The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  It felt odd being on the other side of the fence. Until then, organizing weddings had been like voting Tory: we endured the horrendous consequences of other people doing it, but never did it ourselves. But I accepted the development as another change in a time of change: the eighties were turning into the nineties; the two Germanys were being reunified; Margaret Thatcher was on her way out; I was at secondary school; and we had by then moved out of our terraced house in the centre of Wolverhampton into a semi-detached on the outskirts, where our Pindor bua and Chacha had already moved to.

  In the end, Mum hadn’t been persuaded to move by my complaints about sleeping arrangements, or by an intensification in the infestation of cockroaches, or by the damp caused by the shoddy workmanship of the Indian builders who had ‘renovated’ the house, or by the increasingly violent domestic disputes of our neighbours, or by the favourable conditions in the property market, or by the fact that we were the only bit of the extended family left in Park Village, or by the brick that the white man from number 58 threw at our living room window when, after two decades, he had finally had enough of the whirring of my mother’s sewing-machine. In the end, it took an inner city riot to convince her of the need to move.

  As with so many defining moments in the life of my family, I missed it. I woke up on the morning of 25 May 1989, after an unexpectedly refreshing night’s sleep – unexpected because I was by then making my unhappiness about sleeping arrangements felt by sleeping in a duvet on the floor of my parents’ bedroom – went downstairs to fix myself a bowl of Weetabix, moved to the TV that my siblings were huddled around and slowly realized that the mob of lunatics depicted throwing petrol bombs at police officers in flame-resistant suits and riot helmets were doing so in the housing estate down the road.

  ‘Senior policemen fear that violence associated with the sale of crack may erupt in Britain after several hundred youths in Wolverhampton rioted early yesterday morning. The riot started after West Midlands drug squad officers raided the Travellers’ Rest public house in Heath Town, where cannabis and crack supplies worth £1,500 were seized and twenty people arrested.’

  My immediate reaction was: what the hell is crack? And after my brother had explained, I couldn’t help wondering which other mundane nouns were going to turn out to be narcotics. After ‘glue’ and ‘crack’, were ‘door’ and ‘carpet’ going to be next?

  There was a surprising amount of interest in the house given it was infested by cockroaches, encircled by semi-feral cats, damp-ridden and now on the edge of a riot area. And after a number of visits to building societies, the arrangement of various bridging loans with relatives, and a great deal of breast-beating from my mother, who made it known she had only borrowed money from a bank for the first time in her life for the sake of my brother and me, we were piling our furniture into the back of the factory owner’s Volkswagen van, as my mother surreptitiously abandoned Pussy and the ironically named Lucky on a nearby industrial estate.

  ‘No more mice, no more need for dadnia cats,’ Mum pronounced as I wept.

  The Indians can be a cruel race at times.

  The arrangement of Puli’s marriage was comparatively straightforward: a family acquaintance telephoned Mum, saying she knew of a good boy from a good family who might make a good match for my sister; Mum, Dad, Chacha and Chachi went to visit the boy and his family at their home in Coventry; and then some time afterwards they returned the visit.

  ‘We’ve got to move with the times,’ Mum pronounced. ‘We can’t just marry the girl off to any old pagal. She must meet the boy and see if she likes him.’

  I saw them arrive from the double-glazed window of the new bedroom I shared with my father, next to the new bedroom my mother now shared with my two sisters. There were five of them packed into a red Ford Orion and they made two attempts at parking on our steep drive before pulling up, rather sheepishly, against the kerb. When the rear doors were flung open, it was clear why they had struggled with the gradient: the two women on the back seat were heffalumps who had not only eaten all the pies, but all the pakoras too. The prospective groom, a round-faced youth trying to hide behind an out-of-date mullet, an over-long fringe and weekend stubble, and the prospective groom’s father, a clean-shaven man wearing a sky blue turban, looked cartoonishly slight next to them. I tried to imagine the quartet as a family, watching fireworks with them at Diwali, sharing one of our two Christmas Day dinners with them, but couldn’t make the mental leap.

