The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  I wanted to know everything about this journey, what it felt like to go from a world where it was taboo for women to reveal ankles or arms, to a world where miniskirts were a common sight and couples kissed openly on the streets. I wanted to know what it was like to see a white man for the first time, hear Elvis for the first time, eat in a restaurant for the first time, see a plane for the first time, watch TV for the first time, realize there was poverty in Britain, as there was in India, for the first time. But not only has Mum still not done some of these things – she has never drunk alcohol, had her hair cut or been to a restaurant in Britain, for instance – the grief of leaving everything she’d ever known seems to have blotted out her memory of the journey. All I got were glimpses, snapshots: the sudden and overwhelming feeling of sickness when the moment for departure arrived; her father standing next to the bullock cart at the bus station in Jalandhar, declining to go any further (he was admitted into hospital with chest pains afterwards); the meal of rice and dhal she couldn’t face in the airport; a future brother-in-law half-joking: ‘I can’t see her surviving the journey’; her mother insisting over and over that she wouldn’t miss her family once she had a home of her own; the humiliation of having to be shown how to use the toilet on the plane; the first blast of refrigerated London air; the unexpected kindness of the translator in immigration who had seen it all before … ‘Will you recognize your husband?’

  ‘Did you see Dad at the airport?’

  ‘Yes, he was there – standing at the back, with the whole family. They’d all come because his sister was coming with me, remember? But we didn’t talk.’

  Of course. The Punjabi aversion to public intimacy between the sexes.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then we went in different directions. Your father went back to Grays [in Essex], where he’d been living with your aunt Bero and your uncle Phuman. I went to Wolverhampton with the rest of the family. Number 26 Newport Street.’

  ‘What was the house like?’

  Again, I was hunting for detail. But all I got was: ‘It was cold. Coal fires. Outside loo.’

  ‘How many people were living there?’

  ‘Let me see. There was your aunt Pindor and uncle Malkit, your bibi and baba, and also, Rani, your chacha Kashmir, Surinder, Billa, Bebe, Buboo, Kuldip …’

  ‘Twelve people?’

  ‘It was cramped. But it’s amazing what you can deal with when you have to. There were some terraced houses nearby that had up to twenty people in them. There would be beds in every room, upstairs, downstairs, and sometimes men would use the beds in shifts, according to whether they worked the night or day shift at the factories.’

  ‘Did you go out during those few weeks?’

  Mum bit her lip.

  I desperately wanted her to remember something, to compare her first impressions with those in a piece that was published in the Express & Star around the time of her arrival, in which a white female reporter called Valerie James had, in a quaint journalistic experiment that even the Daily Mail would balk at today, blackened herself up, donned a sari and walked around town to describe what it was like to be an Asian woman in the Black Country.

  ‘A small boy whistles derisively and laughs as you pass him in an empty street … a man turns curiously when he sees you climb into a taxi … At a bus stop four girls walk abreast down the pavement towards you. Chattering, they surround you for a moment … Workmen who call out to every female between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five are silent. But an Indian youth hisses quietly at you from a square-side seat. Brown-skinned men and women single you out in a crowd. But a white woman’s glance slides uneasily away when you meet her gaze. Most people are shyly polite. Some people are hostile. Some, you find yourself noticing with gratitude, are friendly … An Englishman bumped into me. He didn’t apologize. But two other white people, a man and a woman, hovered to help me pick up scattered parcels. White people were kindly but reserved. Service felt slower … in the seven short hours I spent as one, I found enough evidence of prejudice from my English compatriots to realize that an Indian girl’s lot isn’t an entirely pleasant one.’

  But again, no such luck.

  ‘I don’t think I went outside in those first few weeks.’ Pause. ‘I was in the amanat of the groom’s family and they probably felt they had to guard me against mishaps. The men used to go to work early in the morning – your granddad and uncle Malkit worked in a foundry – your uncle Malkit worked at the Qualcast factory …’

  ‘He worked there for twenty-five years, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. People don’t know what hard work is nowadays. Your baba worked very hard too. He was in his sixties when he started, and worked for eight years unofficially after retirement. He was in his seventies and doing heavy foundry work. Your bua was pregnant with twins when I came. I stayed in the house there till our wedding.’

  ‘Our wedding…’ It was strange to hear the words come out of Mum’s mouth. I’d never heard Mum or Dad talk about it before.

  ‘What kind of … wedding was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing like weddings are now. You know, people would get married in school halls, community centres and houses and there wouldn’t be more than a little meal afterwards. Sometimes the bride and groom would be sat down with a couple of guests in someone’s living room and read a passage that vaguely resembled the lavaan from a gutka, and that was it.’ Mum laughed again. She laughs quite often, Mum.

  ‘Was yours like that?’

  ‘Not quite. We had use of the Cannock Road gurdwara.’ Odd. We went to that temple at least once a week for decades, my two sisters were married there, I went there on every birthday, I had Punjabi lessons there, we slept nights there during akand paths, it was where Mum abandoned our cats, whenever she thought we had too many (the implication was that somehow it was less of a sin to abandon animals in the vicinity of a temple), I could remember it more vividly than our old house – and yet no one had ever once mentioned that it was where Mum and Dad had got married.

