The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  I subsequently became a little obsessed with the matter of this wedding date. Maybe because a journalist will always prefer inaccuracy to ambiguity, or maybe because I was at some level scared of sitting down with Mum and getting her version of events, as she remembered them, I wanted to find out when it was, or at least take an educated stab at it, but with Mum only able to estimate that the wedding occurred ‘about a fortnight or maybe three weeks’ after her arrival in Britain on 16 March 1969, and Dad unable to recall even in which decade it happened, all I could do was narrow down the probable dates to: Saturday 29 March 1969, Sunday 30 March 1969, Saturday 5 April 1969 and Sunday 6 April 1969.

  For reasons I can’t justify, I spent an entire morning at a library in London looking up each of these dates in The Times – did I expect to find a wedding announcement? – and eventually settled on Sunday 6 April 1969 as a guestimate. I picked the date because it was an Easter Sunday – new beginnings and all that; and because it was a beautiful spring day – warm and sunny in Birmingham at midday – and felt a brief glow of satisfaction writing it down on the chronology section of my whiteboard. And then promptly lost the little focus I had left.

  Having discovered several stories about Wolverhampton while flicking through The Times – and having always found books easier to get on with than people – and still unable to summon the courage to sit down with Mum and get her version of events, as she remembered them, it occurred to me that I could probably find things out about my parents’ background from books and newspapers. And so I spent two weeks finding out what Wolverhampton was like when my parents arrived.

  There turned out to be a great deal to read about because Wolverhampton was, at the time, enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame as the first town in Britain to be affected by mass immigration. Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham on 20 April 1968 had made immigration a subject of national debate and, since the speech mentioned racial problems in Wolverhampton, and because Powell was MP for Wolverhampton, the town became a focal point for discussion. In the year before my parents were married, the town witnessed marches both for and against Powell, was the subject of several TV documentaries, countless news reports and a devastating feature about racial tension in the Observer that ran under the headline of ‘TOWN THAT HAS LOST ITS REASON’. On 5 March 1969, less than a fortnight before Mum arrived, the Parliamentary Select Committee of Race Relations and Immigration met in the town hall.

  After reading the entirety of the minutes, I switched to books about the rural Punjab in the fifties, spending three weeks sifting through titles such as The Punjab Peasant and Caste and Communication in an Indian Village. This didn’t turn out to be a total waste of time. At the end of each day at the British Library, I would fasten my notes on to my 1800 x 1200mm professional dry-wipe magnetic whiteboard and then at the end of each week I would take them up to Wolverhampton and ask Mum and Dad whether life was really like that for them as children. Through a complex system of ticks and crosses, confirmation and repudiation, I found out things about their lives I probably wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.

  For instance, I learnt that Dad was brought up in a world where young boys got given one item of clothing a year – a white kurta – made from cotton harvested from the family’s own farm, and a pair of shoes every two years, which he would sometimes carry to prevent them from wearing; and though his father had a relatively large amount of land, there were times when he went hungry. During the summer months in particular, his family switched to a diet of Lenten simplicity. At first, cow’s milk replaced buffalo milk. Then mustard oil replaced ghee. Then chapattis were eaten dry. At the worst point – this detail my father remembers most bitterly – they took their tea with powdered milk.

  He was, as he had said, working on a farm from a young age, about five, and by the sound of things he was a difficult child. Sometimes he refused to bathe: when the stench became intolerable, his siblings would hold him down on a munja and wash him, though Dad would dart off to the nearest field to roll around in the dirt afterwards. When Baba, my grandfather, ‘Chacha’ to everyone else, who had taught himself to read by scratching letters in the soil, suggested school, Dad refused again, and couldn’t be persuaded to stay in the classroom even with offers of sugar cane. Eventually my father announced that he would go to school if he could go and live with Pindor – his elder married sister, who was twelve years older than him, and who now lives up the road from my parents – and was sent to stay with her new family. But once there, he refused to go to school again, and was sent back to the home village of Bilga to a lonely life at the khuh – his father busy, his brothers often at school or otherwise occupied.

  By the time he was eight, his days consisted of chopping bhusa for the bullocks, scattering manure for the crops, milking cows for the family and engaging in the perpetual battle to irrigate the land. He spent a good portion of his teenage years living not in the village home but on the khuh, the outbuildings on the farm, sometimes with his father and sometimes his brother Pyara, but mostly alone, his sisters, and, occasionally, his mother ferrying meals from a mile or two away. It wasn’t all work: sometimes, young men at khuhs in the area, free from family scrutiny, would gather to chat, smoke hookah (and opium, if so inclined), drink strong tea (and moonshine, if so inclined), and, if a day of chopping, scattering, milking and engaging in the perpetual battle to irrigate the land hadn’t exhausted them entirely, to wrestle (and play kabaddi, if so inclined). But many of Dad’s recollections are dark: he says he often spent the pitch-black nights terrorized by fear of cobras and vipers and sightings of the spirits known to roam the land. Could these have been delusions?

