The Boy with the Topknot

Home > Other > The Boy with the Topknot > Page 28
The Boy with the Topknot Page 28

by Sathnam Sanghera


  But then things went twice as wrong as they had gone right. My father had another violent breakdown when my mother was pregnant for the second time. Mum recalls him throwing a tray of hot food at her during supper. She ran out of the house, to a neighbour who had a telephone, and called the police. According to his medical notes, he was sectioned in January 1971. He clearly needed the treatment, but my mother’s act of self-preservation further soured her relations with her mother-in-law: having previously accused her of making my father ill with black magic, she now accused her of sending him off to hospital for no reason. The atmosphere soured further when my sister Bindi was born. She was just as adorable as Puli, but because there is a view in Punjabi households that a woman, in order to fulfil her marriage contract, has to produce male children – perversely, despite the abuse she’d endured, there was still a view that she had yet to earn her place in the family – my mother became the subject of bickering and mockery.

  Nevertheless, things slowly began to improve again after my father was discharged from hospital. He got another job, and while he was still violent towards my mother (one of Puli’s first memories is of Dad throwing china at Mum), and still had a habit of losing jobs (he lost one after threatening to attack a supervisor with a shovel), he got new jobs just as quickly, his sturdy physique making him naturally suited to manual labour, and eventually Mum, by concealing his employment and medical history, persuaded an Indian neighbour to give him a chance at Goodyear’s, one of the best-paying factories in town.

  She describes seeing his first wage packet – for £40 – as the first truly happy moment of her married life. It was twice what he’d ever earned before and Mum remembers using the money that started coming in to buy a sewing-machine, with which she began earning a little money on the side, and when her brother-in-law - my uncle, or ‘chacha’ – was arranged in marriage and began talking about buying another house for his bride and his parents, four doors away, my parents were able to buy the family out of their share in the house.

  This was a big moment. For Punjabis, a house and a family are intricately connected, a fact reflected in the language: the Punjabi word for house, ‘ghar’, also refers to the domestic unit that lives in the house. There followed an even bigger moment: my brother was born. And what a boy too: from the beginning, the kind of infant who had uncles and aunties crossing the langar hall of the gurdwara to chuck his chin. After everything that had happened, I imagine my mother could barely believe her luck. After everything that had happened, I imagine my mother had never been so terrified.

  True enough, for every one drop of happy, there were two drops of sad. A few months after my brother’s birth, my father got into another fight with a colleague at work and was fired from Goodyear’s. On 16 July 1973 he registered at the employment exchange, and this time demonstrated no desire to get another job. He sat around, overate, his weight ballooned, he developed diabetes, and my grandfather despaired. Dad’s behaviour must have seemed obscene for a man who was still doing heavy manual labour after the official age of retirement. But what he saw as laziness and greediness was in fact a new manifestation of his illness. And in December 1973 my father was admitted to hospital yet again. A letter from a psychiatrist at the time explains that ‘He’d been behaving strangely at home, wandering out into the road, spending most of his time in bed and overeating. He’d been referred for a course of ECT but the anaesthetist cancelled this because he was grossly obese. At this time he was displaying no bizarre behaviour but remained extremely lethargic and appeared to be hallucinating. He attended the day care unit five days a week and remained very reluctant to do any work. There was also a considerable language problem. The patient himself said that he felt better, but failed to show any great improvement.’

  During this period my father’s daily routine consisted of waking up late, walking to the local off-licence for a can of beer – Mum knew he shouldn’t be drinking on his medication, but he would get money from relatives if she tried to stop him – and drinking it while walking around the streets. When he got to the local greengrocer’s, he would always buy a banana and always eat it while standing on a specific street corner at a specific time. Often he would return home with complaints that the children walking past to and from school at lunchtime would tease him. ‘Fatso, eating bananas,’ he said they sang. ‘Fatso, eating bananas.’ Mum would tell him to ignore them, or, better still, not to stand there on the same spot doing the same thing every day, but Dad refused to disrupt his routine – he almost seemed drawn to the confrontation. Then he began complaining about one particular girl. She had it in for him, he said. She swore at him, he said. She needed to be taught a lesson. Could these insults have just been voices in his head? Regardless, they were very real to him because then …

  Another of my sister Puli’s early memories is of sitting cross-legged in the front room, playing with a doll, when the police came to arrest him. On reflection, it may not have been a case of one shot of happy, two shots of sad, by this point. The ratio may have been even more punishing. And to find out once and for all just how punishing, I headed off in the direction of the offices of the Crown Court on Pipers Row.

  The sight of your offices took me by surprise, Mr Robinson. I watched the building go up in the nineties, with its reflective glass and cream stone, and went past it on the way to school for years, but somehow managed not to notice how smart it is. Admittedly, placing a cream building next to a bus station and overlooking Wolverhampton’s busiest roundabout probably wasn’t the wisest move. It could do with a wash. But otherwise it’s great. I’ve been banging on about what a dump Wolverhampton is for years, but started to realize recently that it’s actually not as bad as I remember. There are some nice buildings, some nice places to eat, a few coffee shops, and even the racial tension isn’t as bad as before – you see interracial couples walking around town unselfconsciously, and there are even some Asian Goths.