  ‘And we had a priest reading the lavaan from a full copy of the Guru Granth Sahib.’

  ‘Were there any photos taken?’

  ‘No.’

  Actually, there was at least one picture taken. A few months after this conversation Mum visited India and went through her deceased brother’s trunk; at the bottom she found a parcel of documents, in the middle of which she found a picture of her wedding.

  ‘Was there a milni?’*

  ‘No. Who was there to do a milni with? None of my family were in the country. And in those days, the couple didn’t walk around the Guru Granth Sahib clockwise four times like they do now.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘They just sat there and stood up at the end.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yes … And the thing is…’ I could see from her reflection in the TV screen that she had the end of her shawl to her mouth ‘… the thing is that at the end the ceremony … your father didn’t get up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your father didn’t get up. From the altar. He just sat there.’

  ‘He just sat there?’

  ‘Your uncle, your phupre Malkit, had to lift him up.’

  Jesus. The equivalent at a white wedding would be the best man having to prompt the groom into saying ‘I do’.

  More omissions followed. There was no banquet, just some chapattis in the temple after the ceremony – the kind you get if you drop into any gurdwara on any Sunday morning. There were no bidai songs to mark my mother’s departure to her new home. And after the besuited men had returned from sinking a few celebratory pints in the Lewisham Arms, none of the bride’s brothers appeared to push the couple’s car away in the direction of Grays as a sign of their love and support.

  Mum said it was a relief to arrive in Essex. Although there were hardly any Asians in the town, unlike in Wolverhampton, the terraced house that was to be her home was less cramped than Newport Street – four adults and three c
hildren sharing the same space; she was grateful not to be living with the mother-in-law – like all Punjabi women, she’d been instructed to expect her husband’s mother to be cruel – and my Bero bua, who poured mustard oil at the pillars of the door to welcome the newlyweds, and who had no family nearby, seemed pleased to have them.

  On arriving, Mum was sat down in the living room and Bero began the process of relieving her of the wedding paraphernalia. First the large red veil that had been concealing her from view was removed, revealing a parting painted vermilion. Next to come off were her bangles, which had tinkled whenever she moved. She’d been stripped down to her heavy red and gold embroidered tunic by the time my father, who had all day been no more than a presence to her right, occasionally a violet shadow at her feet, strode into the room.

  I tried again to imagine the scene: my mother looking as she does in her earliest picture, used in her first passport – a sparrow-thin, pale girl of sixteen or seventeen with a red bindi between her eyebrows, an embroidered chuni framing a long face with soft eyes, a heavy gold pendant hanging off a gold chain around her neck, a smaller pendant hanging off a delicate chain running down her parting, red and white ivory bangles encircling hands patterned with henna – and my father looking as he does in his early passport picture, the large brow, those sad eyes, the immaculate quiff. I asked Mum whether that was the first time she got a proper look at Dad.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Did he look different from what you expected?’

  ‘—’

  ‘You must have seen his picture by then? You know the photograph – it’s in his passport.’

  ‘—’

  ‘You know the one. I’ve got a copy of it somewhere. His hair is hilarious …?’

  A lengthy pause. On the TV a polar bear was disembowelling a seal, while beyond the patio doors, dusk was falling. In the dimming light I could make out the shape of the fir trees I had planted at the back of the garden with Chacha. It was the last thing we had done together before he passed away, and we had put them up because the kids in the house opposite would climb the apple tree at the back of their garden to hurl racist abuse at my parents as they mowed the lawn. The firs had grown quickly, and you couldn’t see the apple tree any more.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t remember what he looked like,’ Mum said eventually. ‘All I remember is that he came up to me and slapped me across the face. Your uncle Phuman came running into the room, shouting, “What do you think you’re doing?” … Your dad didn’t say anything at first … But eventually he pointed at where I was sitting and said: “Look where she is sitting. That’s Phuman’s place on the settee. Doesn’t she realize?”…’

  11. You Got It (The Right Stuff)

  The biggest cliché and most fundamental truth about madness is that, like beauty, it is all in the eye of the beholder. Something considered crazy by one bunch of people at one time might be considered normal by another bunch of people at another time, and, actually, my mother’s obsession with marrying me off is a good illustration: it may seem bizarre viewed through Western eyes, especially given what she went through with her own arranged marriage, but is unremarkable within the context of Punjabi society.

  Sikhs, you see, are – and there’s no better word for it – crazy for matrimony. For people of my parents’ generation in particular, a wedding is more than just an occasion at which two people agree to commit to one another in a spirit of mindless optimism. It is an occasion at which two families are united for ever, an expression of a mother and father’s devotion to their child, an exposition of izzat (honour) – that most intense of Punjabi feelings – and the fulfilment of a sacred duty. The numbers tell the story: Sikhs have the second highest rate of marriage of all religious groups in Britain (59.2 per cent, after Hindus at 60.8 per cent), the lowest proportion of people who have never married (27.8 per cent)* and the average wedding apparently now costs in the region of £25,000.†

  Before you even open your bejewelled invitation to the auspishous (sic) occasion of Mr Singh’s matrimumy (sic) to Miss Kaur – the increased investment doesn’t seem to have eradicated the problem of spelling mistakes – you know you’ll soon be spending three days at a five-star hotel/private beach somewhere, watching the groom arrive by elephant/on horseback, and being filmed belching your way through a twelve-course dinner by a camera crew whose last project was Brokeback Mountain. A wedding I recently attended at a swish hotel in Manchester even featured a bagpiper, who appeared in full Highland dress at the beginning of the milni, to give a full and hearty rendition of ‘Loch Lomond’.

