Looking back at what I’ve written, I worry I’m being hyperbolic. Did things really change so completely? Did my old personality and insecurities vanish into the Wolverhampton canal along with my disembodied plait?* Well, I have compressed events – these changes took place over a year or two – and the old urge to hide under a table didn’t disappear, it would re-emerge, as it still does, at the oddest times, like a draught under a door. Otherwise, yes, things were like this. However, as my personal life began gliding along like a Sunseeker yacht cruising the Caribbean, my home life began to increasingly resemble a North Sea trawler in a force ten gale.
By this stage, all my siblings had been through the marriage mill at least once. Bindi had been married off to a bright and handsome turbaned boy from India, with whom she already had a baby boy. My brother had married his sweetheart Ruky, a beautiful, happy girl from down the road, and one of the best things that has ever happened to our family. Meanwhile Puli was back at home, her marriage having failed. It transpired that her mullet-haired husband was in love with an unsuitable girl – whose existence he had revealed to Puli on their honeymoon – and he’d only gone through the arranged marriage to please his father. In the event the betrothal lasted eleven months and for the final six months of those he didn’t speak to Puli. Despite this, it took him actually running away from his parents’ house for the families to accept that the marriage wasn’t going to work.
You might have thought my mother’s delight at Bindi’s marriage, and Rajah’s marriage, in particular, might have outweighed her anxieties about Puli’s divorce. After all, my brother had got engaged as soon as Mum had discovered he was dating; his wife was the right religion, caste, age, skin colour and height, displayed many traditional homely virtues, and was happy to move in with us. But it wasn’t. She took the breakdown of Puli’s marriage badly, as personally as she’d taken the arrangement, and my chief memory of the aftermath is of her sitting on the settee in the living room raging and wailing a monologue in front of various visitors that went along the lines of: ‘My God what sins and crimes did I commit in my previous life that I be given a kismet like this dear lord why was I born why does God make me suffer so …’
In contrast, Puli seemed to take it well, carrying herself like someone who’d been in a road accident but survived. After the initial shock, I thought I saw relief and then determination to make the most of her second chance. She quit her job at the council and got a part-time job in a chemist’s. She took up a range of alternative therapies, became vegetarian, cut her hair and had it styled. She enrolled on a women’s studies course at Wolverhampton University and developed a tendency to make proclamations that went along the lines of: ‘All my life I’ve been doing things for other people looking after them doing things to please them but now I want to be my own person in my own right and I’m no longer afraid of doing what I want to do …’
These declarations, which sometimes came in response to requests such as ‘Like some tea?’, or in the middle of Brookside, made me cringe sometimes, but I never considered them odd. And neither did I consider it odd that she would stand at the front door for five or ten minutes every night, checking and re-checking that it had been locked, that she would sometimes call home from work to check whether she’d left a window open or left the iron on, that she and Mum would argue bitterly in the bedroom they now shared, almost every night. The arguments actually made sense. Mum had by this stage started talking about another marriage and Puli was refusing to entertain the possibility.
I didn’t understand why Mum was in such a rush to get Puli married off again. But then I didn’t really understand anything. I didn’t understand that Puli had taken herself off the medication that had kept her stable since 1986, for the schizophrenia she still didn’t realize she had. I didn’t understand that Puli’s sleeplessness, irritability and vagueness were the signs of an impending schizophrenic relapse. I didn’t understand that my mother’s sobs following the arguments weren’t those of self-pity, but a result of the fear of witnessing yet another mental breakdown, and the beginning of a depression that she would eventually have to be medicated for. And I didn’t understand that in her urge to get Puli married off, she was, in a strange but very Indian way, trying to save her.