  It was fascinating to find this out. As a child my eyes would glaze over whenever India was mentioned – I found the stories almost physically painful to withstand. But now I couldn’t get enough. But while absorbed, I still hadn’t really got to the point – finding out what happened to Mum and Dad when they got married – and I think I still wouldn’t have got to the point, had Mum not, on one of those visits home, in contravention of our agreement, presented me with a photograph of a prospective bride. The girl was arranged in the classic arranged marriage pose: standing in the corner of a room next to a rubber plant; her hands clasped in front of her; a chuni draped backwards over her shoulders. The side-on pose suggested the possibility of some kind of facial disfigurement out of view. The large, muscular hands suggested a history of lifting heavy objects. In spite of myself, I did what all men do with prospective mates: I mentally undressed her, tugging at the drawstring of her salwar, unhooking her kameez, probing her (pot) belly, until – aggggggggh! – I remembered where I was and yelped.

  ‘Okay, okay. No need to shout.’

  ‘Mum – we had a deal, remember.’

  ‘Yes, yes …’

  ‘No marriage stuff until I finish the book.’

  ‘Very well, yes. It’s just that I want you …’

  ‘… to be happy, I know…’

  ‘… and for you to marry …’

  ‘… a nice girl who is the right religion, I know …’

  ‘… and the right caste, the right age …’

  She took back the picture and looked at it longingly, in the way an exhausted executive might admire a picture of a luxury spa in Tuscany. ‘Of course, I didn’t know what your father looked like until after we were engaged.’

  I ran a hand through my hair. ‘Really?’

  ‘You know you can ask me about what happened. You said you wanted to talk about it. But you haven’t asked.’

  ‘Let’s do it tomorrow.’ I was reaching for the door handle.

  ‘Tomorrow will be hectic. The kids are coming. What’s wrong with now?’ There seemed to be lots of things wrong with now: not least the stationery. My dictaphone, lying in the bedroom upstairs, needed new batteries; I’d left my best pen at home in London; the paper in the A4 pad I’d brought down wasn’t of a good enough grade … ‘I’ve thought about telling you for age
s but sometimes I’m not sure you want to know any more. Am I wrong?’

  The honest answer was no. The dishonest answer was yes. I went for something in between. ‘Hmmfgh.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened, hunna.’

  There was a cup of tea and a Penguin bar waiting for me when I came back down to the living room from fetching my notepad in my bedroom. Mum sat on the floor, and I moved to a sofa on the other side of the living room, sitting parallel to her, having found that conversations of any kind of intimacy are more comfortable without eye contact, put the TV on (mute) so there was something to look at if things got awkward – there was a programme about polar bears on BBC2 – and then feigned a sudden interest in the wrapper of my Penguin bar, a sudden interest which revealed that it wasn’t actually a Penguin bar at all, but a ‘Sealbar’. So many groceries in my parents’ house, purchased from various discount stores, are like this. What I thought was a box of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies turned out to be a box of ‘Pip’s Crispy Rice’, and the bottles of Domestos in the bathroom had turned out to be ‘Steritos’.

  ‘So, tell me: what do you want to know?’

  ‘Tell me …’ I put my tape recorder next to the chocolate bar. ‘Tell me … what happened when your marriage was arranged. What did you know about Dad?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Fifteen. Sixteen maybe. My mother told me he came from a good family, that he was going to inherit a good amount of land and that he lived in a village nearby – Bilga. Only four miles away from my village of Rurka. She said she would be able to take food to my father at the khuh in the mornings, walk the four miles to see me, and, God willing, my sons, and still be back in time to take food to the khuh in the evening.’

  ‘Did she ask you for your opinion on the … match?’

  ‘Ha!’ I’d said something stupid. ‘In those days children were no more consulted about marriage than a bullock asked where it would like to graze. Anyway, I trusted my parents. All that mattered was that they were pleased.’

  ‘Did you really not even see his photograph?’

  ‘Eventually, but when the marriage was fixed, they asked if I wanted to see a picture of the boy. And I said no.’

  And there you have Mum’s moral standards: she was brought up to believe that a person who could not respect their parents could not respect God, to such a degree that she even accepted her permanent separation from them with stoicism.

  ‘Did the arrangement come as a surprise?’

  ‘Not at all. Marriage was the point of everything for girls then. We didn’t have the opportunities that girls have nowadays – careers and jobs. Marriage was the meaning of life.’

  Mum elaborated and I listened. Among the many surprises of that conversation was that I’d managed – more or less – to shut up. My interviews at work are invariably punctuated with sycophancy, smarminess, desperate attempts to ingratiate and inappropriate laughter, and the longest I can usually get through any conversation with Mum without screaming in frustration is three minutes. But I was restraint itself that evening. It was almost as if I had reverted to being a child – those nights when, Dad snoring away in the corner of the middle bedroom at 60 Prosser Street, Mum would put me to sleep with tales of saints and gurus and talking birds and jungle adventures.

