The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  12. This Is a Low

  Mum went to bed after telling me the story of her engagement and wedding. Late the next evening she resumed the story of her early marriage, going through everything that happened up to the point of Puli’s birth in 1970, a year after the wedding. Then, on the third and fourth evenings, she finished the tale, up to the point of my birth in 1976. Several weeks later I found myself removing a 35cl bottle of Gordon’s gin from a Fitness First rucksack, pouring a glug into a china teacup, and sitting down behind a laptop placed on a flatpack desk I had bought from Argos, to attempt to write a version of the story.

  A woman, they say, always remembers her wedding night, and my mother is no exception.

  That seemed acceptable. Clear. But should I talk about Mum as Mum? Somehow, it didn’t sound right. Good journalism was impartial and neutral.

  A woman, they say, always remembers her wedding night, and Jito is no exception.

  Better. Another sip of neat gin. Gag reflex. Vodka next time.

  After Cugi, the husband she had not yet talked to, slapped her in the living room of their new home, she retired with him to the front bedroom, which was …

  Which was what though? Mum hadn’t been able to provide much of a description. She had said the room was in a terraced house, and that there was a mattress on the floor, but she couldn’t remember anything about the decor or the light. Also: was it a slap? She’d used the word ‘thupar’ – meaning slap – the first time she ran through the story, but then ‘muka’ – meaning punch – when she referred to it again. Not to worry, though: you can always return to these things. I would put question marks next to bits that required further probing.

  After Cugi, the husband she had not yet talked to, slapped her in the living room of their new home, she retired with him to the front bedroom, where he punched her in the stomach. He growled to sleep on the double (?) mattress under the window (?) while she cleared up her own vomit …

  Then what? Mum had gone on to a description of what happened the morning afterwards, but did anything … Christ. Just the idea of having to ask had me reaching for the bottle. This was turning out to be much more difficult than I expected.

  The compulsion to drink alone wasn’t the only unexpected consequence of listening to Mum’s story. In the daze that followed I gave up on my already disintegrating social life – I felt a need to talk about what I’d learnt, but at the same time couldn’t bear doing so; I decided to quit my ridiculously perfect but now part-time job – I needed it to distract me, but at the same time realized that writing my parents’ story was more important; I started spending more time in Wolverhampton – another paradox, in that I wanted to get away, but felt panicky whenever I did get away; and – this was perhaps the most unexpected development – when Mum, once again in contravention of our agreement, mentioned a nice Sikh girl who was working as a teacher in Wolverhampton, I agreed to have an arranged marriage meeting.

  Since graduation, I must have been on twenty or thirty such set-ups and have gone on them for all sorts of reasons: a family member was particularly insistent; I was dating someone inappropriate and having a brief meeting was a good way of keeping the family off my back; I was single, and why not? I even had a brief flirtation with a Sikh matrimonial website. But this was the first time I agreed to meet someone purely to please Mum. Having heard her story, the old saviour complex kicked back in. The more I thought about what my parents had been through, the more trivial my anxieties about love and marriage seemed, and an arranged marriage meeting a tiny thing in comparison to the sacrifices my mother had made. I wanted to lessen her grief, and told myself if I could do this by marrying a Punjabi Jat, then at least I should try.

  Besides, the arranged marriage meetings I’m required to go on do not in any way resemble the horrendous tea parties my sisters had to endure. I’ve had a few of those, but like I said earlier, it is generally a case of blind dating with parental approval. And so, for the first time in weeks, I removed the lumberjack shirt I’d bought for £7.99 from Fosters when I was fifteen, put on a once-trendy but now frayed Paul Smith T-shirt, got Mum to wash my jeans – she returned them with a crease ironed down the middle – and headed off to meet my potential future fiancée in the Wolverhampton branch of Starbucks.

  Discovering Wolverhampton had a Starbucks had been a bigger shock than discovering it had a tourist information centre. Indeed, for years, I had defined my home town by its lack of a Starbucks. The fact seemed to sum up the city’s arrested development: the aggressive coffee chain, which seems to have more outlets than employees, which would open stores in the lavatories of the opposition if it could do so, couldn’t, evidently, be bothered with Wolverhampton. But as with so many things to do with my past, I’d got it wrong.

