The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘And then, after a week or so, the doctors said I should try to meet your dad again, to see how he reacted. They had six or seven people in front of me, members of the family lining the way, just in case he tried to attack me. I walked up to him really slowly. I think the family had told him I had gone back to India, so it took him a while to work out it was me. And when he did, he didn’t get angry at all, he just cried. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone cry that much before.

  ‘After that I worked out how to get to the hospital myself. We used to get £6 a week in benefits: £2 would go to your Bibi, for groceries; £2 would go on rent and there would be £2 left, which I would use to buy bus tickets and fruit for your dad. I went whenever I could. But then, one day, your father, he just appeared at the door. Yes. At the front door of the house where we were renting rooms. This was a few weeks into his hospital stay. He’d escaped somehow and had walked all the way from Stafford. It must be nearly twenty miles. He must have found his way to the house just by asking people.

  ‘He looked so delighted to be back home and kept on saying: “I was worried you had gone back to India.” But everyone in the house was panicking. They must have thought he was going to kill me, after what had happened. But again, he wasn’t angry, he just looked relieved and he took me upstairs quietly. I don’t know if someone in the house called them, or whether the hospital did, but the police came to get him almost immediately. He was crying when they took him back. He didn’t want to go.’

  Again, so many questions. Mum made it sound like Dad had escaped from prison, whereas the letter made it sound like my father had checked out from hospital, in the way you might check out of a spa out of sheer boredom. Mum said he was dragged back to hospital by the police, but the letter suggests he didn’t even go back to hospital. There is no mention in the letter, or in my father’s medical notes, of any interviews at any point with my mother. Could something have been removed? I don’t know. I still cannot explain these things. But my mother’s comments – ‘the consultant couldn’t believe how little I knew about marriage and life’, ‘your father took me upstairs’ – and the nine and a half calendar months between the escape or discharge, whatever you want to call it, and my sister Puli’s birth, explained why she stuck with my father. There’s only one thing more unacceptable than a divorced woman in the Punjab: a single mother.

  17. Stay (Faraway, So Close)

  The family gathered to watch me open the letter: Bindi, staying over with her two baby boys, leaning against the radiator; Rajah’s bicep bulging like a cushion against the banister; Ruky, smiling serenely on the stairs; Puli, flat and quiet, next to me by the telephone; Mum muttering ‘Waheguru, waheguru’ under the picture of the Golden Temple; and Dad lurking in the living room doorway, so he could return to Channel 4 as quickly as possible.

  I ran a finger over the white envelope, lingering over the college coat of arms in the corner, and everyone, except Dad, leaned forward as I flipped it over.

  ‘Only one sheet of paper inside,’ I said, tugging at the flap and feeling like Charlie Bucket looking for the fifth Gold Ticket. ‘They would have sent forms if I’d got in.’

  Mum broke off from praying. ‘What did he say?’

  My brother translated.

  Dad shouted out from the back. ‘What did he say?’ There was panic in his voice. Anything out of the ordinary – a Jehovah’s Witness, an English voice on the telephone – makes him jumpy.

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ Mum retorted, before turning to me. ‘Just open the chithi, will you? What will happen will happen, nothing will change your kismet.’

  If that’s the case, I thought, then why are you praying? But as this wasn’t the right time for theological debate – there’s never a right time for theological debate at home – I unfurled the letter and squinted at the text.

  Thank you for coming to Cambridge for interviews in November. We were glad to have the opportunity to meet you …

  Shit. The classic introduction to every rejection letter. I’d been writing to local newspapers for some time now, asking for work experience or opportunities to write and they all began like this. Thanks for your letter and sample article. BUT it was derivative. BUT the prose was overwrought. BUT we don’t have space for 2,000 words on why Atzec Camera were better than A-ha.

  But, there was no ‘BUT’ this time.

  ‘So?’ My brother’s expectant face.

  ‘Um.’ I felt tiny.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Er.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do you mean Yeah?’ He slapped me on the back. ‘You mean YEAH!’