  Unfortunately, this good humour didn’t last on entering. After leaving my dictaphone with security at reception, as requested, I went upstairs to your reception area, where I gave a short version of my parents’ long story to a slim, friendly young woman at the front desk, who listened intently before referring me to a less slim, less friendly, and less young colleague, with the charm of a used dishcloth, who listened to my story until I got to the phrase ‘1975’, at which point she raised her hand and remarked: ‘I’m afraid we can’t help yow – Wolverhampton Crown Court has only existed since 1990.’

  I opened my Fitness First rucksack – free when you join! – and showed her the newspaper cutting. ‘It is from 1975 and refers specifically to Wolverhampton Crown Court.’

  Her eyes passed over the photocopy before she half-turned and barked at an invisible colleague behind her: ‘Oi’m roight, aren’t I? The Crown Court didn’t exist before 1990?’ She gazed back at me. ‘Most likely, if there are any records, they will be at the Magistrates’ Court on North Street.’

  ‘The Magistrates’ Court?’

  ‘Or they might be kept at the Dudley Crown Court.’

  At this point I glanced down at my shirt and jacket and wondered whether there was something about my demeanour making this woman want to redefine the term ‘unhelpful’. Admittedly, I could have looked smarter – my lumberjack shirt didn’t go with my blazer, and there was a curry stain on my jeans – but I didn’t look like a vagrant either.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Why would records for Wolverhampton Crown Court be kept at the Dudley Crown Court?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Look, it has taken ages getting to this point. Are you sure you don’t have any records here? I’ll be happy to go through them myself if necessary. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Yow wo’ be able to do that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just bec …’

  ‘Could I talk to someone in charge? Your manager?’

  ‘He ay around.’

  ‘Give me his name, and I’ll write to hi
m.’

  ‘Send yower letter to the Crown Court.’

  ‘Could I have a name, please? I know the letter will just get lost otherwise.’

  ‘Address it to the office manager.’

  ‘Does the office manager have a name?’

  ‘Robinson.’

  ‘Does Robinson have a first name?’

  ‘Jonathan Robinson.’

  ‘Thanks. And what should I write in this letter?’

  ‘Write enclosing as much informayshun about the case as yow can. Yow will need to enclose a certificate of conviction and a case number.’

  I don’t know what was more preposterous: the idea that people get given certificates for conviction, or the fact that you have to produce basic information in order to get basic information.

  ‘But that’s the whole point. I don’t have that information. That’s the kind of simple stuff I am looking for.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be almost impossible for us to help yow.’

  Of all the enervating conversations I’ve had recently, Mr Robinson, I think this chat took the biscuit. I left your office thinking I should find a hardware store, and return with a club to deliver 4,500 blows to the back of your colleague’s charmless head. But I’ve had time to calm down since, and as spirit-crushing as the encounter was at the time, on reflection it was actually quite useful, because it has made me accept a few things about my predicament.

  I have realized, for instance, that your colleague was actually right: it is going to be almost impossible to gather the evidence I’m looking for. There is no single reason for it: I’m not asking the wrong questions, or submitting my requests on the wrong type of paper. The problem is that there is an array of obstacles, ranging from the fact that my parents come from an oral culture (which means little written evidence exists), to the fact that they do not speak English (which means that any written evidence that did come into existence as a result of dealings with British authorities tends to be full of holes), to the fact that my father is an illiterate, uneducated, unemployed mentally ill Asian man (which means that officials who might be able to share written evidence with me can’t be bothered to). You see, I have reluctantly and bitterly concluded that unlike the entrepreneurs, politicians and writers I used to interview for newspapers, my father doesn’t matter in the eyes of society: he is not worth producing background information on.

  The conversation has also helped me accept that my plan to write my parents’ story as a piece of journalism is unrealistic. Not only because of the lack of corroborating evidence – so many family memoirs seem to rely on authors finding a cache of letters in an attic, but what do you do if your family don’t have any letters? – and because there is too much narrative to try to corroborate, and because people don’t want to give me the evidence, but because such an account would require me to present the evidence neutrally and dispassionately, and I can’t do that. Moreover, I don’t want to do that – I don’t want these things not to upset me any more, and I don’t want to doubt my mother’s account any more – and it doesn’t matter that I can’t. My education – I did a degree in English Literature – and my career have instilled into me a view that there are two ways of writing about the world: through fiction, ‘literature’, where you can be ambiguous about things in artistic terms, and journalism, where you deal in truth and provable facts. But I realize now that this is a narrow view: something doesn’t have to appear in the pages of a newspaper or between the covers of a novel to be true.

  And perhaps the most important thing I’ve come to understand since visiting your offices, Mr Robinson, is that my efforts to reconstruct my parents’ story have become unhealthy. Not only because I have let the search for evidence coagulate my life – it’s important to know where you’ve come from, to unearth secrets, but it’s also important to know when to let secrets go – but because my efforts have been disproportionately focused on the bad things that happened to my parents. I’ve been doing this because trauma and tragedy make a better story. But in life happiness is just as important, if not more so. And my parents’ story, after my father’s period in custody and subsequent treatment, did have a kind of happy ending. At least, the cycle of double tears was broken.

