which meant, with the walk of more than a mile to school in the morning, the walk of more than a mile back from school to home at lunchtime, the walk of more than a mile from home to school at the end of lunchtime, and the walk of more than a mile back from school to home at the end of the day, that my siblings walked four or five miles every day. They rarely had more than fifteen minutes to eat at lunchtime, and sometimes my sisters had to make their own chapattis in that time too. Puli was scraping her bowl clean with the end of her roti, in her preferred dining position – at the foldaway table underneath the telly – when I asked her. She gave me a version of Mum’s huffing and puffing before asking for a piece of paper – I tore a strip from one of the blue airmail letters that arrived in the post for Mum once a fortnight – and I watched as she transcribed my surname slowly on to it, the tips of her fingers iced with flour. I read it out to myself as I struggled through my lunch of two chapattis – ‘You can’t just have one roti now you’re at big school’ – and announced it to Bindi and Rajah.

  ‘That’s our name,’ said Bindi, sniffling into a hanky between mouthfuls, sitting in her preferred dining position: the settee opposite the telly.

  ‘I know, you plonker,’ said Rajah, from his preferr
ed dining location: the armchair, a plate placed on a tray resting on his lap. ‘We all have the same family name. That’s the point. Durrrrr.’ He stuck his tongue under his bottom lip. ‘By nabe’s Sathnam dun d’im a SPACK.’

  When they’d gone, leaving separately as usual – why did they never go to school together? – I continued practising my name on Pussy as she danced around my father’s feet in the kitchen, his preferred dining position, where he received his chapattis red-hot and sooty, and where he could belch and fart to his digestive system’s content without having to endure disapproval. I continued practising as his hands took me through the streets of Park Village again, and would probably have practised all the way to school had we not had a happy interruption in our routine outside Mrs Burgess’s corner shop.

  Sweets were something my father and I had in common. Or rather, not having sweets was something we had in common – me because, as an eight-year-old boy, I could never have enough; and my dad because, as a diabetic, he was under instructions to avoid them. But sometimes, usually after lunch, he’d crack.

  ‘Don’t tell your mum, okay?’

  We didn’t enter until I’d promised.

  A bell tinkled as we pushed open the blue door, and Mrs Burgess, as thin as the cigarette hanging from her mouth, older even than the lino that cracked across the floor, came hobbling out of her stock room.

  ‘Alroight, cock,’ she trilled, examining me from the tip of the brand new silk hanky on my topknot, to my already-grazed knees. ‘Coo. Look at yow, trimmed up like a ham bone! Yow look just like ower Steve used to.’

  I loved Mrs Burgess. For her crazy expressions, for the crazy way she said I reminded her of her son Steve, even though her son Steve, judging by the picture on the shelf behind her, was a middle-aged officer with the Metropolitan Police. But more than anything I loved Mrs Burgess for her shop, which unlike the Indian shop on Crowther Street, or the Indian newsagent on Cannock Road, was almost entirely dedicated to sweets and snacks. As well as its display of crisps, one whole wall was stacked with jars of chocolates and sweets measured out by the quarter pound – barley sugars, cola cubes; another was taken up with a deck of sweets coming in packets – Mojos, Black Jacks, Love Hearts; and at the far end of the shop stood a display of what my siblings and I called the 20 pence sweets – Twixes and Mars Bars – which we continued calling the 20 pence sweets even when they started costing much more.