All I felt was a profound sense of emotional claustrophobia and the universal teenage urge to get out of the house. And I got the perfect opportunity when to my surprise, and to the surprise of more popular pupils whose support was catastrophically fragmented, and to the surprise of the staff who wrote violent notes objecting, I was elected by my school year to be head boy. The job didn’t, on paper, involve a great deal: I had to mutter ‘Dismiss by rows’ at the end of school assemblies to indicate it was time for everyone to shuffle off to lessons, and got to hand out detentions if kids were particularly rude to prefects. But I managed to make it almost a full-time job, and as the role changed my relationship with teachers, who suddenly seemed to notice I was a human being with actual thoughts and feelings, I got the chance to develop several close friendships with staff, most importantly and permanently with my English teacher and tutor, Robin Roberts, who lived half an hour away with her boyfriend, Steve, and whose house I began visiting whenever I could.
No other period of my life is more difficult to unpick than what followed. And no other period makes me question my ignorance of the schizophrenia running in my family. Did I choose not to know? There are things both Dave and Robin say I told them that I can’t, even with their descriptions, remember happening. And it makes no sense why the gap between Puli’s account and my memory is so oceanic, when I saw more of her than any other member of the family. Most evenings I was locked away in my bedroom working, or away at Robin’s or Dave’s, so I didn’t see much of Rajah and Ruky and Mum, who were away at work. But I was at home most afternoons after school, and Puli was there with me and Dad, as I had my turkey burger sandwiches and watched telly. There was even one time when I watched a video of Mel Gibson’s Hamlet with her. The play was an A-level set text and I’d got the film out because I was having problems getting into it. One of the essay titles? ‘Was Hamlet mad? Discuss.’
Every time I excavate, the narrative comes out differently. But here is an attempt.
I remember walking into Puli’s room one of those afternoons and finding her in the middle of a yoga exercise. She was dressed in a tracksuit, her knees drawn up to her head, her hands under her knees, and with her spine rounded was swinging back and forth, like a human rocking chair. I tiptoed out, thinking nothing more of what I saw. She’d been doing yoga for some time, at home and also, once a week, at the Dudley Health Centre. But I might have given it more consideration if I’d come back a few hours later. Puli tells me now that in the early stages of her breakdown she would sometimes stay in that position rocking back and forth, back and forth, for up to four hours at a time.
I remember mowing the lawn (gardening was a way of escaping the claustrophobia of the house), opening the wheelie-bin to throw away the cuttings and finding a photo album full of Puli’s wedding pictures. Some of them had been scratched and defaced. As with the yoga, I thought nothing much of it. Mum had disposed of the wedding videos in an act of anger weeks before. If anything, I was surprised Puli hadn’t thrown them out sooner. I tipped the cuttings over them, slammed the bin shut and didn’t worry about the discovery. But if I’d dug deeper into the bin, Puli tells me now I would have found something to worry about: she had thrown her family photo albums away too. And some of those photos had been scratched and defaced as well.
I remember another time, talking to Puli in her bedroom: I’d popped into her room to show her some of my poetry. I still liked maths, but Robin had made me realize that my predilection for pop lyrics could be extended into literature, and I fancied myself as the Asian Seamus Heaney. But as I handed over my latest awful composition – thank God I didn’t circulate the work further – I noticed her twitching and looking agitated, so I asked if she was okay. ‘My boss hates
me,’ she said. Her pupils seemed to have contracted. ‘The bitch is always talking about me behind my back.’ It wasn’t an extreme expletive, nowhere near as offensive as the insults I bandied about at school, but still, it was the first time I had heard any of my siblings swear. We never swore at home. ‘It’s all in your head,’ I said, rushing out of the room, not realizing how right I was. ‘Try not to worry about it.’
I remember the arguments between Puli and Mum becoming so bad that Mum began sleeping downstairs, in the living room. My father was already sleeping downstairs by this stage, in the front room, because he was having difficulty sleeping, which gave me difficulty sleeping, which distracted me from studying. I remember feeling guilty that my parents had both been reduced to sleeping on impromptu mattresses in their own home. The guilt intensified when I tiptoed downstairs one night, to sneak away some of the whisky left over from my brother’s wedding, and heard Mum crying, alone. I wanted to ask what was wrong, but couldn’t risk her smelling the booze on my breath.
