The combination of lots of sweets, greediness and feeble purchasing power might have been frustrating, but I always found the activity pleasurable, as it allowed my fondness for confectionery to be combined with my enthusiasm for maths. I must have spent a quarter of my childhood running through the combinations and permutations of what I could get with my 10 pence a week pocket money. If you wanted to go for sheer quantity, you could go for twenty Mojos, at a half pence each. If you fancied something savoury and something sweet, you could go for a 5 pence bag of crisps plus five Black Jacks. Then there was the possibility of those 20 pence sweets – the emperors of chocolate bars, for which we occasionally pooled our pocket money. The resulting purchase would be cut in half with the kind of precision reserved for diamond cutters, the process usually monitored by an independent adjudicator – Mum. We still nearly always ended up in blows over the crumbs. Thrillingly, it was this display that my father padded towards.
‘Shall we get the coconut one?’
He meant Bounty. I should have guessed. Coconuts, along with butter, mangoes, guavas and raw sugar cane, were among the foods that sent my parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts into fits of ecstasy and nostalgia for India. I didn’t think much of the real-life hairy coconuts Mum brought home, but Bounty … it was like it said on the pack, the taste of paradise.
‘Comes in two chunks,’ I said. ‘So you can have one and I can have one.’
At the counter, Dad reached into his trouser pocket and handed over some money with a slow smile and a ‘hello’, one of his few words of English – the others being ‘thank you’. The 20 pence coin that passed between them, only recently in circulation, was almost as mesmerizing as the chocolate bar it entitled us to.
‘Cheers, cock,’ trilled Mrs Burgess, taking the coin from Dad, but addressing me, and putting it into the wooden tray that served as her cash register. She sang us a local farewell – ‘Ta ra!’ – before disappearing, whistling, back into her stock room.
Outside, I relished ripping open the wrapper and sliding the bars out from the cardboard slip inside, but Dad wolfed down his share in two gulps – like a pig chobbling coal, Mrs Burgess would have said. There was no chance of me doing that. I was going to make it last as long as I could, even if it meant being late for school. Crawling along, with Dad glancing repeatedly at his watch, I nibbled the milk chocolate off the top first, then off the sides, and then – trickiest bit here, the chocolate is at its thinnest – from the bottom. Finally, a cuboid of sugary coconut caught between the tips of my fingers, themselves stained with the yellow haldi of lunch. I polished it off in quarters.
‘That was sohni, Dad.’
I kept the black cardboard slip from inside the wrapper with the intention of sniffing it and reliving the experience later, but it drifted on to the classroom floor during afternoon registration, as I ransacked the pockets of my shorts for the strip of blue airmail, with my name written on it. Mrs Jones waited.
‘How do you spell that?’
‘Ess, ay, en, gee, haitch …’
‘You mean aitch …’
‘Gee, haitch …’
‘Not haitch. Aitch is pronounced without an haitch …’
Again, my mouth opened and closed wordlessly. Fortunately, she changed the subject.
‘I see your name alliterates …’
She looked over the whole class now. Or rather, she looked at the wall and I assumed she was looking over the whole class.
‘Does anyone know what alliteration means?’
A sea of blinking eyes. We knew nothing.
‘Alliteration is a stylistic device, or literary technique, in which successive words begin with the same consonant sound or letter.’ She may as well have been speaking Mandarin. ‘For example, the phrase: the sweet smell of success. Actually, Wordsworth springs to mind.’ She closed her eyes. ‘And sings a solitary song, That whistles in the wind … Can any of you think of an example of alliteration?’
The blinking intensified.
‘Come on, I’m sure one of you can think of something. A dime a dozen is another example. Bigger and better? Jump for joy?’
It was only when I noticed my classmates laughing that I realized I’d inadvertently replied. ‘Silly sausage!’
