The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  In our Ford Focus, it was my turn to nag Mum. Why couldn’t she learn to drive like my aunt? Learn to speak English? It would change her life. But there were just the same old excuses: ‘I could never drive – I’m just not mentally alert enough’; ‘I’m too old’; ‘I’m too ill’. I know Mum is unwell, but the fact that she has been making out she is on her deathbed for the last thirty years makes me wonder whether she protests too much. I wish I could find a way to persuade her that her life isn’t over.

  Unfortunately, in the hospital, it was evident that our distant relative – Mum had repeatedly explained how we were related, but I still didn’t understand – really was on her deathbed. I would say she looked much frailer than when I saw her last, but I last saw her eighteen years ago, when she must have been around eighty, and she looked pretty frail then. Nevertheless, despite her failing eyesight, and faltering hearing, she recognized my mother after only a little hesitation; they embraced and she managed to ask about each one of my mother’s children and grandchildren by name. When she got to me, my mother instructed me to move closer and accept a blessing. With my head placed under her hand, I was thinking how great it was that the elderly were so respected in Punjabi culture, having one of those actually quite common moments when I felt proud to be Indian, when she put her crinkled mouth to my ear and wheezed: ‘Why haven’t you got married yet? Find a wife and make your mother happy.’

  Someone once told me that one of the last things that goes when you’re dying is your ability to recognize faces: but with Punjabi women, it must be the impulse to nag about marriage. Sadly, she passed away a few days later.

  On the other side of town my uncle Phuman greeted us with bare feet and a smile. Walking into the house bought back a flood of childhood memories. Apart from a trip to India when I was four, a fantastic day-trip to Weston-super-Mare when I was nine, and a correspondingly depressing day trip to Portsmouth when I was ten – we expected a beach, but ended up walking around warships – Grays was the only place we ever went ‘on holiday’ as a family. And it was seeing our cousins in their home, with their stereos in their rooms, posters of hot chicks on their walls, white friends popping over to play and say hi whenever they liked, that made me realize for the first time that maybe our family wasn’t very relaxed.

  As I wolfed down chapattis and chicken curry, and as Mum nibbled at the vegetarian option of chapattis and lentil curry, my uncle and aunt brought us up to date on their family news, and as I took my dishes to the kitchen, my aunt surprised me again by asking how the book was going. It turned out a cousin had read something about me on the internet. I’ve put so much effort into making sure my London and family lives are separated that it comes as a surprise when the two cross. After I’d moaned unspecifically about the agony of the task, and revealed what the book was about – the bit about my parents anyway – and asked if my uncle and aunt would mind talking about what happened in the late sixties, it was Mum’s turn to surprise me: she suggested I take my uncle and aunt to their front room, while she slept off her migraine. Either she was genuinely under the weather, or understood the importance in journalism of getting independent accounts, or she simply didn’t want to go through the story of her early marriage again. If it was the final thing, I knew the feeling.

  In the front room I took a chair opposite my uncle and aunt, who sat down on the long sofa. Looking at them – I’d never seen them sitting next to one another before – I noticed for the first time that my uncle was considerably shorter than my aunt, and then began arranging the stationery I had bought along on the glass table between us – dictaphone, chronology, photographs. I put my A4 pad on my lap. I had written down seventy-two numbered questions on the first page, all related to the bits of Mum’s story that I needed corroborating: one thing I’ve learnt about interviews is that it’s important to get all the questions on one side of paper so that you don’t draw attention to the artificialness of the process by flicking through pages during conversation. But looking at them, I couldn’t decide on one to begin with. Meanwhile, my normal openers – the devastating ‘how are you?’, the penetrating ‘run me through a typical day in your life’ – weren’t suitable. In the end, in halting, flailing Punjabi – I could hear my brother collapsing in laughter if he ever heard the tape – I began by saying I wanted them to run through the story – the kahani – of what happened when first my father came to live with them in 1968, a year before my mother joined him.

