The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Something about the choreography of the scene suggests the meeting has something to do with Puli, and the first possibility that springs to mind is that the boys have been bullying her. There was an incident some months earlier when a classmate of Puli’s had pelted her with pebbles as she walked home. Puli had told Mum, Mum had told our grandmother, and the Punjabi honour machine had kicked into gear: a visit paid to the boy’s house, the boy confessing to the crime, saying he did it because he thought Puli was weird, and his father beating him in front of everyone, there and then.

  The second possibility is that it is something to do with noise. The clamour we generate ourselves is bad enough: Mum at the sewing-machine or clanking saucepans in the kitchen; my brother listening to ‘Beat It’ on his radio-cassette player; me making mix tapes on my radio-cassette player; Bindi listening to ‘Glory Days’; Dad watching Channel 4. But then there is the noise from 62 too: the Bollywood songs; the hollering that seems a necessary part of all Indian households. Puli, trying to study, is always complaining, telling us to shut up so often that we have christened her Sergeant-Major, after Sergeant-Major Williams, who blusters ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP!’ throughout It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.

  But I’m wrong on both counts.

  ‘What have you been saying about this girl?’ shouts the father at his boys in Punjabi, his hands on his hips.

  The two boys look on, astonished.

  ‘Come on now … what have you been saying?’

  Eventually, the moustachioed one mumbles: ‘We ain’t said nothing, Dad.’

  ‘So you’re saying she’s lying?’

  ‘—’

  ‘Why would she make up these stories for no reason?’

  ‘—’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  The clean-shaven one speaks. ‘We ain’t said nuffink, Dad. Kushnee. We didn’t even know her room was next to ours.’

  ‘So what’s your explanation for this good girl, who goes to the temple every week, who studies hard, who never causes her parents any trouble whatsoever, saying you’ve been talking about her, eh? Do you expect me to believe you over her?’ He puts his face right up close to one of his sons’. ‘DO YOU?’

  I watch, agog. This is so weird in so many weird ways. It’s weird seeing our neighbours in our house – a bit like seeing your teachers out shopping, or your parents in the school corridors. Just wrong. It’s weird seeing Mum so quiet, seemingly not in control of a situation. It’s weird that our neighbour is wearing his pyjamas, and a turban, when he has no beard. It’s weird Puli has been saying she can hear what the boys talk about next door when you can’t even make conversations out when you put a glass against the wall, as I have often done, out of sheer boredom. And it’s weird seeing a man playing the role of the disciplinarian: like the shopping and the cleaning and the working, the shouting and whacking is something our mother takes responsibility for in our household. Dished out by a man it seems more unforgiving, scarier. I flinch when, after a few more nuffinks and kushnees, he raises his hand, as if preparing to hit the boys. But Mum stops him.

  ‘Nai, nai. No need.’ She sounds tired.

  ‘Their mother spoils them …’

  ‘Listen, no need.’ I can barely hear her. ‘I’m sure it won’t happen again.’

  ‘Kids nowadays …’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Is there anything you want us to do?’

  ‘No, no, let’s leave it.’

  ‘Maybe we could get the boys to move bedrooms?’

  ‘Suchi, no need.’

  ‘Make the boys sleep in the middle room. That way there’d be no problem.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, if you have any problems, if you ever need anything … please just let us know. You only need to ask. If neighbours can’t be there when you need them …’

  ‘Okay.’

  The neighbours snake out of the house; the father, unshaven, still dressed in his pyjama bottoms, cord dragging behind him; the two sons, bemused, in tracksuits, following like ducklings, through the kitchen, out into the back yard and away. As soon as they’re gone, Puli runs upstairs, Rajah, Dad and I sit down in front of the colour TV, and Bindi and Mum start preparing supper.

  In the week that follows, those dark circles reappear around Mum’s eyes.

  And no one hears a peep from next door.

  Except for Puli.

  More than twenty years later, I ask Puli for her version of what happened. She begins telling me – that the voices started when she was revising for her O-levels, that they were very loud from the beginning, that they tormented her more and more until she began coming downstairs to tell Mum about them, in tears – but then she stops, and says she would prefer to explain what happened in writing. Like me, she find things easier to lay out on paper.

