In other words, my father and sister had gone from being my father and sister, two people who behaved a little strangely at times, but two people I loved, to being a collection of symptoms. I’d let the disease claim them entirely. On reading Mad House, it struck me that, maybe, in some ways, my mother was actually better off without the word ‘schizophrenia’. At least her ignorance meant she didn’t lose so much of her husband and daughter to the illness.
I subsequently made a conscious effort to stop jumping to conclusions. It was possible my father didn’t like going to the GP because all middle-aged men are reluctant to do so, that my sister was indecisive because it was a trait of her personality, like it was a trait of mine. Instead, I let the remainder of my reading lead me to a series of questions, rather than answers, which I wrote down in a notebook. They included:
Why does Dad stare at books and newspapers when he can’t read?
Does Dad hear voices?
Does Dad think he is receiving personal messages via BBC Parliament?
How well is his condition controlled by his medication?
Might he get better?
Has he ever been violent?
I would, I decided, put these questions to the psychiatrist when we met.
7. Mad World
As I was saying, schizophrenia is difficult to diagnose. The disease has not a single, but many different ways of beginning; some of the early signs – withdrawal, moodiness, etc. – are also the early signs of adolescence, when the illness tends to strike; there’s no scientific way of verifying a diagnosis; the sufferer, because of the nature of the illness, cannot always help in describing the symptoms; and the early symptoms tend to be subtle. And it is this subtlety that bedevils attempts to talk about the beginning of my sister’s illness in its context. You see, while Puli’s early symptoms were barely perceptible, almost nothing else about our family life was so. Looking back, her madness wasn’t half as mad as our apparent sanity.
One aspect of this collective lunacy came in the form of our innocence, which may seem, I realize, a strange thing to pick out. Children are, by definition, innocent, you may say. All kids have funny ideas about the world. But the thing that gave our childish innocence a demented edge was that our parents and grand parents and uncles and aunts, the adults whose role it was to ground us into reality, were, isolated by language and illiteracy and focused on survival, even more clueless than we were. How clueless? Well, I have a vivid memory of trying to explain to my grandfather that the flying monkeys depicted carrying Dorothy and Toto away in The Wizard of Oz weren’t actually real flying monkeys, but created through special effects. The way he looked back at me, you would have thought I was telling him the sky was made of sponge. I also remember my brother struggling to explain the concept of fashion brands to my mother (‘But why pay £5 for a T-shirt I could make for 50 pence?’), Bindi trying to convey the concept of veterinary surgery to my grandmother (‘So you’re saying there are people pagal enough to spend real money on treating dogs and cats?’), and Puli attempting to make Mum appreciate the significance of Santa Claus. ‘You see, there’s this old man, who lives in the North Pole … What’s the North Pole? It’s a very cold place, like the top of a mountain. Anyway, he lives there with these things called … elves. What are elves? Well …’
But it was a case of the blind leading the blind, as we didn’t have a clue either. By the time I was eight, Rajah eleven, Bindi thirteen and Puli fourteen, I’d still never been to a cinema, used a telephone, been inside a church, used a shower, sat in a bath – we still used a bucket and jug – seen the countryside or the sea, read a newspaper, had a white friend, owned a book, met a Muslim or a Tory or a Jew. Among the things I’d never tried on the culinary front were: bacon, coffee, beef, lamb, Chinese food, pizza and McDonald’s. When my primary school headmaster gave a lecture on the dangers of glue-sniffing, I thought he was referring to the white paste we used in art lessons and for months afterwards I held the jars at arm’s length, terrified that a whiff would have me dribbling like an addict. I thought the area we lived in was called the ‘Black Country’ because of all the black people living there (but at least I didn’t blurt this thought out loud as one of my classmates did during a lesson on local history). And when I saw an NF sign scrawled on the wall of a nearby Indian butcher’s, I liked the graphic design of the logo so much – the fancy way in which the F hung off the N – that I inscribed the symbol on to a balloon I’d been given to play with. Puli burst it on sight, but without explaining why.