  ‘Do you want the full story?’ asked my uncle.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  And so he began with the full story, starting by explaining how he ended up in the UK, an extraordinary tale which involved a stay in Singapore, a flight to Britain, a stint at a wool factory in Bradford, a stint working in a pie (or did he say tie?) factory in Huddersfield, a drunken fallout with a close relative in Gravesend, a return to India where he and my aunt were – get this – attacked by a bomb, or a grenade, while sitting at home, and an eventual return to England. And here you have the difference between Indian and Western narrative methods. Not only is there more drama, but while the Western way is linear – X happened, then Y happened, and, as a consequence, there was Z – the Indian method is roundabout and circular: there was X, and Q and D, and did I mention M? But after all the meandering, you usually end up in the same place, the point, which in this case was my uncle’s decision to settle down with his young wife, my father’s sister, and his young children in the south-east, where there was plentiful work in the paper mills and cement works. My father joined them in January 1968, more than a year before he was married, and my uncle got him a job where he worked, at Thermalite, a building materials company.

  ‘Was Dad well when he arrived?’

  ‘Yes. He used to play kabaddi and football and did weightlifting. He was really strong. Jwaan. We would work ten hours a day, five, six, sometimes seven days a week, but we played hard too – would drink two or three pints a night normally, five or six at the weekend. Your father ate loads as well. He would eat half a packet of butter with each meal. And I remember he had a really big and heavy topknot. Really thick hair.’

  The only bit of this description that wasn’t remarkable to me was the stuff about the butter. You could rewrite the National Health Service’s guidelines on healthy eating, replacing the word ‘vegetables’ with ‘ghee’, ‘fruit’ with ‘red meat’ and ‘water’ with ‘beer’, and you’d have a sense of what is considered healthy eating by Punjabi men. I remember once watching my twenty-stone grandfather melt an entire slab of Anchor in a saucepan of boiled milk and drink the concoction before bed. But every other detail was mesmerizing. Work and football and drinking might be normal things most dads do, but I’ve never seen my father do much of any of them. I remember him once coming home smelling of booze – I must have been around seven – and Mum berating him for it. At the time I thought she was being harsh – other dads went to the pub all the time, why couldn’t ours? But I understand now she was just looking out for him: alcohol and antipsychotics don’t mix. As for work, I have a few memories of Dad digging the vegetable patch at Prosser Street, and nowadays he can occasionally be persuaded to push the lawnmower while Mum holds the extension cord. But I’ve never seen him do any other work. Meanwhile I had assumed the weightlifting was one of Dad’s delusions. It was amazing to think he actually did it.* Thrilling to think that at one point he might have led a normal life.

  But as desperately as I wanted to believe it, something niggled at me about my uncle’s description: the topknot. Dad had never mentioned he had one, and I knew from his passport photo that he didn’t have long hair when he came to Britain. Was my uncle sure about the long hair?

  ‘Oh yes.’ My aunt nodded next to him. ‘He had a lot of hair. He used to wash his hair in lasee. He had his topknot cut off here in Britain.’

  ‘But in his passport photograph – in his first passport – he has short hair.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So, are you sure?’
/>   My uncle shrugged. ‘Maybe he cut his hair in India then …’

  If this had been an interview for a newspaper, I would have made an almighty fuss about this. Encounters with public figures are so controlled by public relations officials, so slick and dull and unrevealing, that the slightest slip becomes a big deal. But having been humbled by the enormous gaps and inconsistencies in my own memory, I overlooked the remark without qualification, gave my uncle total benefit of the doubt. These events happened a long time ago and this was possibly the first time he had discussed them. I simply repeated the question.

  ‘Was Dad really completely well in 1968?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No unusual behaviour?’

  ‘Nothing happened that year.’

  ‘He didn’t get into any fights?’

  ‘No, he didn’t fight with anyone.’