I remember having my first and last and only argument with Dad. As part of my Dave-influenced gentrification, I had begun using the monotone of Radio 4 to mask the racket of crashing pans from the kitchen, the R ’n’ B pulsating from my brother’s bedroom, and the fights raging around the house. But I noticed, increasingly, that on the rare occasions I left my bedroom, my father would be walking down the stairs, or just entering the bathroom, or standing on the landing. Eventually, I realized he was lurking outside my door. I didn’t wonder why he was doing it, just knew it made me uncomfortable, and things came to a head one morning when I went to have a bath and returned to my bedroom to find Dad sitting on my bed, one ear to the radio, like the HMV dog. Irritated, confused and adolescent, I screamed at him to get out and – not knowing what I was saying – accused him of being as mad as Hari, the nutter who used to walk around Park Village with a ghetto-blaster on his shoulder. I remember the flash of anger in his eyes and his plea afterwards. ‘But Hari … Hari is … mad.’ I felt afterwards like I’d kicked a kitten in the face, and thinking about it now, it feels even worse because I understand that he was experiencing auditory hallucinations, as his own mental health condition was exacerbated by the stress of what was happening to Puli. ‘Unfortunately he has been suffering from sleeplessness,’ explains a letter in his medical notes. ‘His elder daughter is also suffering from vague and bizarre symptoms, suggestive of acute stress reaction and depressive illness. She has been under consideration for assessment under the Mental Health Act 1983. However, this domestic upheaval has not helped Mr Sanghera …’
I remember Puli sitting making notes in the living room as I watched Neighbours. She always seemed to be making notes. I assumed they were related to her studies. But they were more than that. ‘When I started writing, I couldn’t stop,’ she remembers. ‘It was the same with other things. If I did yoga, I couldn’t stop. If I started laughing, I would keep on laughing. If I started crying, I would keep on crying. Once I started writing, I would get carried away and start writing all this stuff about witches, how I felt they were possessing me, about how I could melt witches with hot water. That’s how ill I was. It’s painful to think I handed in some of that stuff to the tutors. I take such pride in my public behaviour, and yet … I actually did that.’
I don’t remember Puli locking herself in the bathroom and threatening suicide, though I must have known it happened as Robin says I mentioned it to her.
I don’t remember doctors coming to see Puli, but they did. ‘One of them came when I chucked all my belongings out of the bedroom,’ she says. ‘He asked me what I was doing and I said I was clearing things out because I felt so well, because I’d come off my medication and was feeling so good about life, that getting rid of the stuff was like getting rid of bad memories. He listened to me and gave me a piece of paper saying I was okay. And then when the other doctors came, I showed it to them. I really did believe I was fine, but I was actually getting worse and worse. It got so bad that at one point I ran in front of a bus. I thought that if I was hit on the head, if I had a blackout, then that would sort out what was wrong in my head, and I would wake up normal. The driver managed to stop before he hit me. But I can still remember the way he looked at me, afterwards, just before I ran off.’
I don’t remember Puli barricading herself in her room, but I remember there being a lot of commotion in the house one day and my brother asking whether I had somewhere to be for the rest of the day. As it happened, I did have somewhere to be. I had a date, with a girl called Amanda: she was in my English set and from Bridgnorth and wanted to study English at university like I did. She met me off the bus, gave me a volume of W. B. Yeats’s poetry, and after wandering around town, we kissed. My technique wasn’t passive any more: if anything, I’d gone too far the other way and it must have looked like I was trying to give the poor girl mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She ended things before they had really begun soon afterwards, with a gentleness beyond her years: it was less like being dumped than being put to sleep before an operation. I heard later, through the grapevine, that she considered me ‘a little intense’.