  A week later a brown envelope arrives at my flat in London, with the postcode underlined, and Puli’s address inscribed on the back, in the way Mum used to get her to inscribe our Park Village address on to the back of airmail letters to India. Inside, three sides of lined A4, stapled, all covered in Puli’s large, neat handwriting.

  ‘Mum didn’t take me to the doctor initially. She must have been terrified about what it meant … after Dad. But eventually … after that thing with the neighbours … she took me to see the doctor. It was Dr Dutta. I remember telling him I could hear people talking about me (in the background), judging me, laughing at me, criticizing me, while I revised. I wanted him to tell Mum that the voices were real, that I was talking sense. But his response shocked me.

  ‘He asked: “Are you sure you’re revising? You don’t just sit there?” Of course I don’t just sit there, I thought. I work very hard and have been working hard for years. But his question frightened me: what if I failed my exams after all the work I’d done?

  ‘He didn’t say anything else. There was this strange atmosphere in the surgery. And eventually he silently handed me a prescription for tablets, with no explanation. I couldn’t make sense of any of it. But as we got up to leave I did pluck up the courage to ask a question.

  ‘I asked: “Doctor, can you tell me if the voices are real or in my imagination?”

  ‘“They are in your imagination,” he replied, and returned his gaze to the papers on his desk.

  ‘He said I’d be getting a letter from the hospital and it was important to attend the appointment.

  ‘We left the room and walked home in the dark evening (at least it feels dark to me now, how I remember it). I was defeated. When I got home with my tablets – Largactil – I asked Mum if they were the same as Dad’s. I had been going with Dad to the psychiatrist’s for years – to translate – from as young as nine or ten. I didn’t know he had schizophrenia, I wouldn’t have known what the word meant then, but I knew he was mentally ill, and that his medication was for mental illness. But Mum said my pills were different. I still checked Dad’s bottles of medicine though. And the labels said “chlorpromazine”. I thought she was right, that both the medication and my condition were different. But I know now that chlorpromazine and Largactil are the same thing.

  ‘So I started taking them, not knowing they were for schizophrenia. I didn’t know my name had been added to the ‘severely mentally ill register’. I found this out when I read through my medical records recently. It was a low dose compared to what I take now. By the summer holidays, I’d calmed down and the voices weren’t such a problem. Things began falling into place. I passed nine of my O-levels. I passed them all.

  ‘Then I entered sixth form to study for A-levels. Things began well – once I even surprised my chemistry teacher by solving an equation even the smartest girl in the class couldn’t solve and she asked me to explain it to the rest of the class. But that was to be my last achievement at school. I started going downhill when Bibi died. I’m not blaming her passing away for my problems but I do know that it was at that time that I gave in. Life suddenly felt meanin
gless. Nothing made any sense any more. I didn’t know why I was doing A-levels. I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a career.

  ‘What I didn’t realize was that these were symptoms of my illness … the symptoms were changing. I was suffering from what they call severe mental anxiety. Life became a nightmare again. The mental anxiety was even worse than the voices. I visited a child psychiatrist at New Cross Hospital and she changed the pills I was taking. She gave me a prescription for haloperidol and said it should calm me down.

  ‘It worked. But though I was given a small dose, I found it very strong and would find myself dozing off, in classes. In the mornings I’d wake up exhausted and run half the way to school because I was always late leaving the house, because I was always late getting out of bed. What surprises me now is that nobody, not my friends, not my teachers, ever questioned me or talked to me sympathetically about what was happening. There was no help or support. Also: why didn’t I ask for help?

  ‘But I stuck to haloperidol and got through two years of sixth form, hibernating in the common room in study periods or in my bedroom at home. I became very quiet and felt very alone. I completely lost myself to the illness at that time. I was a zombie. Drowsy. Withdrawn. Moody. Depressed. Nobody understood me, not even me.’

  10. Something Got Me Started

  I tell myself now that there were numerous logical reasons why I decided to write a family memoir soon after that appointment with Dad’s psychiatrist. It would be an organized, disciplined way of finding answers to the difficult questions that had been raised. I had started talking to Puli about her story and wanted to rescue her experience from oblivion. Apart from being part of the strategy to explain myself to my family, I realized that my family story was important in itself. It felt increasingly ludicrous spending time writing about strangers when there were more important subjects at home. It was a way of bringing the various aspects of my life together. It would be a way of forcing me to write that letter – sometimes it’s easier to be courageous when you have an audience. Making the letter a public act was a way of dragging my mother away from the Punjabi community into my world.