  At this point my aunt pushed the plate of Bombay mix on the table away from her, as if she’d suddenly lost her appetite, though she hadn’t actually touched it, and said: ‘Let me tell you something.’

  I groaned inwardly. Whenever Mum used this phrase it tended to be followed by some bleak admission that had me instantly gasping for a stiff drink. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of the jab before the knockout punch, the ‘We need to talk’ before the ‘You’re dumped’.

  ‘Some time during that first year with us, the family decided to send for your mother to come to Britain. For that we had to fill out a rahdari. You know what a rahdari is?’

  ‘A permit?’

  ‘Yes, a permit. We had to make an application, and your dad had to sponsor it. We went to Wolverhampton to fill it out. During that visit we were all sitting in your uncle Malkit’s house in Newport Street one evening. The men were drinking glasses of whisky and everyone was eating and your dad … suddenly … for no reason … smashed one of the glasses.’

  ‘He dropped it?’

  ‘No, he smashed it. With his bare hand. The glass was sitting on the table and he whacked it with his bare hand. With his palm. Like this.’ She slapped the table, making the tea in my cup leap over the brim into the saucer. ‘That’s when I first saw signs of how … angry he could be …’

  My uncle blinked. ‘I wasn’t there that day. Your aunt came back and told me about it.’

  My aunt continued. ‘Then there was the time we had to go to pick your mum up from the airport …’ The chronology on the table reminded me of the date: 16 March 1969, a cold day across the whole country, according to The Times. ‘Your father and your uncle were working on shifts: your uncle was on nights and your father on days. I woke your dad up at 4 a.m. and said: “Phuman is about to come back and we’re leaving at six.” He got up and came down to the kitchen for breakfast. I was pouring some tea when he came up close and … pushed me …’ My uncle shuffled next to my aunt on the sofa. ‘… Pushed me so hard that I fell on the floor. When I got up I asked him why he’d done it. But he didn’t answer. And when your uncle came back from work, he confronted him about it. Your father’s response was: “I didn’t do it, she must have fallen by herself.” I said he was lying and asked if he was going to carry on like this when his wife joined him. If he was, I didn’t want him to live with us any more. He replied: “If I did push you, I’m sorry. I made a mistake.” After that he didn’t touch me again, but he would stare at me. He had this stare. These terrible bloodshot eyes. It was like he wanted to eat me.’ Pools of moisture in her eyes. ‘I was terrified. But I thought he’d improve when your mum came.’

  This is an important point, and while it doesn’t excuse what happened, it needs to be stressed: the Indian obsession with marriage extends to believing it can cure mental illness. In a recent study from North India, nearly 18 per cent of male students and 50 per cent of female students surveyed believed that mental illness could be cured by marriage.* This may even explain my mother’s eagerness to get Puli married off so quickly, when she knew she was ill.

  ‘He didn’t get better though, did he?’

  My uncle, looking at some point over my shoulder, spoke after an interval.

  ‘Your mother didn’t say a word. And then he hit her.’

  ‘You’re talking about when you all came back from the wedding in Wolverhampton?’

  ‘On the wedding night he …’

  ‘Shhhhh,’ my aunt interjected. ‘Leave it there. Let’s just say life was hard for your mother.’

  ‘What were you about to say?’ I didn’t want to hear but needed to hear.

  ‘Couples didn’t have honeymoons then,’ my uncle continued. ‘They stayed at home. On that night he … When I woke up, I saw your mother’s face and what he’d done to her … I went and said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed? She has just come from India, has no family here and look what you’ve done.” He apologized and promised he wouldn’t do it again.’

  My aunt nodded mournfully. ‘Your mother told me in the morning what he’d done. She said she didn’t want to stay in Grays, wanted to go to Bibi’s in Wolverhampton, to be with the family. I said I would put her on the train. But when Cugi heard, he cried and said if Jito went to Wolverhampton, he wanted to go to Wolverhampton too. That was the thing about him – he treated Jito terribly but didn’t want to be away from her either. We had a talk and agreed that if he was good to Jito, then they could stay. They had no space for them in Wolverhampton anyway. But then …’

  My uncle finished my aunt’s sentence: ‘… then he started acting strange … again.’