  The atmosphere in what the estate agent had puzzlingly called a ‘breakfast kitchen’ – what made it particularly suited to the first meal of the day? – was nervous, as my siblings and Chacha’s four children swapped first impressions of the prospective groom and mimicked the fat women waddling into the house. There was a dispute about who should take the first tray of tea and biscuits into the living room, where the adults had gathered. Puli – more sombre than the rest of us, presumably because she was on the brink of being married off to a man she’d never met before – excused herself on the grounds that she’d been instructed to make an appearance at a specific time. Bindi, who was at this stage working at a branch of Safeways as a cashier – more sombre than the rest of us, presumably because she was probably beginning to realize that she would be in the same position as Puli in a year’s time – excused herself on the grounds that she might be mistaken for Puli. My cousins were too young. So it was down to me or my brother, which meant it was down to me, for while Rajah had by this stage made it through his extraordinary Michael Jackson phase, and was now in the midst of a more subtle Jordan Knight from New Kids on the Block phase, studying business and finance at a college in Dudley, his other-worldliness still excused him from most domestic tasks.

  The memory of walking into the living room with those cups of tea and plates of ladoos is a vivid one, in part because it was so unusual to see men and women of my parents’ generation sitting in the same room together. Normally, when visitors arrived, the men segregated themselves into the front room, while the women drifted into the living room, just as men sat on the right at religious services at the gurdwara and women on the left.* But here they were all together: the men lined up in the chairs Mum had bought from an office clearance sale; the fat women on the creaking settee that was threatening to give way under their weight; my mother and Chachi sitting in front of the double-glazed patio doors behind which lay the huge lawn that had immediately replaced the cats in my affections.

  The other memorable thing about the scene was the silence. Of course, I’d witnessed such social stillness before. I was regularly stunned at how little Punjabi men had to say to one another until they had consumed half a bottle of whisky each. But I’d never been in a room containing so many Punjabi women which had been so quiet. Moreover, I’d never been in a room containing so many Punjabi women, one of whom was my mother, which had been so quiet. It was actually a bit scary: like the moment in a play fight when your partner pretends a little too convincingly to have died. As I directed the tray towards the coffee table and three pairs of hands stretched out to steady it, you could almost hear the midday shadows inching across the wall.

  Needless to say, when the silence was finally broken, it was Mum who broke it.

  ‘This is our youngest boy – he is studying at the grammar school,’ she said, as if there was only one grammar school in the world, as if this was why Chacha had swapped his afternoon shift for a morning one, and why I was at home and not at the factory, as I would normally have been on a Saturday. I smiled thinly and headed towards the door, only to find myself being pulled back into a seat by my always-mischievous Chacha, amused at my visible discomfort. ‘You know we’d never even heard of the school, but, thanks be to God, his headmaster Mr Ball entered him for the exam, and his teacher Mr Burgess gave him extra lessons, and then, thanks be to God, he passed, and then there was an interview – they even interviewed us! – and thanks be to God he passed that too. But then there was a letter saying they wanted thousands of pounds a y
ear in fees but when something is meant to be, it is meant to be, and thanks be to God, we filled out the forms and now the gor-ment is paying …’

  The fat aunties nodded, the male guests murmured between slurps of tea, and I flushed like a raspberry. My mortification was in part the mortification of any gangly pubescent – I was beginning to feel uncomfortable in my own skin. But more than that there was the knowledge that my mother’s pride was misplaced. Things were going badly for me at my new school, and had been from the moment I went to buy the uniform from Beatties department store in town and Mum asked me to haggle down the price, only for the assistant to retort: ‘This isn’t Wolverhampton market, madam.’

