The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘You’ll be saying you prefer that water the goras pass off as milk next.’ Mum was still having gold-capped milk bottles delivered.

  ‘Semi-skimmed milk is healthier, especially as Indians have a predisposition to heart disease.’

  ‘Pah! Your grandfather lived to ninety and he ate a packet of butter a day.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Look – I’ve bought it now, it’s brand new. And it comes with your mother’s love.’ I knew what was coming next: she’d employed the same argument for the apron and the kitchen gloves. ‘You should never deny a gift from your mother.’

  The emotional tension intensified. Whenever a visitor popped over, Mum, mentioning the hillock, would say: ‘It’s like packing off a daughter in marriage.’ Which, of course, translated: ‘It’s like losing a son.’ I began having nightmares about the departure scene: my mother standing in the doorway, pressing money she couldn’t afford into my hand; my father in tears; both running after the departing car, their feet splashing in the rain, screaming for it to stop.

  It was a relief therefore when my parents accepted my brother’s suggestion that they go to India for a holiday. He pointed out the facts: he and his wife could look after the house while they were away; he would help pay the fare; I was going to be away at college; the weather in India was lovely in September; their daughters were married; my mother was no longer working (the years of sewing had taken their toll on her back and shoulders, and she had retired out of ill health); and they hadn’t been to India for more than fifteen years. And so Mum started packing, for the third time that summer.

  They left early one morning, and in the end the only tears shed were my brother’s. In my self-absorption, I’d not considered how he felt about things. He was married, had a swish job at an investment centre in Birmingham, was a rock for my parents and suddenly seemed so grown up. But still, he was only twenty-two, and the longest he had ever spent away from home was his honeymoon fortnight. The silence that descended upon the house when Mum and Dad left was deeper even than the one that had claimed the school corridors. It was as if some pandemic had claimed us all.

  On my way back home after my last day at the laundry, I decided to take a trip down memory lane, or, more specifically, down Prosser Street, which was only a quarter of an hour from the hospital. It was a surprise to find the houses had all shrunk in size and that the alleyways we used to tear down had been gated shut, and a shock to find that Mrs Burgess’s shop had been closed and boarded up. Somehow, I’d always expected it to be there. I stood on the corner, dismayed, remembering her funny expressions – someone with no hair had a head ‘like a bladder of lard’, posh people were ‘all fur coat and no knickers’ – and realized I’d never said goodbye. Was she still alive?

  The plan was to go and see what had happened to our house, but when I looked down the street – somehow the houses that had been renovated in the eighties looked more in need of modernizing than those left untouched – I saw Chacha teaching me to ride a bike on the pavement, Baba heaving his extraordinary frame out of our front door, six of his grandchildren scampering around him, Bindi coming back from work, smart and proud in her Safeway uniform, Rajah setting off to town in a white blazer with the sleeves rolled up (a look inspired by a Glenn Madeiros performance on Top of the Pops), my father taking me to school, Pussy and Lucky sunning themselves on a window ledge, Puli carrying home the bread and butter pudding she’d made in Home Economics, my cousin Nicki running down the street having been caught washing a kitten in a toilet, my cousins Pumi and Gurdeep playing hopscotch, Chachi hoovering the inside of Chacha’s Cortina, Bibi off to the gurdwara, my mother beating a rug clean on a doorstep … and suddenly it seemed a better idea to catch a bus home.

  The next day Robin and Steve drove me to Cambridge. They gasped when they saw the amount of stuff waiting to be loaded into the car, but didn’t object when I said I wanted to take everything. Steve drove, Robin sat in the front, and I sat in the back, a box at my feet, a box on my lap and the handle of a saucepan digging into my ribs whenever we took a right turn.

  18. Unfinished Sympathy

  Mr Jonathan Robinson

  Office Manager, Crown Court

  Wolverhampton Combined Crown and County Court Pipers Row

  Wolverhampton

  West Midlands

  WV1 3LQ

  Dear Mr Robinson,

  My name is Sathnam Sanghera and I’m writing to request information related to a case that was heard by Wolverhampton Crown Court in the mid-seventies. I’m currently working on a family memoir which will need to mention the legal proceedings, and on a recent visit to your offices, I was advised that you were the best person to contact about accessing the relevant records in your archive. It was suggested I write to you, enclosing ‘as much detail about the case as possible’. So, here, as requested, is the long story.

  The case concerns my father, Jagjit Singh Sanghera, who is now aged fifty-six. At the time of prosecution in 1975 he was aged twenty-five, five years younger than I am now, a resident of the Park Village in Wolverhampton, and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia for more than five years. I am reluctant to ask him about what happened because he is still ill and I do not wish to distress him, and while my mother has been able to provide me a detailed account of what happened, she cannot recall the exact timings, the name of the lawyer eventually hired to represent my father, and, as she doesn’t speak or write English, hasn’t been able to provide precise details of the charges and plea entered: basic information I need to confirm before I set pen to paper.