  My mother tells me that after one of her prison visits, a Sikh prison guard approached her and asked why my father was always in tears. She gave him a short version of the story, and the prison guard pointed out the obvious, that he shouldn’t be in prison, he should be receiving treatment in hospital, and he gave her the name and number of a Muslim lawyer in Birmingham who might, he said, be able to help. Mum visited this lawyer with my uncle Malkit, paid for his advice with the money she had earned from sewing whenever she wasn’t looking after her three children or visiting my father in prison, and the lawyer got him out of jail and into hospital.

  Dad never worked again and has little insight into what happened, but that hospitalization was the last he endured; he was never violent ever again – quite the opposite. Mum got him to give up drink, which was what was probably triggering his breakdowns, got him to lose weight, and then, in 1976, I was born. The years that followed weren’t easy: my father continued to suffer from milder symptoms of the disease, and then, a decade later, my sister Puli fell ill with the same illness, but throughout, our parents loved us, Mum worked hard to raise the four of us and give us a happy life, and succeeded to such a degree that I spent my youth lost in a fug of pop music, and I didn’t even realize my father had schizophrenia until my mid-twenties. In other words, she saved my father, she saved her children, and for that I do not need to gather any corroborating evidence, because my entire life, my entire record collection, is a testament to the fact.

  So, on reflection, I’ve changed my mind, Mr Robinson. I’m not going to write my parents’ story in the way I intended. And I don’t need any information about those legal proceedings from you. Of course, you could send it anyway. But, let’s face it, it’s not likely, is it? Not only do I suspect you don’t give a toss, but I’ve just done a little research and not only discovered several references to cases heard by Wolverhampton Crown Court before 1990 – your colleague didn’t know what she was talking about – but I have also been unable to find a single reference to you, giving me the sneaky suspicion that you don’t actually exist.

  So this, in summary, is a letter to someone who might be a figment of someone’s imagination, asking for nothing – which, somehow, feels like an apt way to end a process I stumbled into in the first place.

  Yours sincerely

  Sathnam Sanghera

  19. It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over

  You can shut the door on the past, but no matter how much you try to beat the present into submission, it keeps coming back at you, like those comedy birthday candles that refuse to be blown out, or, in the case of my family narrative, like the interminable drip, drip of Chinese water torture. No sooner had I packed away my 1800 x 1200mm professional dry-wipe magnetic whiteboard than it all kicked off again, this time with my sister Puli.

  As with many of my family relationships, for reasons I have already banged on about at length, and the additional reason that my mother has systematically tried to shield me from potentially stressful aspects of her life (‘I didn’t want you to worry …’), I had let my relationship with my eldest sister drift. Weeks could pass without us talking, the lowest point being when she rang to tell me she had returned from a two-month trip to India, only for me to realize I hadn’t even known she’d gone. But the task of reconstructing the family story brought us back into contact.

  I was about to say that the fact we now talk most days was the most straightforwardly positive consequence of my time back at home, but few things about our family life are simple, and the re-established closeness has come pickled in guilt. First, there has been the guilt of simply having had so much better luck: we are members of the same family, bookends of the same set of siblings, but looking at our lives, you’d think we’d been born to different
families on different continents. Whereas Puli had not lived up to her academic promise, for instance, I had outlived mine. While I had been permitted – albeit with intense emotional pressure – to procrastinate on the issue of marriage, Puli had married twice. While I had escaped many of the restrictions of Punjabi culture, by marrying an Indian with even more traditional ideas than our mother she had been dragged back into its worst aspects. Most critically, while I had been spared mental illness, she had been afflicted with schizophrenia.

  Then there has been the guilt of my past behaviour. In truth, I had deliberately and repeatedly abandoned my sister. I was aware, for instance, that her husband had once hit her, and that she had ended up back at my parents’, as a consequence. Mum had only told me about it afterwards (‘I didn’t want you to worry …’), but even when I found out I didn’t ask Puli about it. I told myself it was too late to do anything, that everything was fine now anyway, but the truth was that I didn’t know how to handle it and I didn’t want to puncture my dysfunctionally happy world with such stress and trauma.

  However, getting a second chance, I promised myself, and my sister, that if she ever needed help again, I’d be there. She only had to call. Not that she did: she is fiercely self-reliant and my parents are always around to help anyway. But I kept on insisting, complaining that she struggled with things she didn’t need to struggle with, and eventually she did it, she rang. I was in the reading room of a library in London when the phone went, and though I was at the time letting private numbers go straight to voicemail – to take an anonymous call was to risk having an unexpected conversation, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of stress yet – for some reason I popped out of the reading room to answer it.

  ‘Sorry for calling.’ Puli always apologizes for calling.

  ‘You all right?’ I was whispering, to avoid disturbing the readers next door.

  ‘Yes.’ I could tell from her voice she wasn’t. ‘Actually, I went to see the psychiatrist today and during the consultation he said something that worried me.’ She was reading from preparatory notes.

 

‹ Prev