  My date was late, giving me plenty of time to see how Wulfrunians were taking to café culture. Judging from the conversations floating around the till, they were struggling.

  Customer one: ‘So y’am saying “tall” ay yower biggest size?’

  Customer two: ‘Can’t I just have a simple coffee?’

  Customer three: ‘Do yow serve fish and chips?’

  After fifteen minutes – still no sign of my potential future fiancée – I tired of sneering at people at the counter, got a second coffee and switched to sneering at people sitting around me. As with most branches of Starbucks, half the store was occupied by teenage girls laughing uproariously as if starring in an episode of Friends, but their liveliness was counterbalanced in Wolverhampton by a gaggle of Goths gathered in a corner – about eight of them, looking miserable, or trying to look miserable, in combinations of black, dark red and purple. A couple holding hands and kissing on the periphery of the group caught my attention – the girl because she was too pretty to make the angsty-consumptive-poet look succeed, and the boy because, despite his backcombed hair, black streaks of eyeliner and army surplus combat boots, he was just too cheerful-looking and too, frankly, Asian, to pass off as a proper Goth. Indeed, I think he might have been the first Asian Goth I had ever seen, and the couple, the first teenage interracial couple I had spotted openly smooching in Wolverhampton. Watching them, I remembered all the surreptitious dates I’d been on when I was a teenager, the lengths I went to to avoid being caught, and then, remembering I was on the brink of another date, began replaying all my past marriage meetings in my mind.

  The fur-coated banker whom I met in a London hotel bar and who announced half an hour into our meeting – ‘Hope you don’t mind’ – that she’d brought four friends along for moral support, and they were scattered around the bar. The ball-breaking stockbroker who revealed that at the age of thirty she’d never had a relationship of any kind: not a kiss, no hand-holding, nothing. Was she saying it because she thought it was what an Asian man would want to hear? The pretty marketing assistant who pronounced in the pub she’d agreed to meet me in that she’d never had a drink, would never have a drink, and could never be with someone who did drink, because drinking alcohol was a transgression of the Sikh faith. And then, most memorably, the solicitor from the matrimonial website, who met all my criteria – she didn’t have a moustache, thought London was the best city in the world, could sustain conversation without resorting to the words ‘wikid’ or ‘innit’ or ‘hunna’ every other sentence, didn’t use an excessive number of emoticons or exclamation marks in emails, didn’t have a disconcerting habit of comparing potential partners to her father/brothers, thought our parents’ obsession with caste was ridiculous given that the gurus declared all men and women equal, felt as silly as I did when trying to work out the difference between ‘wheatish’ and ‘wheatish medium’ in the ‘skin colour’ section of the website application, didn’t seem to be secretly in love with someone else, wanted a proper relationship before committing to living together forever in electric dreams, and who was petite and cute and clever and who actually seemed to like me, but who the next day sent me a 2,000 word – 2,000 words! – character assassination by email that literall
y made me cry.

