The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  With hindsight, it might have been even worse if the barber was Sikh, but at the time, the revelation felt catastrophic, for it added an entirely unwelcome, symbolic edge to what I was about to do. My understanding of Indian politics wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but I knew that after two Sikh bodyguards had shot the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Sikhs and Hindus didn’t get along. In fact, they had a recent history of chopping one another to pieces. And I knew that one of the things that often happened when Hindus attacked Sikhs was that they cut off their hair. If I’d also known then what I know now, that the turban was a symbol of the Sikh community’s struggle to be accepted in Britain, that it was a Sikh bus driver’s struggle to be allowed to wear a turban that in part inspired Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech, I doubt I would have had the courage to open the door.

  Inside, the three men waiting to be seen, and the two men in the leather seats being seen to, and the two barbers, one of whom was presumably Ranjit himself, turned to look at me as I entered, directly, in the eye, in the way that English people never do. In the moment, I felt the oddest sensation – the sensation that I was starring in a movie of my own life. Not a good movie. An independent production that didn’t get beyond non-broadcast pilot stage. But a movie nevertheless. I tried to avoid their gaze – a difficult task with the wall-to-wall mirrors – sat down on the felt bench next to the door and tried to get my bearings.

  The barber shop was basically a converted terraced house: two seats in the front room; behind the wall, another two unoccupied seats in the living room; sixteen appliances plugged into just two sockets via a serpentine combination of extensions and adapters; near the door, a payphone, with business cards advertising Asian building firms and lawyers and estate agents pasted around it; a board emblazoned with the pun ‘a cut above the rest’; another board emblazoned with prices – hair £4, beard £8; a calendar on the wall advertising ASIA AIR TRAVEL; and hair. Lots of hair. Everywhere.

  Of course, I had expected it. But not so much of it on the floors and hanging in the air. And not so much of it being removed from so many different parts of customers’ bodies. One man was having the back of his neck shaved. Another had asked the barber to remove the hair in his ears – and he was doing it. Having been indoctrinated about the evils of cutting hair by Mum – those almost daily lectures about the holiness of long hair and stories about how witches would try to cast spells on you by cutting your locks – and having grown up watching my brother kick and scream whenever the time came to visit the barber’s* – the disgust I felt was intense.

  I had an audience of eight – evidently the closing time was, like all Indian deadlines, flexible – when the fatter of the two barbers, who may or may not have been Ranjit himself, indicated it was my turn by spinning the chair in my direction and wiping it clean with a white cloth. I moved towards him with the trepidation of someone about to undergo heart surgery, handed over my blazer, placed my rucksack on the floor and put my arms through the giant black bib held up for me. After sitting me down he pumped the metal bar under the leather seat, bringing my topknot to his cutting level and, making eye contact in the mirror, asked: ‘Your dad know you doing this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, thinking it was my mother he should be worried about.

  And then he hacked up some phlegm into a tissue.

  Reassured about my family’s non-violent intentions, the barber plucked the hanky off my topknot, revealing the bun beneath. Despite the day’s assaults, it was still recognizably one of my mother’s better creations – intricate, swirling, vaguely reminiscent of Princess Leah’s vertical buns in Star Wars. He unravelled the knot and let the plait hang down the side of my face. For years, having my hair undone in public had been my ultimate nightmare – I worried about it more than I worried about my mother discovering my collection of page 3s, or my English teacher discovering that the poems I wrote for creative writing exercises contained plagiarized Stevie Wonder lyrics. But oddly, sitting there, the silhouette of my head resembling that of a giant cherry, I didn’t feel any embarrassment at all. If anything, I wanted to savour the moment.

  My barber’s hairy hand – maybe it needed a shave – hovered over the paraphernalia laid on the shelf in front of us: clippers, driers and razors spread out like instruments before an operation. Just as I was committing the moment to memory – click – he picked the biggest, cleanest pair of scissors and in a blink – snip – more than 5,000 days of hair growth fell to the floor like a dead crow. I’d like to say the room gasped. Or that I literally felt the weight of the world lift from my shoulders. But no one blinked and I felt no different. They say that amputees sometimes continue to feel their limbs when they’ve gone: maybe it is the same for Sikhs with their hair. The barber retrieved the plait from the floor and waved it in my direction. Images of the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots in India snapped through my head like genocide flashcards. Iron rods. Knives. Clubs. Kerosene.

  ‘You need this?’

  ‘Um.’

  He put it into a Mahal Supermarket carrier bag anyway.

  ‘Your mum will want it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I watched him put the carrier bag next to my rucksack. And then he began spraying the back of my head as if it were a sunflower.

  ‘How you want?’

  ‘Anything but what you’ve got,’ I wanted to say. I didn’t know a great deal about hairstyles but I knew that the orange highlights in his hair were at least a decade out of date, if they had ever been in fashion at all. But instead, being prepared for the question – one of the magazine tips had been ‘Bring a picture! It’s not true stylists don’t like you to bring a photo!’ – I reached for my trouser pocket and pulled out the sleeve of the cassette single of ‘Freedom ’90’ by George Michael – in retrospect, a bad choice for several reasons, not least because it was a moody shot, taken in semi-darkness. The barber looked at it for a nanosecond, squinted at my reflection, hacked up some more phlegm and remarked: ‘Pushed back and grade 3 then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, having no idea what grade 3 was. I thought numbered grades were what you got for playing the flute.