  But I also wonder whether I am reinventing what happened to suit me. Was it less a reasoned decision than a kind of panic attack? I can’t actually remember sitting down and going through the reasons for and against. Though I do recall asking Mum for her permission – calling her from a train, on my way to yet another interview.

  ‘What, like of one those story books that you’re always reading?’ she asked.

  ‘A bit like that.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to read about us?’

  ‘They might find it interesting.’

  ‘It’s not a very cheerful story. I wouldn’t want you to get stressed out.’

  ‘I won’t get stressed out,’ I said, having absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

  ‘Would it mean you’ll be around more?’

  ‘I’ll be around more. I’m thinking about going part-time at work.’ The idea was to quit writing the interviews taking a sideways glance at the world of celebrity, and the car reviews, which involved driving sideways down motorways, owing to my poor driving skills, and concentrate on the column I was writing which took a sideways glance at the world of business.

  ‘No problem.’ She sounded keen. ‘Maybe we can get you married off while you’re back …’

  ‘Muuummm.’ I had to say something. ‘Look, we need to come to an agreement.’ The man sitting opposite me, irritated by my Punjabi bellowing, switched seats. I continued in a whisper. ‘It’s going to drive me mad if you keep nagging me. How about this: you don’t mention the marriage thing and then, when I’m done, I’ll give the matter serious consideration.’

  ‘Okay, fine.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No nagging. No arrangements. Nothing.’

  ‘You know, I just want you to be happy …’

  I waited for the inevitable caveats, but the train passed through a tunnel and I lost reception before they arrived.

  And I realize now how I should have begun my research: I should have sat down with Mum and got her version of events, as she remembered them. But what I actually did was sit down with Dad – Mum was lying on the floor, listening to the news on Panjab Radio via the Sky digibox – and began by asking him about his childhood. The conversation went like this:

  Me: ‘Dad, I wanted to talk about your childhood – for this book thing …’

  Dad: ‘When I was small?’

  Me: ‘Yeah. You know – what you got up to when you were little.’

  Dad: ‘I used to work on the family farm.’

  Me: ‘How old were you when you started?’

  Dad: ‘Two.’

  Me: ‘You were working on the farm as a baby?’

  Mum (from the floor): ‘He means five or six. That’s when boys were put to work in those days. Your eldest bua told me your Dad would often be sent out with a calf to graze for a day. He didn’t go to school, you see.’

  Dad: ‘No, I was working before five.’ He moved to the lip of his armchair. ‘Look, your mother tells me not to talk to you about this … but you know God, he has a mother and a father … there are two people …’

  Mum: ‘Oi … sssshhh. Don’t talk rubbish … your son wants to know about your childhood, what you used to do.’

  Dad: ‘I used to ride to the farm on a bike.’

  Mum: ‘You can’t ride a bike.’

  Dad: ‘I can. I used to ride a bike to the farm. Buli got one when he got married.’

  Me: ‘Who’s Buli?’

  Dad: ‘My brother …’

  Mum: ‘Your thiya …’

  Me: ‘Oh.’

  Dad: ‘And then over here I used to ride with Shindi to Dudley.’

  Mum: ‘I don’t remember that. You didn’t have a bike.’

  Dad: ‘With Shindi, my friend who lived near the pub, remember?’

  Mum: ‘You didn’t.’

  Dad: ‘I did.’

  Me: ‘When was this?’

  Dad: ‘When I first came here.’

  Me: ‘When was that?’

  Dad: ‘1980…?’

  Mum: (laughing) ‘1980? It was 1969! Or 1968.’

  Dad: ‘And I used to lift weights. I was one of the strongest men in the country.’

  Again, I realize now what I should have done next: I should have sat down with Mum and got her version of events, as she remembered them. But instead, I resorted to stationery. Specifically: an 1800 x 1200mm professional dry-wipe magnetic whiteboard; a pack of 100 whiteboard cleaning wipes; five whiteboard dry-safe dry-wipe marker pens; and five 24mm round plastic-covered magnets. All in all, the order cost in excess of £100, and once I’d put the board up in my study in London – and shelled out another £100 for a man to re-plaster the bits of wall I’d demolished when putting it up – I felt ready to begin.