  ‘How?’

  My aunt responded. ‘Well, son, whatever happened, happened … Things were hard for some time. Your mother was so strong. And then everything came to a head one bank holiday …’

  A braver, less involved journalist would, at this point, have pressed for more information. Indeed, a semi-brave journalist had written down the pertinent questions in the A4 pad sitting on my lap. Were most of Mum’s injuries scratches or bruises? Did they remember anything about the time Dad took Mum for a walk by the river, and began kicking her on the street, before they even got there? Did they know my father eventually told my mother she couldn’t leave the bedroom while he was at work, even to use the toilet? That he would check the bucket in the corner of the room at the end of the day, to make sure she had complied? A braver, less involved journalist would have asked all these questions, but my aunt was in tears, my uncle’s eyes were brimming with tears, I was struggling, and there was still so much more to get through, not least the bank holiday incident.

  My uncle told the story, which tallied almost exactly with Mum’s version. The whole family, except for my grandparents, had come down for a break on a bank holiday weekend, and as the guests arrived, the women began cooking in the kitchen, with Mum baking chapattis and placing them in metallic trays that had already been filled with servings of meat and sabzi. The children ferried the trays into the front room, where the men sat nursing tumblers of whisky, and once they had eaten, the children were served, and once the children had eaten, the young women served themselves, eating quietly, with their heads veiled, on the living room floor.

  After the tension of the preceding weeks Phuman and Bero must have felt like they were breathing pure oxygen. But then my father suddenly lashed out. Recollections diverge on who he lashed out at first: Mum says it was at Phuman; Phuman says it was at my uncle Malkit; my uncle Malkit would later remember that my father lashed out at my aunt Bero; but there is consensus on what happened as a result: Dad was bundled into a room upstairs, and the door locked, in the hope he would calm down. He didn’t calm down: he kicked the door down.

  ‘That’s when I went and got the police,’ recalled my uncle.

  ‘Did you call them?’

  ‘No, I went and got them. We didn’t have phones then. I went to the police station and they came to the house with dogs. They came and took him away.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes, the police. We went to bed, but a couple of hours later, the police let him go. They said he was drunk, and th
at he would be okay now, these things happen.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  Another divergence in accounts here. My aunt Bero says they took my father back in immediately. My mother, meanwhile, says he knocked on the door – he wasn’t screaming or ranting any more – but the family refused to let him back in. Defying warnings that she would surely be killed, Mum said she joined him outside, where he was sprawled across the pavement. She helped him up, and they began walking, wordlessly and aimlessly, around Grays. At some point they ended up on the bank of the river and Mum remembers crying. Not the silent howls of the preceding weeks, always trying not to disturb the other people in the house. But loud, guttural sobs. Behind her, Dad, his head between bandaged hands, wept too.

  Of the many disturbing images in my mother’s account, this one, of my young parents, both of them still teenagers, sobbing on the bank of the faithful river flowing past from the oldest and greatest of the world’s river ports towards the ends of the earth, is the one I found most troubling. They walked around town until the street lights began giving out to the dawn and when they returned to the house, it was arranged for them to move into a rented room in a house nearby: 11 Grange Road.

  My aunt’s justification for the decision was that ‘I thought he was arguing because of me and thought they may get on better alone.’ There may have been truth in that, but I can’t help suspecting that she and her husband had simply got to the point that all families eventually reach when they have schizophrenia in the family. They couldn’t cope any more. As Torrey puts it in Surviving Schizophrenia: ‘a family within which the patient has been assaultive or violent is particularly poignant and lives in a special circle of hell. Its members are often afraid of the patient yet at the same time feel sorry for him/her. The ambivalence inevitably felt by the family members is formidable; fear and love, avoidance and attraction, rest uneasily side by side.’