By the time I came back home – I think I spent an evening at Dave’s after seeing Amanda – Puli had gone. I don’t remember being in the house when the police and ambulance came. All I recall is coming home late in the evening, with Dave – we’d been for a drink in a pub near my house, and he was staying over because he couldn’t drive home – and Mum telling me in our darkened hallway that Puli had been taken away. I remember hugging her, and crying in my bedroom. I remember Dave’s kindness in not looking embarrassed as I did so. And of the six weeks Puli subsequently spent in hospital, I remember visiting only once, and of that visit I recall nothing of what Puli looked like, of what she said, of what I said, only the shaking and slobbering of the patients around us. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I put it down to a nervous breakdown.
But Puli remembers events differently. It was one of the things she asked to write, rather than talk about. ‘You were in the house when the police and the ambulance came,’ her letter began. ‘Initially I refused to co-operate, tried to convince everyone I wasn’t ill. But then I heard someone breaking down in tears downstairs. At the time, I thought it was Dad. But later, when I came back home from hospital, Mum told me it had been Rajah. It was hearing those sobs that made me accept I was going to have to go to hospital. I suddenly felt exhausted and started to doubt myself. You were there at the time. I’ll never forget the look on your face, when the police came, and I was going on and on, spouting out all the nonsense that came into my head. You looked disgusted. And it took me by surprise.
‘And I remember you visiting me in hospital. You came with Dad and Rajah. I was surprised when a nurse said I had visitors – I had been feeling isolated and had not expected or even wanted visitors. I walked up the corridor in a kind of daydream. And there you all were, walking towards me, from the opposite end of the corridor.
‘Seeing your faces … I think that was the only time during my hospital stay I felt positive emotion, almost delight. It was a special moment for me. You all looked so handsome, even Dad. It was like I hadn’t seen you in years. I was glad at that moment that I had family and wasn’t alone in the world. As you saw me, you quickened your pace and hugged me. It was the most genuine, true-hearted hug I had ever had. It was just what I needed. Then Rajah hugged me. And then Dad hugged me too, which meant a lot, because I know hugs aren’t always easy for Dad.’
16. Summer of ’69
I returned from Essex determined to maintain the momentum. No longer was I going to get hung up on what to write and how to write it – that was something to worry about later; the drinking had to stop – at least, the daytime drinking had to reduce; and I had to focus like a panther on the task at hand, namely, gathering all the corroborating evidence I could find. Besides, verifying the next bit of Mum’s account was going to be a relative breeze. She’d told me that doctors were involved with my fath
er almost as soon as he arrived in Wolverhampton in his £25 taxi cab. Doctors always take notes. And every patient has a right to see a copy of their medical records under the Data Protection Act of 1998.
After permitting myself only the briefest wobble about the ethics of viewing them – on the one hand, my father did not understand the significance of the request, on the other my mother, in her legal capacity as his carer, was keen on me deciphering the notes* – Mum submitted a request with Dr Dutta, the eldest of three Indian-trained GPs who look after my parents (the other two being his wife and son-in-law). He took £15 for photocopying fees, as he was entitled to, said the notes would shortly arrive in the post, and we began waiting.
The adjective in the preceding paragraph that should have alerted me to the anguish that followed was ‘Indian’. As anyone who has visited the subcontinent will know, Indians tend not to so much follow regulations as acknowledge them with a noncommittal yes/no headroll, before ultimately resisting them, and this is what happened with my mother’s request. After a couple of weeks, a follow-up query from Mum produced the claim that the file was large and taking longer than expected to photocopy. And then, some time after that, the youngest of the doctors, Dr Dutta’s son-in-law, took her aside as she waited to see a doctor on another matter, and bombarded her with paranoid questions. Why do you want to see the notes? Why does your son want to write a book about you? Does he know what your husband did to you in your early marriage? Why can’t he write about something more cheerful?
The Boy with the Topknot Page 24