‘Don’t EVER write that again.’ Her fingers dug into my arm. ‘EVER!’
Allied to this was the craziness of the culture clash that engulfed us. Again, this is hardly unusual, you may say. East meets West, East struggles to understand Western notions of liberalism and black pudding, West struggles to understand Eastern notions of enforced marriage and mango pickle, is an old chestnut now, as much of a cliché in multicultural Britain as class used to be in monocultural Britain. You could pave a path from Wolverhampton to New Delhi with books and films and poems on the subject. But what made our culture clash unusual, I think, was that while we were subject to Eastern and Western influences, there was, at the time, absolutely no sense of a gap yawning open inside us. It was less a culture clash than a … culture concurrence.
And it’s not as if we were fed bland versions of East and West, either. At home we were essentially raised as Punjabi village children. We didn’t just get nagged about the importance of arranged marriages from an early age. Mum would snap at us if we even made eye contact with a member of the opposite sex while walking along the street. She didn’t just warn us about the immorality of alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol was very rarely allowed in the house and we weren’t even permitted to buy chocolate cigarettes. There was compulsory Punjabi school on Saturday mornings, compulsory four hours of sitting cross-legged at the gurdwara on Sunday mornings, and it was made clear that our parents’ word – or rather, Mum’s word, as Dad didn’t have many to offer – was the word of God.
However, at the same time, we embraced – and were allowed to embrace – many aspects of the West with wild abandon. There were Easter eggs at Easter, cakes and Bird’s Eye trifles on birthdays, and every year at Christmas we’d have the full shebang: fairy lights on a plastic tree from Woolworth’s in the front room, Christmas cards from our classmates throughout the house, and, on the big day, a giant turkey for lunch and in the early evening, the traditional family bust-up – Puli and Rajah nearly hacking one another to death over whether we should watch Only Fools and Horses on BBC1 or the James Bond movie on ITV. As soon as we were done we would do it all over again, waddling over to the Sang(h)eras four doors away for another Christmas dinner later in the evening. Though these Christmases, as now, always had an Indian flavour: we didn’t eat meat on Sundays and Tuesdays, so would sometimes have our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day; Mum would often try to jazz up the turkey with various spicing and tandoori techniques; among the traditional Christmas cards there would always be a few wishing us a happy new year and depicting Guru Gobind Singh astride a stallion; and when it came to presents Mum didn’t really get into the seasonal spirit. She would give each of us some cash, and we would trot off to buy ourselves something (usually a Matchbox car in my case), wrap it up ourselves and place it under the plastic tree. As there was nobody stopping us, we invariably ended up opening the parcels before Christmas Day morning.
Meanwhile, among the telly programmes we never missed were: Dallas, Rentaghost, The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, That’s Life, Don’t Wait Up, EastEnders, Hi-de-Hi, Blue Peter and Top of the Pops … which brings me to perhaps the most extreme manifestation of our Westernization: pop music. We consumed it in whatever form we could get it, pooling pocket money for copies of Look-In and Smash Hits, listening to the Top 40 singles countdown on Sunday nights, and the album chart with Bruno Brookes on Wednesday nights. Top of the Pops was, of course, the absolute highlight of
the week: we awaited its transmission in the way football fans might await the World Cup Final. Conversely, the choreographed bluster of professional sport passed us by like our competitors on the school playing fields. Often we’d only notice there was a major sporting fixture afoot when our favourite music TV shows were moved from their scheduled slots.