  She explained that almost every task she’d been given, from making cow dung cakes for cooking fuel at seven, to embroidering at eleven, had been suggested with a view to preparing her for the prospect of getting married to a strange man and moving to a strange home. Even her parents’ decision to send her to school, when they themselves had no education, when her father worried that education would make children ashamed of being farmers, when her elder brothers were denied an education on the additional grounds of expense, was framed in terms of marriage. Her mother, whom I only have a vague memory of meeting in India when I was three or four, put it to her father, whom I cannot remember ever meeting, that if the first of their two daughters could read and count, she would be a more economical housewife and would be able to write back from her in-laws. Four years later, the decision to cease her schooling was also framed in terms of marriage. It was at that stage – she was just embarking on English lessons – that her girls’ school was due to be merged with the boys’ school, and the family decided to discontinue her schooling, worried that being seen with boys would damage her marriage prospects.

  ‘It was never part of the plan to go to Britain,’ she added, as back in Wolverhampton a fat ginger cat brushed past the patio doors. ‘At the time we were fixed up, your baba, your dad’s dad, was in Bilayat. And two of your dad’s sisters were settled here with their husbands – your Bero bua and Pindor bua both came in the mid-sixties. Your baba was staying with Pindor in Wolverhampton. At first, there was a vague suggestion that your bibi – your Dad’s mother – was going to join them, but no one else. He hated it in Britain. The cold, the long hours in factories.’

  ‘Why did he stay? He had lots of land in India, didn’t he?’

  ‘Ha!’ Mum laughed. ‘Lots of land in India just means lots of headache.’

  A brief lesson on the economic realities of farming in the Punjab followed. Yes, Baba, as an only child, had inherited a large tract of land – three times the land that his cousins had inherited. But three times more land meant three times more taxes, three times more work, and a thrice more intense battle with the difficulties of droughts, floods, crop failures, locusts, sickness, rust in the wheat, moneylenders charging exorbitant interest, dying bullocks, carts needing new wheels, new plants drying up, unsprouted seedlings shrivelling in the earth, poor monsoons, excessive monsoons, animals drowning in the monsoon, blacksmiths charging exorbitant rates for mending ploughs and cotton carders who kept more than their share of the cotton. Besides, Mum explained, it was good for the farm if members of the family emigrated: the more of them earning a prosperous living in England, the more money they could send back to buy new land and employ workers.

  ‘But after the engagement we heard your baba had applied to have the whole family join him … all those allowed to join him anyway … his children. They included your chacha and your Rani bua. They weren’t sure if your dad would qualify – his age was vague and borderline … but you know how it goes …’

  ‘Sometimes it can be handy having a vague date of birth …’

  ‘No one in the village, not even the family relations next door, your grandfather’s cousins, knew that they were going to Britain. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. They were worried that someone might report them, or they might attract nazar. You know what Indians are like …’

  ‘Paranoid …’

  ‘… Paranoid. But then they had a point too. You couldn’t trust anyone in those days – brother betrayed brother for an inch of land in the Punjab.’

  Mum’s family – her mother, her eldest brother, an uncle and the matchmaker – went to Bilga to visit my father the night before he was due to try his chance at getting through immigration. I imagined the tableau as Mum described it. Four of them sitting on munjas placed against a wall: a tall, elderly woman with delicate features and a shawl over her shoulders – her mother; a man in his twenties sharing the same fine features and wearing a large pastel-hued turban – her eldest brother, Gurdev; a middle-aged man wearing a white turban and sporting an extravagant moustache – an uncle; and a plump, moon-faced woman munching on a ladoo – the matchmaker. On the floor, the gifts they had brought along: a crate of apples; a box of sweets; and sections of brightly coloured silk and cotton with gold mohra scattered across them. Mum remembers overhearing her mother speaking tensely to her eldest brother when they returned.

  ‘I worry the family are so different from ours. The boy’s brothers, they like drinking, you can see it in their eyes, the mother-in-law – you can see she is sly, and the boy himself … he looks … simple to me. He’s going to pardes, he’s marrying our daughter, but he didn’t utter a word to u
s. He didn’t stop playing with that radio all evening. Did you notice?’

  Mum’s elder brother Gurdev hadn’t noticed. He had spent the second visit as he had spent the initial visit, when the marriage was arranged – having a lively conversation with my father’s boozy brothers.

  ‘Naniji,’ he’d said. ‘You know what I think? I think you think too much.’

  Going to Britain threw things out of kilter for Mum. Having watched her three brothers get married, she’d expected a gap of six months or so between the engagement and the wedding. Instead fifteen months passed between the kurmai and the biah. She’d expected not to meet any of her in-laws until the muklava. Instead, one of her future sisters-in-law – another of my father’s sisters – joined her at home in the village of Rurka a month before the wedding. She had been arranged in marriage to a man in England, and it was thought they should travel together. And then there was the stress and upset of travelling to Bilayat itself … a journey from which there was no return.