  Over the years I’ve often wondered why these meetings are so weird – more so than normal blind dates – and reluctantly concluded that part of the problem is me. According to regular unsolicited feedback from those who know me best, I have ideas above my station and routinely go for people out of my league. Also, I’m not interested in many of the things second-generation Asians tend to care about: Bollywood, bhangra, R&B, bling. However, I also think there is something intrinsic to such meetings that encourages weirdness. Existing in the grey area between a date and an arranged marriage meeting, you have to act like you’re there because you want to be, even though you are compelled to be there; you have to flirt but at the same time imply no sexual intention whatsoever; you have to reveal things about yourself, without giving too much away (you can’t risk damaging information getting back to your family); and because your ‘date’ has been chosen by someone else, and because so many British Asians are (like me), for want of a better word, schizophrenic, constantly switching between personas to fit into different worlds, you have absolutely no idea what end of the Punjabi spectrum they are coming from, and whether they mean what they say. They could be anything from a sword-wielding religious Sikh who has never cut their hair or left their house without a chaperone (or pretending to be), to a nymphomaniac alcoholic who is throwing up into your lap after an hour and demanding you move on to China Whites for a boogie. In short, the meetings are fraught with potential disaster. Which, of course, raised the question of what the hell I was doing in Starbucks on the verge of another one. Listening to Mum’s story had made my head spin, I was finding it difficult even to talk to my friends, the aversion to TV had returned with such a vengeance that I now couldn’t even stand BBC Parliament – some of those Welsh Assembly sessions can get pretty heated, I tell you – and here I was throwing myself into the most difficult and brutal aspect of life imaginable. It was like failing a driving test and then agreeing to race in the Monaco Grand Prix. But just as I glanced at my watch, and wondered whether a delay of half an hour was a sufficient excuse to cancel a date, there was a soft voice over my shoulder.

  ‘Are you …?’

  I turned around …

  … and she was lovely. A bit tall for my taste maybe, but a nice open face, no sign of teacher-frumpiness, big brown eyes – people always say Indians have nice eyes, but she did – sexy thin-framed spectacles, a smart black suit – back from work? – the whiff of Yves Saint Laurent Opium and, best of all, no hint of the anti-Viagra of a Wolverhampton accent.

  ‘Sorry I’m so late … nightmare at school.’

  ‘No problem.’ For some reason I had pulled my mobile out of a pocket and was waving it around. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  She tilted her head to one side.

  ‘Decaftripleventinonfat3splendaextrahotstirrednofoamcaramel macchiatowithwhipcreamandextracaramel please.’

  A moment’s pause as I tried to diagnose whether she was joking: you can take nothing for granted in arranged marriage scenarios.

  ‘I read somewhere it’s the most complicated Starbucks order you can get.’ She smiled in a way that gave a suggestion of Colgate-advert teeth. ‘Americano please, fat milk.’

  I came back with a coffee for her, a smoothie for me – I’d already had enough caffeine to keep a herd of bullocks awake for a week – and a muffin for … God knows who. After exchanging observations about our surroundings – we both agreed it wasn’t fair we didn’t have coffee shops to hang out in when we were teenagers, that the Goth lovers were sweet (subtext: she is cool with idea of interracial relationships, phew) – we began the task of finding out about each other, and I discovered she was the elder of two children, that she’d always wanted to be an RE teacher but now fancied becoming a property developer, that she had gone to university in Birmingham and had had a relationship there which petered out with the end of her degree, that she lived in Wolverhampton with her family but would happily move elsewhere – who wouldn’t – that her dad was a bus driver, her mother a sewing-machinist, and that she thought I asked too many questions.

  ‘Sorry, occupational hazard.’

  ‘What about you? What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a journalist … kind of between jobs at the moment though.’

  ‘Oh. What do your parents do?’

  ‘Mum used to be a sewing-machinist too. Retired now.’

  She leant forwards. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Park Village.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I know it. Which factory was it?’

  I told her. ‘We lived just behind it.’

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘Doesn’t work.’

  ‘Retired?’

  ‘Ill.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Hasn’t worked for years.’

  ‘Mind talking about it?’

  This is the other thing about these arranged marriage pseudo-dates: you begin with the kind of discussions you would normally only have three years into a relationship. How many kids do you want? Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time? Do your parents love your siblings more than they love you? Too often it’s dating, robbed of the things that make dating fun: the flirtation; the attraction; the snogging; the sex. It’s also another reason why I struggle to get anywhere with them. Not only is discussing big things unsexy, it is, paradoxically, unrevealing. Frankly, I don’t know where I see myself in ten years’ time. I don’t know how many kids I want. Most of the things I look for in girlfriends are small. They have to be cheerful in the mornings. They can never attempt to make me dance in public. It helps if they don’t visibly detest me. And, normally, I would at this point have turned the subject away from the subject of my family, to the handful of anecdotes I always churn out with strangers, such as the time I was sat next to George Soros and asked him what he did for a living, the time a PR rang my line at work and asked to speak to ‘Satan Sinatra’, my first week at university when I went around telling people my nickname was ‘Blade’, and how my best friend had never let me forget it. Stories which were self-deprecating but still carried vital nuggets of flattering information about myself: the Cambridge degree; the occasional brushes with power and celebrity; the interesting career.