  You’re not the first person I’ve tried to get this basic information from, Mr Robinson. I’ve submitted several subject access requests under the 1998 Data Protection Act with the West Midlands police force, using various spellings and misspellings of my father’s name, but received letters back saying they can’t help. I’ve written to the chief executive of the hospital where my father was treated following his period in custody, and received no reply. My family have requested to view my father’s medical records, again under the Data Protection Act of 1998, but, for reasons I do not understand, the notes contain no reference to the incident that led to his arrest or to his subsequent treatment, and his GP, also for reasons I do not understand, has not responded to a request to discuss his recollection of events. Meanwhile, when I figured out that when my mother referred to Dad’s time in ‘Weesum Prison’, she meant Winson Green in Birmingham, I wrote to the governor, asking whether the prison might have records of who was held in custody in the seventies and what for. A man from his office rang a few days later – some enthusiasm, at last, I thought – but only to say they couldn’t help. They didn’t have information going that far back, he said. Did he know of any way of getting hold of such information? No. Could he suggest the name of anyone who maybe worked at the prison in … Click. A dead line.

  To be honest, this lack of helpfulness has come as a surprise, Mr Robinson. Before I started this project, I worked as a newspaper feature writer, and I very rarely had problems getting background information. I only had to mention the name of the artist, politician or entrepreneur I was writing about and suddenly young women called Lucy from PR departments across London were leaving voicemail messages mispronouncing my name and suggesting they supply the information required over lunch at Claridges. But with this, nothing. Perhaps this is what it is like not having the back-up of a major media organization? Or perhaps I am doing something wrong? Should I hand-write my requests? Or use a different grade of paper?

  Frankly, I would have given up if I could, Mr Robinson. But I can’t. There’s another letter waiting to be written, already years overdue, on which my own future depends, but I can’t start that until I’ve laid out my parents’ story on paper. Which is why I have recently resorted to spending days at the Wolverhampton Local Archive, flicking through copies of the Express & Star, around the dates I know my father was hospitalized in the seventies, on the off-chance that one of those committals w
as the result of the incident for which he was arrested, and on the off-chance that the local paper might have covered it. I have also asked a professional researcher to help me get the names and addresses of prison officers who worked at Winson Green in the mid-seventies, in the hope they might be able to suggest a way forward.

  I was about to call one of these names when, sifting blankly through my mother’s records, a thin and impenetrable file of Punjabi papers related to my father’s land in India, I finally had a much overdue flicker of good luck when the following scrap of paper fell out:

  Although I spent most Saturday mornings of my early youth attending Punjabi school, I’m afraid I couldn’t decipher my mother’s handwriting, but I could see there were four dates – 1/7/75; 15/8/75; 18th something; 26/9/75 – and when I showed them to my mother, after a period of prolonged squinting, she said the dates were, according to her notes, when my father was ‘caught by the police’ (‘Police ne pharhiya’), sent to court (‘nu court vich [illegible word] faisla karan bhej ditta’), admitted to hospital (a guess, as this note was indecipherable), and sent home (‘nu ghar bhej ditta’). She couldn’t recall why she’d written the dates down, or how her previous estimate of the incident was out by some two whole years, but it didn’t matter: finally I had some hard information, and I immediately caught the number 558 bus from my parents’ house to the Wolverhampton Local Archive. On entering I once again noticed a poster advertising a ‘family history course’, and hoped that the tagline – ‘Every family has a history and we’ve got a bit of yours’ – might at last prove true.

  At the microfiche reader, sitting between amateur genealogists who actually do this kind of thing for fun, I began by sifting through copies of the Express & Star around the first of those four dates, looking for a story that might mention my father: not the easiest task in the world, owing to the Express & Star’s refusal then – as now – to organize its news stories into sections. As you probably know, on one page you can get everything from a story about the Middle East, to a story about a local election campaign, to a tale about an abnormally large carrot grown by a boy in Pendeford, and you have to read it all, just in case you miss what you’re looking for.

  There was nothing of any relevance in the 30 June edition of the paper. And nothing of any relevance in the 1 July edition of the paper. But then, at the bottom of the third page of the Wednesday 2 July edition, next to a story about an annual garden party at the grammar school I eventually attended, and underneath a story about a woman appearing at the Edinburgh Sheriff Court being charged with murdering her two sons, there it was:

  ACCUSED OF HARMING GIRL

  A Wolverhampton man was remanded in custody for a week by the town’s stipendiary magistrate today accused of inflicting grievous bodily harm on a 14-year-old girl.

  He is Jagjit Sanghera, aged 25, of Prosser Street.

  I barely took a breath before loading the next reel. This time the story leapt out from the pages of the Friday 15 August 1975 edition. It was set above a story about a Belgian being remanded for attempting to murder a detective inspector and next to a story about ‘Europe’s biggest international balloon contest’:

  MAN HIT GIRL, 14, ON NECK AND FACE

  A 14-year-old girl was struck in the face and throttled as she walked to school, Wolverhampton Crown Court was told today.

  As she was reeling back dazed from the blow, Jit Singh Sanghera tried to strangle her.

  He admitted unlawfully wounding the girl, and was ordered by the court to New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton, for treatment.

  The court was told the girl was walking to school along Prestwood Road, Wolverhampton, with two friends.