  Through the hugs and blessings that followed, I heard Puli saying, ‘I knew you’d do it,’ my mother weeping and Bindi asking Ruky: ‘So where is Oxbridge anyway?’ The telephone rang before the news that I was going to inspect the wonder of Mr Wonka’s chocolate factory had sunk in. It was Robin offering congratulations and asking whether I’d read the letter in full. I thought she meant: tell me what it says. But what she meant was: I know what it says, but do you understand? In my confusion, I read it out to her, the words passing through my brain undigested. Matriculation offer. Pass two A-levels. The condition that you remain at school until next summer …

  There was a lengthy interval before the penny dropped.

  ‘So I just need to get two E grades to get in?’

  ‘Yes. But you’re not going to give up, are you?’

  ‘I just have to turn up and sign my name on the exam papers really?’

  ‘Yes. But you’re not going to give up, are you?’

  ‘Two E grades, you say?’

  I promised Robin I wouldn’t give up, and became even more determined when I discovered that the college had called school to ask whether I’d be more motivated by a ‘three A offer’, or a ‘2E’ offer. Robin, knowing I was an emotional cripple, and had no chance of making the three As I had been optimistically predicted, had made a case for the easy offer, and I knew that if I gave up and lowered the school’s overall exam grades as a result, she’d be held responsible. But when it came down to a choice between memorizing bits of Ferdinand Mount’s The British Constitution and my other commitment – feeling crap – there was no contest. I gave up on school work and took up crying, full-time.

  I’m reluctant to call it depression because the word is overused and because when you have mental illness in your family it’s uncomfortable to admit you might be susceptible yourself. But it was the unhappiest I have ever been – even the trauma of the last few months seems like one long cocktail in the Lanesborough compared to those grim months. What was behind it? Well, I think it was in part your normal teenage Samuel Beckett blues, in part, with the pressure of work removed, a delayed reaction to the chaos of the preceding year, but mostly, it was guilt.

  Of course, on the face of it, everyone was chuffed. Some of my cousins had gone to university by this stage, but no one in the family had been to Oxbridge and Mum played the role of the proud mother with aplomb – she was on the phone for the rest of the day telling anyone who would listen that her son was going to ‘Kerm-bridge’. Meanwhile, my brother was more than just pleased for me. In the hallway that morning I saw something new in his eyes: determination. He’d drifted at school, but would soon be taking evening classes, enrolling at university, earning a degree, part-time, and then an MBA, his career taking off in parallel.

  But the family response was more complicated than that. Behind Puli’s smile, for instance, there was disappointment. She’d been a straight A student once: struggling through her illness to study for her O-levels and A-levels. But while teachers had talked about university, Mum had talked about husbands. After her marriage ended she had enrolled on a course at Wolverhampton University, but again illness had stopped her in her tracks.

  And then there were my parents. As much as Mum twirled chillies around my head to fend off the nazar apparently coming my way, there was something in the precise way in
which she quoted me to visitors (‘It’s the best university for his chosen subject’) and something in her questions (‘You say this college is much better than any in the Midlands?’) that betrayed her feelings. I was abandoning her. Worse than that, my brother and I were both abandoning her. It was clear by this stage that Rajah and Ruky were going to have to, at some stage, move out. They needed their own space. And with Puli now saying she wanted to get married, it meant that after everything, my parents were going to be living alone. Their ultimate nightmare. It was left to Dad, with his emotional directness, to articulate their anxiety. He walked into my bedroom on the morning of the letter and asked:

  ‘Isn’t there a school …’ Any educational establishment is a school for Dad ‘… a school you could attend in Wolverhampton?’

  ‘Dedi.’ I tried to force out a laugh. ‘I’ll be coming back all the time. Twice a month … or …’ The commitment was already being diluted ‘… once a month at least. And I’ll be here every Christmas and Easter and in the summer too.’