It didn’t seem possible for us to become any more obsessed, but then, one Saturday morning, Michael Jackson’s video for ‘Billie Jean’ was broadcast on BBC1. I was with my brother at the time, and thought we were equally mesmerized. But the sight of Jacko in those short trousers, that fedora pitched forward, those ringlets framing his face, triggered something more profound in Rajah. At the time he had been flirting with a variety of acts and movie heroes – there were Wham!, Ralph Macchio and Sylvester Stallone posters displayed in his bedroom – but within weeks the walls were plastered, from skirting board to ceiling, with Jacko. He saved up for a copy of Thriller. When we got our first video player, about five years after Chacha had got one, he taped every passing mention of his idol: from news bulletins as well as pop music shows. Eventually, watching the video for ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ became as much a part of our breakfast routine as tea and Weetabix. And finally, he began dressing like his idol too: abandoning his neat Ralph Macchio cut for an extravagant loose perm taken straight off the cover of Bad.
At the same time, Bindi directed her affection towards Bruce Springsteen and George Michael. With the former her devotion mainly took the form of recording his songs from the radio, collecting posters and making rather sinister-looking traced drawings of the posters. With the latter it went further: there were posters and sinister traced drawings, but other manifestations too. When we discovered Pussy had given birth to three shiny kittens, my brother called his Rocky, I called mine Lucky – because we had successfully saved it from Mum, who always tried to get rid of kittens as soon as they arrived – but Bindi called hers ‘Georgina’. At some level, like my brother with Michael Jackson, I think she wanted to be him too. After the former Wham! star was depicted wearing Aviator shades in the video for Father Figure, for instance, she splashed out on a £2.50 pair for herself. And when the stubbly one appeared on the Nelson Mandela tribute, dressed in a black suit, Bindi started dressing in black suits too, though in her case they were of the Indian salwar kameez variety.
And then – it’s embarrassing to continue, but only fair – there was me. Like Bindi and Rajah I went for the music thing with gusto, catching my sister’s George Michael bug in the way you might catch chicken pox. My idea of the best time possible was to make mix tapes of his music, a common enough pastime among children in the eighties, I suppose, but an activity complicated for me by a lack of blank tapes, a lack of original music to copy and a lack of hifi equipment. I would begin by swiping a cassette from my mother’s collection of religious music, then get Bindi to lend me her tape player and place it next to an old radio, and then lie in wait for his tracks to be broadcast like a detective on a stakeout. As I often wouldn’t know a George track was being played until it had been part-played, and as I would often be on the other side of the room or the house when it came on, and as I would sometimes press PAUSE accidentally, or forget to press PLAY at the same time as RECORD, and as radio DJs would often talk over songs, my mix tapes took several months to make, and usually consisted of little more than fragments and snippets of songs, often interrupted with human voices calling me down for chapattis.
My idea of the second best time possible was to attempt to transcribe the lyrics of the songs I had managed to tape, a task that Bindi would often assist me with.
‘He’s saying “But don’t worry, you come sometime,”’ I’d say, having played ‘Club Tropicana’ for the 415th time.
‘No, listen.’ Stop. Rewind. Play. ‘“Fun and sunshine – there’s enough for everyone … All that’s missing is the sea … But don’t worry … you can … SUNSHINE …”’
‘“But don’t worry, you can sunshine?” What does that mean? People don’t sunshine. The sun sunshines.’
‘Makes more sense than “you come sometime”.’
When we’d finally agreed on a version, Bindi would let me use the typewriter she and my sister had been bought for the typing course Mum had enrolled them on (to make them more employable and more marriageable), and I would spend an hour or two typing out a perfect copy on to a clean sheet of paper before filing the results away, imagining that some day they would come in useful.