  Suddenly Sanghera, aged 25, of Prosser Street, Wolverhampton, attacked her and then ran off.

  The girl had a fractured nose bone and bruising on her neck.

  Sanghera told police: ‘Some of the children had been calling me names. She was laughing and I thought she was laughing at me.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever thought and felt so many different things at the same time as I did when I first read that story, Mr Robinson. There was pity for the girl – that poor, poor girl; pity for my father – even after five years of treatment he was still seriously ill; pity for my mother – this was the kind of violence she had endured for years; weary amusement at the misspelling of my father’s name as ‘Jit’ – which brought my running total of official misspellings of his name to eight; and the disorientation of having to tally my view of my father as a gentle and kind giant, with a man capable of horrific violence. Of course, I’d gone through a form of this when my mother had given me her version of events, but somehow it was different having it confirmed in English, in writing, in a newspaper I had begun my journalism career on, in a level of detail my father’s medical records didn’t go into – bizarrely, there is not a single reference to violence in his medical notes, beyond one letter from a psychiatrist which refers to ‘episodes of apathy, unreasonable anger and suicidal thoughts’.

  Mixed in this maelstrom of emotions was puzzlement. Why had my father spent six weeks in custody in a prison described by one official report at the time as ‘a human dustbin’ when he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic? Surely he should have been submitted for hospital treatment straight away, rather than locked up? Did the family not arrange for a lawyer to represent him to make this simple point? My mother had mentioned that there had been an opportunity to get Dad out on bail when he was arrested, and that several members of the family were willing to arrange it, but apparently my grandmother, my father’s mother, had refused to let them get involved, saying prison would teach her third son a lesson, that she didn’t want any other members of the family to suffer if he transgressed bail conditions.

  I don’t know what your views are on people who offend while mentally ill, Mr Robinson. Given they probably account for the majority of your business – according to the Office for National Statistics, around 5 per cent of men in the general population have two or more mental disorders, compared to 72 per cent in prison – I wouldn’t blame you for having harsh views. I used to be part of the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key brigade. But I’ve changed my mind. Jail is no place for the mentally ill. It’s certainly no place for people with paranoid schizophrenia. Prisoners are required to follow rules, but how do you follow rules when your brain is malfunctioning? And judging from my mother’s account of her visits, it sounds like my father’s brain malfunction was worsening. She says he would spend the whole of every prison visit crying. One day he appeared with a wound on his forehead, saying he’d got it from banging his head against the wall of his cell. Could it have been he wasn’t even getting the medication he had previously been prescribed?

  Anyway, now that I had the court dates, I could go to Wolverhampton Crown Court, look up the records related to the case, find the name of the lawyer who eventually represented my father, and, if he was still alive, get some answers to these questions. And, after making copies of the two news stories, I headed off across the town centre to your offices on Pipers Row. Though I didn’t go straight there – I went for a walk around the city centre first, and as I walked, and walked, and walked, I realized that the news stories, the confirmation of the dates, had fundamentally altered the way I viewed my parents’ early marriage.

  I don’t know if you’re a pop music fan, Mr Robinson. Even if you’re not, you’ve probably heard of George Michael, and when my mother first told me what had happened, a few months ago, I thought of a line from ‘Careless Whisper’. No, not the bit about guilty feet having no rhythm. The bit about there being no comfort in the truth … all you find is pain. The narrative just seemed to be a shapeless series of painful events. A list really. Accounts of family lives blighted by schizophrenia tend to be like this: because the drama is being propelled by an illness, there are no lessons learnt, no patterns, just random events. Often the painful narrative keeps lurching forward bleakly until the medication starts working or someone – usually t
he sufferer – dies. But now, with the dates of Dad’s arrest confirmed, I thought not of the bleak line from ‘Careless Whisper’, but of an expression my mother would utter whenever I got over-excited as a child. ‘SSSShhhhhh,’ she would hush. ‘Stop laughing so much. You’ll only cry twice as much later.’

  I grew up resenting the phrase, thinking it epitomized something rather joyless, if not at the heart of Punjabi culture, then at the heart of our family life. Mum is never more anxious than at a celebration, or on receiving good news, hovering around with red chillies to frighten away evil spirits, telling us to remember to thank God for our good fortune. I hate that I’ve inherited the attitude: sometimes I can feel the end of good things before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy them. But finally I understood why she was so fond of the saying: that’s how life was for her. Whenever she laughed, she cried twice as much later.

  Things, for instance, were looking up after the first time my father was hospitalized in 1969, following a violent mental breakdown when he was around nineteen. He’d been misdiagnosed, with depression, rather than schizophrenia, but was being treated for schizophrenia a matter of months later – it’s unclear how or why this diagnosis was suddenly made – and soon after this my sister Puli was born. Even though there is a preference for boys among Punjabis – a son continues the family line and takes care of parents in old age, whereas a daughter joins another household – Puli was a sweet baby and the household, which included my father’s parents and two of his siblings, was full of cooing and laughter for the first time since my parents had got married. He recovered enough to get a job at a local brickmaker’s and when the family began discussing the possibility of buying a house of their own, rather than renting, my parents were able to pitch in for a share.