  For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. I’d been encouraged to drink what felt like a litre of rum the night before, and the day before that I’d driven my family across the country in a minibus, each of my nine passengers managing to find a unique way to irritate, so was feeling psychologically vulnerable. And then, noticing that everyone but me had greeted the bagpiper with the kind of nonchalance London commuters reserve for a delayed train, I thought I must have missed something. Maybe the bride or the groom had a Scottish connection? But conversations with relatives nearby revealed they hadn’t. The closest thing to an explanation to transpire was that ‘Bagpiper’ was a popular whisky brand in the Punjab, and that the groom’s family were enthusiastic drinkers.

  The day continued in this surreal vein – it was as if the hotel had given the family a list of every conceivable wedding option imaginable, for every ethnicity under the sun, and the family had ticked every box – and when the couple, who had only met a few times before their bethrothal, had their first dance to ‘I Will Always Love You’, I couldn’t help guffawing and remarking on the irony to my patient brother, who, worn down by my incessant moaning, finally snapped, exclaiming: ‘Why do you have to analyse everything?!’

  He was right. I’d missed the point. Like Bollywood movies, Sikh weddings aren’t meant to be analysed: they are simply exercises in escapism and showing off, a mindless, albeit heartfelt, amalgamation of influences from a variety of cultures. Not that understanding this makes them easier to endure. I find weddings, in general, onerous, for the compulsion to have ‘fun’, for the persistent refusal of any of the pretty girls to flirt or even acknowledge me in any way whatsoever. But Sikh weddings, with their mindlessness and extravagant length, with the way they require you to sit for hours with a bunch of men talking about the buy-to-let-market, are agonizing. So much so that I just don’t attend them any more.*

  Unfortunately, I had no choice in attending weddings as a child. And, if anything, weddings were even more arduous then, for they invariably meant three days of being hugged by moustachioed uncles with alcoholic breath, having to sit cross-legged in silence during impenetrable ceremonies which could go on for five hours at a time and having to share toys with tedious younger cousins while interesting elder cousins went round doing cool things like trying to derail the trains that ran on the tracks at the end of our back yard.

  I was going to say that the single worst thing was being forced to dance to bhangra, a genre of music for which I’d developed no enthusiasm, despite being force-fed it for up to fourteen hours a time at the factory. But actually, there was something even worse: being forced to watch a video of myself trying to dance to bhangra a matter of days after each wedding, my family pointing and laughing at my lack of rhythm and coordination. When it is done well, watching someone perform bhangra can be mesmerizing, but when I did it, it looked as if I was being electrocuted while trying to simultaneously unscrew two light bulbs.

  Maybe the weddings wouldn’t have seemed so bad if there weren’t so many of them. If I wasn’t at one, I felt as if I was being dragged along by my mother as she prepared for another – the shopping trips began months in advance – or being forced to watch a video, reliving the agony in real time. And when I dared to hope the frequency was declining, it became fashionable for couples to have separate English-style registry office ceremonies as well, which doubled the number of weekends
lost to betrothals. And then, just as I dared to hope I was running out of cousins to get married, cousins I didn’t realize I even had started appearing from India as well, bearing gifts of sugar cane, asking to be shown the whereabouts of the nearest porn shop and announcing they wanted to be married too.

  Watching these Indian cousins get married at least had a certain Challenge Anneka, against-the-clock appeal. They were often in England ‘on holiday’ or ‘seeking asylum’ – though sometimes they would admit they’d entered the country illegally – and because the one thing that would legitimize and/or extend their stay was marriage to someone with a British passport, the prolonged and exhausting process of arranged marriage would have to be telescoped. As soon as they made it through Customs and Immigration, or as soon as they were liberated by their human trafficker of choice into an alleyway in Dudley, and before they had even got used to Western customs such as not spitting on the living room floor, arranged marriage aunties were scouring the land for potential spouses, their criteria being that the person be a British Sikh of the appropriate sex and caste and be willing to get married very quickly.

  In fact, these were the only criteria, which meant these visitors, who often managed to combine an intense desire to stay in Britain with sustained whining about the shortcomings of the UK versus India, represented a matrimonial opportunity for those lingering in the relegation zone of the arranged marriage league table: the over-25; the obese; or the offspring of those parents who were most concerned about Westernization and wanted their children to marry Indian spouses to keep alive their traditions of religiosity, illiteracy, alcoholism, manual labour and domestic violence. Some of my relatives would eventually join this group, but when it came to arranging Puli’s marriage, when she was nineteen, the family went for a British-born boy from Coventry.