  But because this girl was warm and attractive – obviously I was far from sure if I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but I’m not sure I even want to spend the rest of my life with myself – and because she didn’t fall into the two categories that my previous Punjabi dates had fallen into,* I made the mistake of telling the truth. Even worse: the whole truth. I told her my father and sister suffered from schizophrenia, but I didn’t realize until recently. That the doctors thought Dad had the beginnings of dementia, but I wasn’t sure. That I’d made a succession of terrible mistakes recently in the emotional turmoil of a break-up, chief amongst which was the decision to write a book about my parents’ life, before actually knowing what the story was, that now I knew the whole story I felt like I’d been a victim of one of those elaborate undergraduate jokes in which your friends come into your room while you’re away and turn all the furniture upside down, that somehow I’d gone from not being able to read misery memoirs to writing one, that I had no idea how I was going to write about the violence my mother had suffered at the hands of my father – it was too painful – that I found it hard to distance myself from the story, and that I felt utterly miscast, like Steven Seagal in Pride and Prejudice, or Judi Dench in Police Academy.

  ‘Don’t move, dirtbag!’ My potential future fiancée had put her coffee down and was making a pistol shape with her hands.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t move, dirtbag!’ She pretended to shoot me. ‘Remember? It was the catchphrase of that fat woman cop in Police Academy … she was dead quiet, but then she’d suddenly lose it and punch people out …’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ I sipped some of my smoothie. ‘There was also that guy who made those noises with his mouth … What was his name? Hightower?’

  ‘No, H
ightower was the big quiet guy …’

  ‘How do you remember that?’

  ‘Asian girl. Didn’t get out much in the eighties. No Starbucks then either, remember?’ She picked up her coffee again. ‘It’s cool you’re writing a book, though.’

  Cool? No, I said. It didn’t feel cool. For, having got my mother’s version of events, I now faced the worrying prospect of having to verify the details with relatives who had witnessed what happened. Why and how was the prospect of talking to my relatives worrying? Well, for myriad reasons, not least the unfortunate fact that sections of my extended family believe my mother to be a kind of witch – yes, a witch, who puts curses on people; some of my relatives weren’t talking to my family any more, and of those relatives who were still in contact, even if I did get them to agree to talk, on tape, after ignoring every single invitation they had sent me for the last decade, and made an appointment to see them at a fixed time of day (‘Of course we’ll be home’), I knew they would arrive one, maybe two hours late (‘Needed a haircut’) and then, before being able to pose a single useful question, I’d have to endure a tour of their new house, a ride in their new car and be required to coo over at least 329 individual pictures of their 329 new grandchildren. After this – the suggestion that we get down to the matter in hand having been ignored entirely – I would have to explain to an audience of at least eight how I’d managed to graduate from university and reach the age of thirty without having a house, a car, a wife or a career in medicine to show for it. An hour or two later, edging tentatively towards the purpose of the visit, and wanting to discuss the sensitive issues at hand in some kind of privacy, I’d attempt to get the interviewee into a room on their own, but they would insist on staying in the living room, the wide screen TV blaring in the background and random visitors adding their two pennies’ worth. If I was lucky, they would then shout and bluster their way through a version of events transparently skewed by their position on old and often irrelevant family feuds, not pausing for questions, glossing over the most interesting tales, providing only a bare outline of events, making no effort to provide dates, interrupting their account only to guffaw at my poor Punjabi, answer mobile phone calls, or launch paeans to the superiority of the milk (ah, it was so much creamier then!), the mangoes (so juicy!) and the ghee (my God, the freshness of pure ghee!) in 1950s India.