  There followed a frenzy of clipping and cutting and spraying and tugging and combing during which I tried to obey the magazine tip to ‘Stay still! Once your cut is under way, quit wriggling and follow the stylist’s instructions, or you’ll magnify the chance of a mistake!’ And after five or ten minutes I looked nothing like George Michael on the sleeve of the cassette single of ‘Freedom ’90’. Instead, there seemed to be four styles fighting for dominance: Amitabh Bachchan’s bouffant vs. Victoria Principal’s bob vs. Johnny Rotten’s mohican vs. my old topknot. Any one of them could have won.

  ‘Is that much length okay?’ he asked, pointing at a point on a comb.

  ‘Yeaugh.’ He may as well have been asking me for my opinion on Danish monetary policy.

  The frenzy of clipping resumed, and then about five minutes after the moment at which I thought things were beginning to look acceptable, he suddenly and inexplicably stopped, picked up a canister of something and a tub of something else and asked: ‘Spray or gel?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘No. SPRAY …’ He waved the canister in my direction. ‘Or GEL.’ The tub looked like it contained wallpaper paste.

  ‘Gel?’

  A minute later he was waving a mirror behind the back of my head and asking: ‘Teek taak?’

  Of all his questions, this one seemed the most preposterous. What would he do if I said the haircut wasn’t teek taak? He could hardly put all the hair back. And given that I’d never seen the back of my head and never would, what did I have to compare it with? As it happened, from all the angles I wasn’t sure if it was a case of teek taak at all – Amitabh Bachchan’s bouffant had definitely won out, but there was a bit of Johnny Rotten in there still. But grateful that at least he hadn’t shaved SIKH SCUM into the back of my head, I murmured in gratitude, and after undoing the overall that had protected my soggy
school uniform from the hair storm, the barber brushed my shoulders with what looked like a minature mop and handed me a tissue, which I used to blow my nose.

  ‘No, that’s to wipe hair.’

  I lifted the snotty tissue towards my virginal bouffant.

  ‘No! For this …’ He held me steady by the shoulder as he forcibly rubbed tiny hair clippings from my face, in the way that Mum used to remove dribble from my chin when I was three.

  Walking towards the door and still trying to avoid eye contact with the waiting customers, I put my hand into my pocket and pulled out the £4 I’d counted out days earlier. He put the cash into a safety deposit box and stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  ‘You look okay. Normal.’

  The old me prickled at the implication: was he suggesting that topknots were abnormal? But, in truth, normal was the look I was after. That was the point.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Outside, at the bus stop, I experienced a strange inversion of the phenomenon known to afflict owners of new cars, when they suddenly notice that half the country seems to be driving the same model. Everywhere I looked I saw turbans – green, blue, white, black, orange – and beards in every shape and size imaginable – shaggy, fluffy, dishevelled, sprouting. It was too much after my act of sacrilege, so, given that the rain was easing, I decided to walk home, catching my reflection in car windows and trying to get used to the new shadow my head cast on the oily pavements.

  I walked the long way back, thinking the extra half hour was exactly the time I needed to come up with the right words for Mum, when months of thinking about it hadn’t. But by the time my house came into view I realized I still had no idea what to say. As I approached the door, I found myself wishing for still more time, thinking that if I could just get to my bedroom without being spotted, I could sit there, with a towel covering my head if necessary, until the right words came. As (bad) luck would have it, when I entered through the back door the entire family was passing through the kitchen. Rajah, back from work, was swigging orange juice from a carton. Dad was standing over the grill – making himself a sausage sandwich for tea. Mum, back from work at the factory, was kneading some dough. Bindi, back from her supermarket job, was washing up. I caught a reflection of myself in the glass of the kitchen cabinet before anyone caught a glimpse of me, and flinched. My hair was wild. It seemed to be wanting to return to its preceding condition, like a regenerating worm. There was a pause before the responses came.

  Rajah said: ‘Bloody hell, you look like Doogie Howser.’

  Bindi sniffed and said: ‘Bloimey.’

  Dad smiled.

  Mum, meanwhile, did a double take and …

  In the years beforehand I’d put thousands of boy hours into worrying how Mum might react. On bad days I thought she might strangle me with my disembodied plait. On good days I thought she might drag me from the house, using my disembodied plait as a leash, abandoning me like Pussy and Lucky on an industrial estate. But in all my worrying, it never once occurred to me what would in fact happen: that she would put her hand to her mouth, walk up to me and then pull me, quietly, towards her.

  I still don’t understand why she was cool about it. Asking her about it recently, she claimed that she knew I was being bullied, and that she had never been keen on long hair: giving me a topknot had been Chachi’s idea, and she didn’t care either way. But that’s not how I remember things. She put incredible pressure on me to keep my hair long. And while I’d like to believe she was relaxed about it because she is a highly intelligent woman, who will love me unconditionally, regardless of what I do, I can’t help suspecting it was due in part to the fact that she had other things to worry about. You see, by the time I had my hair cut, it was becoming clear that Puli’s marriage to the mulleted boy from Coventry was coming to an end.