  Mingled with the guilt was confusion at what had happened. On one level it was clear. I’d got a government-assisted place at an academic school where everyone was expected to apply for university. I’d done better than expected in my GCSEs. My enthusiasm for pop lyrics had developed into an enthusiasm for English Literature. I’d gone along with a teacher’s suggestion I apply for Cambridge. I’d visited on an Open Day, I’d admired the lawns, my brother had loaned me his best blazer for the interview – ‘You want to lend my jacket?’ – I’d made a mental note not to get confused between ‘borrow’ and ‘lend’ in the interview, a softly-spoken tutor with an inability to make eye contact had asked me to discuss a Shakepearean sonnet I’d seen before, and when he asked why I wanted to read English, I’d quoted what C. S. Lewis had said about how we read to know we are not alone, adding that without art and literature and music, life would be utterly meaningless, a list of random and fucking painful events, and he had made a note about me on a form. A common enough grammar school tale.

  But what had happened to my other ambitions? When did I stop wanting to work in a bank? Wasn’t I still keen on maths? After all, I’d taken the subject for A-level alongside English and Politics. When had doing something I enjoyed replaced the need to make money and look after my parents? When did leaving home become part of the plan? My sisters would leave when they were old enough to have arranged marriages, but my brother and I were always going to be around. That’s how our family had always worked: my father and Chacha looked after their mother and father, and my brother and I would look after ours. I could see that I’d got from A to B, but couldn’t see why I’d done it.

  This sense of disconnection remained as winter defrosted into spring and spring bloomed into summer. Sometimes I went to school, sometimes I didn’t, and no one particularly cared either way. Sometimes I spent evenings at home, sometimes I stayed at Robin’s or Dave’s and no one particularly cared either way. I stopped socializing: my classmates were understandably whipping themselves into a frenzy as exams approached, and began the task of trying to fulfil their three, four and five A-grade offers with universities across the country; and I couldn’t stand being treated like a lottery winner when I felt like death. I recoiled from family life too, sitting locked away in my bedroom listening to the Counting Crows, or reading Evelyn Waugh and occasionally trying to revise.

  In the end I gave up preparing for exams and volunteered to paint the house. I did this for the same reason I volunteer to make the Christmas lunch every year: it is a way you can ask to be left alone, without being rude. Shut the door. Do not disturb. I’m busy doing something useful. Swaying on the tops of ladders, with blistered hands, I didn’t feel so bad. I turned up to exams with flecks of paint in my hair, and made my way through questions with the aid of half-remembered essays and what I’d read in The Times that morning. On the last day of school I showed up, as tradition dictated, to sign the shirts of classmates I’d known for seven years, and to have my shirt signed in return. The only message I remember is: ‘Don’t kill yourself Sang’. It was no great loss when Mum stuck the shirt in the wash.

  I visited the most prestigious temping agency in Wolverhampton the same day, and the day after I started as a laundry assistant at the hospital where I’d been born, where my sister had been committed, and where, unbeknownst to me, my father had been committed too. On paper, it was the worst job in the world, as it required standing at a conveyor belt for eight hours a day, next to three monosyllabic, bitter colleagues, sorting hospital sheets smothered in shit, pus, vomit and hunks of post-operative flesh. As it was high summer, some of this flesh would be partially decomposed by the time it arrived, and occasionally surgeons would leave scalpels in the bags, which, if they cut you in any way, would result in emergency tests for fatal diseases. But I didn’t mind it. It was £4.50 an hour, better than the job I’d had at Burger King a couple of summers before, and the silence at the conveyor belt was golden.

  Though I did eventually strike up an unlikely friendship with one of my embittered and monosyllabic colleagues: unlikely because, judging from the leaflets lying around the back seat of his Astra, he was a BNP sympathizer; and doubly unlikely because we bonded over his assertion one morning, made in response to something on the radio, that ‘Billie Jean’ was the finest pop song ever recorded. I suppose I could have used the admission to tackle his bigotry: to point out, for instance, that Michael Jackson was, at one point at least, black, and that the video ‘Billie Jean’ was not only a brilliant, hypnotic piece of choreography but culturally significant for the way it helped break down the race barrier on MTV. But I didn’t. I simply used the remark as an excuse to enliven my conveyor belt hours with pop-related banter, discussing whether the Beatles were overrated, whether Face Value by Phil Collins was underrated, and arguing about who did the better version of ‘The Look of Love’: Dusty Springfield or Deacon Blue.* This is about as principled as I get. Were I in charge of the Western World’s War on Terror, I’d be issuing immunity to any terrorist demonstrating a passing knowledge of the Fine Young Cannibals’ back catalogue.