  There was logic to the idea, beyond it just being a nifty method of procrastination, and a reversion to a penchant for stationery which probably goes back to that Barclays Bank folder, or to my time as a stock room monitor at Woden Juniors. What I figured was that with there being so much confusion about the basic facts of my parents’ story, what I had to do, before sitting down with Mum and getting her version of events, as she remembered them, was to assemble an outline of the basic facts on to an 1800 x 1200mm professional dry-wipe magnetic whiteboard. And the thing to begin with, I reasoned, was a family tree.

  I expected this to be a simple task: what could be easier than laying out the relationships that have framed my entire life? Besides, the precision of Punjabi family titles makes them easier to navigate than most. We don’t just have ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’, for instance, but types of uncle and aunt: your dad’s sister is a ‘bua’ (her husband a ‘phupre’), your mum’s brother is a ‘mama’ (his wife a ‘mami’), your dad’s younger brother is a ‘chacha’ (his wife a ‘chachi’), your dad’s older brother is a ‘thiya’ (his wife a
‘thiyi’), your mum’s sister is a ‘masee’ (her husband a ‘masur’) and so on. However, it gradually emerged that the titles we used as a family didn’t necessarily correspond to the relationships – Shindo, for instance, my favourite ‘bua’, who always bought us packs of Chewits when she visited and always pressed a pound note into my hand on birthdays, turned out not to be a relation at all. Meanwhile, my mother’s references to ‘nani’, the word for maternal grandmother, were in fact to her mother, and my deceased grandfather, the man responsible for the whole mess on my father’s side of the family, was in fact called ‘chacha’, by my mother, father and those of his thirteen children who survived.*

  Such quirks wouldn’t have been so problematic if my relatives’ proper names allowed them to be identified, but not only do all my relatives, like all Sikhs, share common surnames – ‘Singh’ for men and ‘Kaur’ for women – but many of the men and women share first names too: my mother’s first name, Surjit, is, for instance, shared by several of my uncles. At times, sifting through the list of names provided by Mum was like trying to sort through the family mailbox of George Foreman, the two-time world boxing champion who named each of his five sons ‘George’, and one of his five daughters ‘Georgetta’. Also many nicknames did not correspond in any clear way to the official names: Mum’s nickname, ‘Jito’, makes some sense, but Dad’s – ‘Cugi’ – doesn’t. A process I expected to take a morning – a process during which I learnt I’d a staggering fifty-four first cousins and half a dozen uncles/aunts I’d never heard of – took over a week and covered three-quarters of the space on my 1800 x 1200mm professional dry-wipe magnetic whiteboard.

  Not that I needed much space for my second task: a chronology of key events. Now I didn’t actually expect this bit to be easy, as, still not having sat down with Mum and got her version of events, as she remembered them, I didn’t actually know what some of these key events were, and I’d had enough difficulty constructing a chronology of events for my own lifetime. Recalling the date of my brother’s wedding, for instance, took three telephone calls. ‘I think it was around the time that Michael Jackson brought out Dangerous,’ was how he remembered it eventually, to his wife’s audible outrage. But assembling dates for key events in my parents’ lives went beyond being ‘not easy’. It turned out to be impossible. Not only do my parents have no date of birth – Mum’s is simply down as 1950 on her passport, while my father has three different dates of birth, all from 1950, in various official documents – they have no marriage date either. My mother, consulting an old notebook, initially gave me the date of 17 December 1967. But using the advanced journalism skills which have enabled me to exclusively reveal that Gillian Anderson is pretty, that the Aston Martin DB9 is nice to drive and that Bernard Matthews is beginning to resemble one of his own turkeys (in other words, I looked at Mum’s passport), I worked out that this couldn’t be right, as Mum didn’t land in Britain until fifteen months after this date – on 16 March 1969 – and one of the few certainties about my parents’ wedding is that it took place in England. When I put this to Mum, she sighed and said it was possible the date she’d given me was wrong. She’d taken it down from some official documents at some point, but couldn’t remember what these documents were. She may have mis-transcribed the date, she said. Or it may even have been that the person who filled out the document had purposely given an incorrect date to the authorities – claiming, for some reason or another, that my parents were married on this date when in fact they were only engaged.