  Into my second year, I still felt bewildered by the school: the way the music teacher gave us a keyboard and just expected us to be able to read and write music; the way some of the kids patted the corners of their mouths at the end of their packed lunch; the way, frankly, they were so white. Until I went to Wolverhampton Grammar, I hadn’t really been aware of being different. Largely because, even with my topknot, I wasn’t. In my final class at Woden Primary, there were two of us in my class alone with long hair and, if anything, my classmates found my name – translating as ‘god’, and bearing an admittedly hilarious likeness to ‘Batman’ (‘digadigadigadiga … Satman!’) – more amusing than my hair. But now I was one of just a few topknots in the whole school, and my days were marked by taunts of ‘Oi, turbinator’ and ‘Is that your packed lunch on your head?’ and (with a squeeze) ‘Oink oink’ and (with a mimicked topknot-siren) ‘Nee-naw, nee-naw’.

  In this new milieu, I felt I could do nothing right. When we were asked to wrap our textbooks for protection, I did so in 1970s floral wallpaper, while the boys around me came back with theirs expertly cellophaned. While the other kids who had packed lunches came with neatly packed sandwiches, Mum gave me omelette sandwiches and aloo gobi parathas, which stank out the packed lunch area so much that I sometimes ate alone outside. After several months I had managed to make only one proper friend – James Lockley, or Lock, as we called each other by surnames, who caught the bus to school from a similarly crap part of town and shared my pop music obsession.

  From wanting to be the centre of attention, I became timid and speechless, my unhappiness measured out in numbers in my end-of-term reports. At the end of my first year I was sixteenth in French, fourteenth in Latin, sixteenth in History, and even in my best subject, Maths, I was seventh. At junior school, parents’ evenings had been the absolute highlight of my year, as exciting as a birthday and Christmas combined. I would whip myself into a state of high excitement as Mum disappeared down the road with Puli – who went to translate – and almost shake with pleasure as Mum returned to repeat every comment with a smile and a congratulatory ‘Shabaash’. But now I couldn’t stand them. Mum’s insistence that I still take the congratulatory pound coin, that she was still proud of me, made it worse.

  ‘He wants to be an accountant when he gets older,’ she continued in front of the guests, renewing the agony. ‘He’s always been good with numbers. But they now say computers are the thing to go into? Not that we mind. We just want him to be happy. That’s all any of us want for our children, isn’t it? We want our children to be happy. And for them to listen to us. That is all. Nothing more …’

  Mercifully, we were saved from any more of this by Puli’s arrival into the living room, an event which was greeted with a silence even more monasterial than the one preceding Mum’s monologue. She glided around the room with a plate of barfi, her head downcast under a chuni a few tones away from the deep red of the Indian bride, not making eye contact with anyone, even the prospective groom, who was the only person in the room looking more mortified than me. I’d been to enough weddings to know this was the way brides were meant to behave: silent and coy. This timidity might once have seemed an unconvincing act, given Puli’s ferociousness. But in recent years, the explosions, while they hadn’t disappeared, had abated. It was almost as if she’d been hooked up to a mood thermostat, which kept her temper within certain boundaries … which was what had, in effect, happened.

  You see, Puli had by this stage been taking antipsychotics for more than three years. I didn’t know she had schizophrenia at the time, obviously, and neither, less obviously, did she. She still hadn’t been told the diagnosis; and when she spent a year unemployed after failing her A-levels, she claimed the dole rather than the sickness benefit she would have been entitled to. But when we moved house she began to feel better and started applying for jobs, and ended up working at the council’s poll tax office, earning what seemed like an unimaginable amount of money to me. The work seemed to do her good. Looking at her, you wouldn’t have thought she was unwell. Looking at that room, you’d never have thought there were two people there suffering from the most devastating mental illness around.

  Once Puli had slid out of the room, it was Chacha’s turn to break the silence, taking, as he often had to, my father’s role.

  ‘I think we should …’ He cleared his throat. ‘I think we should let them have a little time by themselves.’

  You might have thought from the astonished glances exchanged that he’d just suggested the boy and girl pop next door to smoke some crack.

  After the visitors had departed, there was a rush for the one slab of barfi that hadn’t been scoffed by the fat ladies and to issue verdicts on the prospective groom.