  I went to collect my A-level results one Thursday morning, before the start of the afternoon shift. By the time I’d arrived, everyone was celebrating or commiserating in the pub down the road, and the school corridors had never felt so empty. I looked up Dave’s result first – all As. He was off to Cambridge too. Lock, who had ambitions to play drums in a rock band, was off to Lancaster. I didn’t need to search for my name in the list: my grades stuck out among the battery size achievements of my former classmates: ‘CAC’. I would have felt bad if the school hadn’t already sent out a press release hailing the best set of results in its history and if Robin wasn’t by this stage talking about quitting her job to follow her boyfriend to Italy, where she would take up a post as an English language teacher.

  I made the mistake of responding when I got into work and my BNP friend asked me how I’d done.

  ‘Bit shit.’

  ‘Whatya get?’

  ‘Two Cs …’ I should have left it there. ‘And an … A.’

  Judging from his hooting, you’d have thought I’d just confessed to having spent a weekend shooting on Papa’s estate in Norfolk. ‘One got twoh Cs and an Ah grade in one’s A-levels. Smashing! Orf to Oxford aaare we?’

  ‘Cambridge actually.’

  Our pop banter tailed off after that.

  At home, the event of the summer was Puli’s wedding. She’d been fixed up with a boy from India, hungry for a wife and a passport. I knew what I thought this time, but when I asked if she really wanted to get married, she said she did. She wanted to get on with her life, she said. Move on. Be normal. Which sounded fair enough. The wedding was meant to be a small affair, no party, a meal at the temple, but Punjabis are in capable of doing anything with any kind of subtlety, and soon an aunt in Grays was inviting a sister-in-law who was ‘on holiday’ from India, who was mentioning it to an uncle in Chandigarh, who wa
s calling his brother-in-law in Wolverhampton, telling him to make sure he popped over to pay his respects – family is family, after all – and Mum was saying that, on reflection, we should probably invite the family who lived next door to us on Springfield Road (they had been so good over the business with the blackcurrants) and before we knew it, a crowd of what felt like 300 people was waving goodbye as Puli was driven off to her new life a mile away.

  We all cried again, but Mum didn’t stop, as she switched from the task of preparing my sister’s trousseau to preparing my trousseau for university. It grew like a hillock on the bed my father would soon return to. Duvets; pillows; jars of Bombay mix; blankets; pictures of the Gurus; boxes of Weetabix and Shredded Wheat and Cornflakes; steel tins of sugar and spices, boxes of paracetamol; cups; saucers; plates; soup/cereal bowls; boxes of long-life milk (just in case); packets of Maryland Cookies; Penguin bars; prayer books I couldn’t read; spoons; dinner knives; dinner forks; teaspoons; dessertspoons; dessert knives; dessert forks; serving spoons; a toaster, two sets of salt and pepper mills; a cheese grater; socks; Y-fronts; a saucepan …

  I objected to the saucepan.

  ‘Mum, I’ll be eating in the canteen.’

  ‘But you’ll need a saucepan to make yourself tea.’

  ‘I’ll get a kettle.’

  ‘A kettle?’

  ‘Yes. Electric. Kettle.’

  ‘You’re going to have gora tea? You can’t live on gora tea. There’s no …’ Her eyes were rolling. ‘There’s no takat in it.’

  ‘There are millions of people in the country who make their tea by boiling water in kettles, and they are fine.’

  ‘But you like Indian tea.’

  ‘I like English tea.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I started …’ I couldn’t actually remember ‘… working at the laundry.’