  14. Two Rooms at the End of the World

  I’ll concede that I probably shouldn’t have fretted quite as much as I did about having my hair cut, and, as it turned out, I could have worried a little less about the task of corroborating Mum’s story with relatives. I should have known that if there’s one thing I can rely on with my family, it is narrative, and that eventually a scenario would arise that would give me an excuse to interview relevant members of the extended family in reasonably natural circumstances. Though when the opportunity arose – in the form of a complaint from Mum that no one seemed willing to take her to visit an ageing and distant relative dying in a hospital in Grays – I almost missed it, as it cropped up in the middle of one of her monologues, camouflaged between complaints about the quality of lentils nowadays and her arthritis. She had moved on to the more general topic of price inflation in supermarkets by the time I cottoned on.

  Hold on, did she say Grays?

  Hold on, Grays was where Mum and Dad began their marriage, living with my Bero bua (one of my father’s elder sisters) and my Phuman phupre (her husband).

  Hold on, Grays was where my uncle and aunt still lived.

  The idea of using the hospital visit as an excuse to pop in to talk to my uncle and aunt about what happened in 1969 wasn’t without problems. Would they think it strange that I hadn’t talked to them in a decade but was now suddenly appearing with a million questions and a dictaphone? Would Mum mind if I asked her to stay in a separate room while I talked to them? But in many ways it was an ideal solution. Bero bua and Phuman phupre were still in regular contact with our family. I was very fond of them and they had been very generous to me in the past – I lived with them for several months during one of my university holidays, doing a summer job in London.* Their children all got married relatively late, so I wouldn’t be treated like a freak in an arranged marriage museum, and taking Mum to visit the elderly relative provided a reasonable cover for my sudden appearance.

  A week later I was having a predictable argument with Mum about how many carrier bags of food we should take on the 153-mile journey – I suggested no more than one, given that we would be spending the night at my well-stocked flat in London before returning to the Midlands, but Mum ended up taking six – and a less predictable argument about the car I had chosen to hire.

  ‘I’m not getting into that,’ she remarked sharply when she spotted the innocuous blue Ford Focus.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Those.’ She pointed at the leather seats.

  Mum hasn’t always been a vegetarian – at Prosser Street she ate everything but beef, like the rest of us. But when she retired, she took a religious vow, started carrying a ceremonial dagger, and gave up consuming flesh. Over the years the vegetarianism has become increasingly strict. She has given up cooking meat curries for my father. Started demanding that the Christmas turkey isn’t roasted in the house – last year I had to cook it at my brother’s house in Dudley, and then drive it to my parents before lunch. And now she won’t eat any food that has been touched by someone who has not washed after eating meat, and even objects to leather.

  ‘Mum, what do you think your shoes are made of?’

  She looked down at her sandals and then back at me. ‘They’re made of rubber.’

  I took a close look. And they were. Christ. ‘So you want me to change the car? You know it’s going to cost me another £50…’

  It did the trick. ‘Okay then. But next time, no leather seats.’

  The subsequent four-hour car journey was hard on the nerves. Having persuaded her to sit in the front seat – like royalty, Mum instinctively heads for the back – she grabbed the door handle and wouldn’t let go for the first forty miles, and even then only did so to begin praying for our lives. And then she would only quit praying for our lives to begin complaining about the heating (it triggers migraines), my sense of direction (even though she cannot read road signs), my taste in music (in good company there), and, when I’d switched off Prefab Sprout in favour of Radio 4, requested a running translation of the afternoon play. It was truly a delight to see Grays come into view.

  Though Grays, situated
on the apex of a sharp bend in the Thames, twenty miles from London, fifteen miles from Southend-on-Sea, doesn’t really ‘come into view’. Most towns and cities have some emblem that lodges them in your mind. Blackpool has its tower. Wolverhampton has its Man on the Horse. But Grays has nothing. All that can be said about it is that it is a collection of anonymous housing estates near some objects of vague utility: the Dartford Crossing, the M25 and the Lakeside shopping centre. The lack of definition extends to its name. When we were kids our parents, struggling with the pronunciation, vacillated between ‘Greer-s’ (Puli once stunned her primary school classmates by announcing she’d spent some of her summer holiday in ‘Greece’) and ‘London’, but the modern road signs didn’t seem much more sure, oscillating between ‘Grays Thurrock’ and ‘Grays’.

  Being so featureless, we got lost as soon as we arrived, and I ended up having to call my aunt to meet us on the forecourt of a petrol station, the closest thing the town has to a landmark. She arrived almost as soon as I’d hung up, looking as tall and handsome as I remembered her – my father’s sisters are a testament to what not drinking and not having schizophrenia can do for your health – and surprised me by greeting me with an English ‘Hello’, before revealing she’d been taking English lessons at a local community centre. ‘You can’t live in a country for thirty years without learning the language,’ she pronounced before speeding off to the hospital in her runaround, instructing us to follow.