Like my siblings, I matched this appetite for pop with a concomitant dedication to many of my mother’s Eastern values, and the two things I went for in particular were religiosity and an intense eagerness to please. I think – actually, I know – all four of us felt the latter from the earliest age. We saw how hard Mum worked, saw that Dad didn’t work, and wanted to help. But I think my sister Puli and I felt it particularly acutely. In Puli’s case the sense of responsibility was nagged into her (‘You’re the eldest, so you have to set the tone,’ Mum would tell her several times a day) and sometimes beaten into her. I was never hit, not once, a fact that had me singled out as spoilt by my siblings, but nevertheless tried to obey Mum in every possible way because I believed we had a special relationship. It’s interesting that in conversations with my brother and sisters now, they all say they felt this way at some stage, which is a sign of a good parenting, if ever there was. But I felt it almost constantly, every time Mum combed my hair and told me my kes made me special in the eyes of God, every time she told me a story at bedtime in the bedroom I still shared with her, and every time she recounted the story of my birth. The tale went that just after my brother was born she’d gone to see the tea-leaf reader on Stratton Street, who’d greeted her with the remark: ‘So, how are your four children?’
‘I’ve three children,’ Mum would say she replied. ‘The burden of two girls and the blessing of a son.’
‘You’ll have another son,’ said the tea-leaf reader on Stratton Street. ‘And he’ll lift the family out of poverty and misery.’
In other words, I thought I was the Messiah. And this saviour complex intensified suddenly when I came home from school one afternoon and found Mum splayed across the living room floor. Her hair was dishevelled, and Chachi was bent over her, seemingly trying to stop her digging her nails into her scalp. I’ll never forget the sound … it was animalistic, the kind you might make if someone tried to cut your heart out with a knife. Puli, her eyes wide with fear, whispered an explanation in the kitchen, where the rest of the family were walking in frightened circles: Mum’s eldest and closest brother, our mama, had murdered his younger brother, our youngest mama, over a dispute over farmland in India. Our cousin Manjit, our eldest mama’s only surviving son, had been implicated in the murder and arrested along with his father.
We were used to violent news from India. Several of my uncles had died from alcohol or opium abuse; several other uncles and aunts had died from (unidentified) illnesses; one of my aunts had lost three sons in violent circumstances – one falling under the wheel of a tractor while drunk; another killed in a motorcycle accident while high on opium; another losing his life in a house fire while high on opium. But most of that drama was on Dad’s side of the family, whom we could barely remember meeting on our one trip to India in 1979, whereas Manjit had recently spent a month living with us. We felt the loss, were shaken by Mum’s reaction, and the world was suddenly blanched of colour: white sheets spread out across the living room floor; Mum’s reds and blues shed for the white suits and scarves of mourning; mourners, dressed in white, arriving to wail and express sympathy. I’d accompanied Mum on similar mourning visits to other people’s houses and watched as she forced herself to cry – it is considered polite to weep – and then return to normal as soon as she left. I kept on expecting to turn around and find she was okay, but days and then weeks passed with no change. It was the only time, and remains the only time, I’ve ever seen Mum incapacitated: even when her mother and father died in the late
seventies and early eighties, she carried on looking after us. But there were mornings during this time when she couldn’t even comb my hair: I had to go to Chachi’s house to have my topknot tied before school.
Looking back, that murder, and the subsequent imprisonment of my uncle and cousin, affected us all deeply. Dark rings appeared around Mum’s eyes and she never wore nail polish or perfume again. My brother, in the pimply turmoil of early adolescence, disappeared into his bedroom. Bindi disappeared into her sinister drawings. Puli disappeared, I thought, into her studies. And I experienced an intensification in my sense of responsibility. Any resentment that may have been festering about having a topknot when my brother and father didn’t have long hair dissipated. I became even more religious: muttering the Japji Sahib not just once at night before bed, but eight or ten times in the morning and night and accompanying Mum to the temple not just on Sundays, but at dawn before Punjabi classes on Saturday mornings too, to clean tables, wash dishes, clean floors, and serve tea to the tramps who had worked out that there was a constant supply of free food and drink at the gurdwara. If anyone had asked me why I did this, I would have said it was because ‘sewa’, selfless service, was a central tenet of Sikhism, and I wanted to be a good Sikh. But it’s obvious now I did it as much for Mum. In many ways, God and Mum were interchangeable in my mind.
The Boy with the Topknot Page 11