‘Yes! Excellent example. Well done. One house point to you.’ Ten house points meant a visit to the headmaster’s office to claim a bright red maxi badge, which you could wear on your pullover as a demonstration of your swottiness. ‘Very well done.’ Smiling, Mrs Jones returned to the register. ‘Now then, that name sounds familiar. Are you Narinder’s brother by any chance?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Gosh.’ Her tiny cross-eyes almost disappeared into her large face when she smiled. ‘One of the best students I ever had. We’ll be lucky if you turn out half as good …’
I beamed idiotically. It’s not every day you get a new name, learn that it aliter-thingy and find out that you’re related to a genius. The good feeling stayed for the remainder of the day, with its new exercise books, the sound of someone murdering ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ on the recorder next door and the smell of hops wafting across from the brewery on the other side of the playing fields. When the bell rang, our steel-framed chairs screeched against the floor and Mrs Jones said, ‘That bell is for me, not for you, sit back down,’ just like the teachers did at infant school, before letting us go after the customary pretence that she didn’t want to get home as soon as possible too. I pelted out at a hundred miles an hour for Bananaman and Jackanory and luncheon meat sandwiches, dunked in Indian tea.
Dad was standing at the gates – probably had been for ten minutes already – and next to him was the unexpected figure of Chacha, who, presumably back from a morning shift at his copper tubing factory, had come to pick up Pumi. Seeing them next to each other, you’d never have guessed they were brothers: my father stocky and sombre, his hair brushed back into a bouffant; Chacha younger and thinner and smily and sporting a turban. But then, my brother and I hardly looked related: Rajah was at this stage in the middle of his Ralph Macchio phase, bearing an uncanny, possibly deliberate likeness to the Karate Kid, while I, the family’s religious experiment, was still in my prolonged Ranjeet-Singh-the-Punjabi-Tube-worker-from-Mind-Your-Language phase. Years later I would be surprised when people asked why I was singled out for having long hair when my father and brother didn’t. I never wondered why, the difference between Dad and Chacha having normalized it. It was just the way of things: some people in families had turbans, some didn’t.
On seeing me, Chacha smiled and did what he often did – plucked a single hair from his black beard and pretended to plant it in my cheek. ‘There you go, sahib!’ he laughed. His Punjabi was speckled with bits of English gleaned during his few years at a British comprehensive as a teenager. ‘A full and bushy beard within a week!’ He stepped back to size me up. ‘You will look like a saint.’ A stroke of his own beard. ‘Like Guru Gobind Singh, perhaps. People will travel from the four corners of the world, from the three corners of India, from the two corners of Wolverhampton, just to worship under the enormous shadow of your beard!’
If I knew what ‘ironic’ meant, the remark would have struck me as so, because, with his thin, handsome face, sculpted beard and regal turban, Chacha often reminded me of Guru Gobind Singh, who in portraits was portrayed as a majestic figure on horseback holding a royal falcon. Indeed, when I was very young, I thought Chacha was Guru Gobind Singh – in the way that I thought that the granthi at the Cannock Road gurdwara was Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion – a confusion accentuated by a photograph in our front room, in which Chacha was shown posing with a budgerigar. But I laughed at the joke anyway, like I laughed at all of Chacha’s jokes – after all, he was the one who taught me to ride a bike, who took us to the open day at the local bus garage sometimes – and was still laughing when Pumi’s sad figure crawled into view.
I’d forgotten about her in the relief and excitement of my day, but now it was
apparent from the way she couldn’t even summon the energy to pull up her white socks that something terrible had happened. The worst thing imaginable, in fact: she’d got Mrs Caring as a form teacher. I might have offered sympathy, but it would have been easier to offer consolation to someone who had just lost their entire family in a freak tornado. Besides, I’d yet to develop the necessary skills of human empathy, so I ignored her entirely and skipped home, my father within reach, Chacha and Pumi following close behind, my thoughts as cheerful as they had been anxious in the morning. I tried to walk all the way without standing on cracks in the pavement, looked for empty packets of Hula Hoops (collect twenty and send off for a free Wham! T-shirt), peered into the windows of the cool Ford Granada at the end of Nine Elms Lane, considered important questions such as ‘What did Boy George mean when he sang: “Karma Chameleon”?’ and ‘If planets are in the sky, are we in the sky too?’, and played a game of spot the difference with the houses along the route – the council was making renovation grants available and the smooth rows of Victorian terraced houses were beginning to be disrupted by the addition of Edwardian effects, mock Tudor doors, cottagey bow windows and porches. Instead of looking straight ahead at the street, some houses appeared to have developed a squint.