  ‘Might have bothered to shave,’ said Mum.

  ‘It’s the fashion though,’ said Bindi (sniffing).

  ‘Seems okay,’ said Chacha. ‘Family business. Prospects.’

  ‘Claims he doesn’t smoke or drink,’ said Chachi.

  ‘Dodgy hair,’ said my brother, who had forgotten his loose perm.

  I murmured my approval. Nowadays, the list of things I deem necessary for a relationship to work – a shared sense of humour and level of silliness, tolerance of one another’s careers and TV habits, sexual compatibility, etc. – is almost as long as the average Sikh wedding. But at that age, having never had a girl smile at me with romantic attention, one person seemed as good as another. Not that my opinion, or anyone else’s, mattered. After the meeting Mum consulted a pandit, who looked into his crystal ball, or his orange pyjamas or whatever it is pandits look into, and announced that if Puli didn’t get married to this boy with an outdated mullet she wouldn’t get married for years, and because Mum feared this prospect even more than she dreaded not being able to force-feed us again, the deal was struck. Owing to the superstition that an eldest daughter should never be married off at the age of nineteen, the wedding was set for exactly three days after Puli turned twenty.

  In the run-up to the big weekend, I found myself in the unusual position of looking forward to a wedding. Puli’s departure meant I was one step closer to having a room of my very own. My role as a brother meant I was going to get cash during the ceremony. I was going to get several days off school. And because one is supposed to look unhappy at one’s sister’s wedding – you are losing a member of your family – I was told that I wasn’t allowed to dance, which was a bit like being told I wasn’t going to be allowed to have my legs amputated with a fondue fork. Chacha teased me that I’d be upset when the day came, bet me I’d be in tears by the time it came to say goodbye, but I was convinced otherwise. It all seemed to be upsides from where I was standing.

  My recollection of the first two days of the wedding isn’t great: there have been so many weddings, even among my siblings, that they’re all a blur of boredom and bhangra and sitting cross-legged in boiling gurdwaras. But a few things stick out. I remember the strange feeling of no longer being ignored by my elder cousins. My place at grammar school had given me an odd celebrity status. I would have liked to believe they were all stunned by my academic promise but, judging from the comments, it was more that they were amused by the idea of a member of the family attending private school. ‘So do you speak to your teachers in Latin?’ ‘Do you wear a top hat?’ I also rememb
er having to share my room with a cousin for one night, and him standing semi-naked in front of my bookcase, one hand on his hip, another rearranging something in his Y-fronts, asking whether I’d really read all the books I had lined up on the shelves.

  I had five books on the shelves.

  He followed this up by asking whether it was ‘a bit gay’ for a teenage boy to have so many George Michael posters on his bedroom wall.

  Gay?

  What was he talking about?

  I got up early on the morning of the main ceremony, to avoid the embarrassment of being seen having my hair combed by Mum – I could tie a plait, but I still couldn’t get the knack of tying the knot – and popped in to see Puli after the make-up and mehndi artist had visited. I know it is customary to say brides look beautiful. But she really did. Mum had never allowed my sisters to use make-up. Indeed, it was only at that moment that the wobbliness started, that I began questioning the wisdom of my sister being married off to a man I’d exchanged a total of one greeting with.

  ‘All right?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I’d responded.

  Who was this guy who was going to be my brother-in-law? Wasn’t it all a bit sudden? Who was going to do all the translating now Puli was gone? The factory owner put more effort into hiring sewing-machinists than the family had put into finding Puli a husband. I put more effort into my mix tapes.

  Still, I kept it together, during the over-long ceremony, during the subsequent party at a nearby community centre, during the always-emotional departure ceremony, where I was required, along with the rest of the family, to say goodbye to Puli in the back of the car, the lens of a video camera pressed against one side of my face, and the gold embroidery of Puli’s sari pressing against the other. It was only when it came for Dad to say goodbye that I lost my bet with Chacha. Not that he noticed: he was too busy trying to get my father to let go.