As we turned the corner from Crowther Street into Prosser Street – the local pub, the Lewisham Arms, and the family houses at numbers 60 and 68 within view – my thoughts returned to the events of the day, and I found myself babbling them out in a stream of consciousness to Pumi, who had caught up with Dad and me: telling her about the lovely Mrs Jones, who seemed to have the gentleness of Princess Di and the twinkliness of Mary Poppins, about my two house points (I’d got another for answering a maths question), and about my new name.
‘S. A. N. G. H. E. R. A.,’ I elaborated. ‘You see, everyone has a forename, a middle name and a surname. You must have the same surname? It’s a family name, you see.’
Chacha interjected. ‘That ain’t how you spell it, Dumbo.’
I looked up at his face to see if he might be joking. He’d recently tried to persuade me that eating bananas would literally turn me into a monkey. But he seemed dead serious.
‘Honestly, ask your mother. There’s no aitch in the middle.’
6. Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime
I filled in the month between my resolution to visit the psychiatrist with Dad and the actual appointment by conducting some rudimentary research into schizophrenia. Or rather, I filled in the month between my resolution to visit the psychiatrist with Dad and the actual appointment by … returning to London, where I worked during the day and filled the evenings worrying about how I should word my bombshell letter to my mother, and her possible reaction, until I could stand it no more and came back hoping for some kind of insight in Wolverhampton, where I worked during the day and spent the evenings being nagged about getting married before it’s too late, until I could stand it no more and stomped off to my bedroom, deciding I had to write the letter right there and then, get it translated immediately and deliver it straight away, regardless of Mum’s possible reaction, only to change my mind when brought cups of tea and Penguin bars by way of apology, coming back downstairs to watch BBC Parliament and listen to Mum go on about the declining quality of tomatoes in shops on the Dudley Road, until I could stand it no more and left the house to visit my sister Bindi, an awkward conversation with whom kick-started me into … conducting some rudimentary research into schizophrenia.
I decided, in an attempt to burn off the gallons of ghee that had been cascading into my stomach, to walk the mile or so to Bindi’s house in Goldthorn Park, a leafy suburb in the south of Wolverhampton, slightly to the north of the leafy suburb in the south of Wolverhampton where my parents reside. Initially, little seemed to have changed. But gradually it became evident that the little changes – net curtains framing windows that had previously been bare, front and back gardens concreted over, parked cars mostly of German extraction – in fact pointed to a significant social shift. In my absence, this part of town had become heavily Asian. Wolverhampton has long had one of the largest Sikh populations in the country – 8 per cent belong to the faith according to 2001 census figures – but when I lived there, the Asian areas were concentrated in pockets near the town centre. My family, specifically my eldest aunt, Pindor, who lived on the same street as my parents, was among the first to drift to the southern suburbs, but now the whole area had a distinctly Indian flavour.
And, on the scale of Indian flavours, Bindi’s house was a vindaloo. Designed and fitted out by her husband – a turbaned taxi driver from India to whom she was arranged in marriage at twenty-one – her semi-detached home was an exposition of almost every Punjabi design cliché. Trees had been yanked out of the back garden to make way for slabs. The front lawn had been block-paved over, to make parking space for not one, but two Mercedes. Inside, wallpaper had been replaced with painted plaster, the newest bits of furniture retaining their cellophane packing for protection, and while thousands had been spent sprucing things up, the family actually spent most of their time in the least swish room: the converted garage. But as I was a visitor, Bindi – thirty-four now, not as thin as before, but just as sniffly – took me into the posh living room.
‘How’s things?’ she asked as we squeaked against the cellophane.
‘Fine,’ I lied.
‘Busy?’
‘Yeah,’ I lied.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah.’
One of the uncomfortable revelations of those early days of being back home was the realization that I’d lost the ability to talk fluently to my sisters. Bindi and I used to be close. When I was around twelve, and she around seventeen, we were probably the closest members of the family. Trapped in the house together (as a young Asian woman approaching marriageable age, she wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, and, being new to the area, I often had no friends to hang out with), we spent our spare time making cakes and trifles in the kitchen – following the recipes from her old home economics books like chemistry experiments – and indulging in our pop music obsession together. But once Bindi got married, we stopped talking, and while I’d become increasingly estranged from Punjabi culture, she, with an Indian husband, and two boys being raised as religious Sikhs, with topknots like I used to have, had become entirely immersed in it. Now, the gap between her life (housework, children, TV) and mine (words, music, media tosspottery) felt insurmountable. The few conversations we had were always through her children, and with them away delivering newspapers on this occasion, I flailed through a list of possible conversation topics as she went to make the tea. Housework? God. No. I had a cleaner anyway. Pop music? Nope. The first thing that goes when you have children is music. Telly? I’d realized years earlier that my kind of shows (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under) were not her kind of shows (X Factor, EastEnders). Besides, my telly aversion was still simmering.
I ummed gormlessly as Bindi reappeared bearing tea and a plate of Jaffa Cakes, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I found myself asking: ‘So when did you realize Dad had schizophrenia?’
I’d blurted out the same question to Rajah some nights beforehand. We’d been playing a round of Scrabble in our parents’ living room at the time, a game which, owing to the fact that some of the players didn’t speak good English, and the fact that some of the players were under the age of ten, and the fact that we don’t have a dictionary in the house, we were playing with the usual family rule that any word is allowed, as long as the other players agree it is a word. As ever, proceedings had begun cheerfully, but the game had disintegrated amid recriminations. A nephew had stormed off when I’d objected to ‘adress’. I’d successfully thrown a strop when it looked like ‘SIFT’ was about to be disallowed (‘I DO WRITE FOR A LIVING, YOU KNOW’). But having begun with four players, it was now just down to the two of us.
‘Actually,’ he’d said, putting down a thirty-two-pointer and winning
the game. ‘I didn’t realize until quite late. At first I just thought he was depressed. It was three or four years ago that I realized what schizophrenia was. I went to a few appointments with Dad and read some stuff.’
And that was it. No elaboration on how he found out, no suggestion of trauma, no five-year period of denial and, apparently, no desire to tell his younger brother what he had discovered. I’ve envied Rajah for many things over the years. For his looks, his easy way with people, his patience, his Punjabi skills, the way in which he has managed to balance his love life with family requirements, his successful career in business with hobbies: despite being busy at work, he manages to find time to work as an extra on film sets around the country and is a keen bodybuilder. But at this moment I envied him for something new: for his ability to quickly confront things and get on. I wish I could be like that.
Bindi, meanwhile, fell into a rather ominous silence after the question was posed. I’d scanned the whole of her living room, with its fake ivory ornaments, family portraits superimposed on to palace interiors, and portraits of Sikh freedom fighters, by the time her response arrived.
‘Schizowhat?’
I suppose I should extend what I said earlier: 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; I didn’t share this knowledge with my other sister until I was in my late twenties and it is only now, at thirty, that I feel the need to talk about it. After drinking my tea and recovering from the surprise and relief of discovering someone as clueless as me, it struck me that Bindi’s question was actually a good one. What did schizophrenia mean?
The Boy with the Topknot Page 9