The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  But coming back from Puli’s, her question why ringing in my ears, I felt I should at least pursue the mystery as far as I could, which, as it happens, wasn’t very far at all: all I had to do was walk thirty seconds down my parents’ street to visit my Pindor bua, aged sixty-nine, and the eldest surviving member of my father’s family. Her husband, my uncle Malkit, was there and we ended up spending several hours talking about what happened in the seventies, and eventually, after what must have been my ninth cup of tea that day, I put the question to her.

  ‘Did you ever meet Meemal?’

  ‘No, he died when your Baba was young.’

  ‘Did Baba talk about him?’

  ‘Yes. He told me he was a teacher. And that he died early.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Your Baba used to say he had come back from teaching, was in the village on holiday, when he went to talk to a man at the khuh who knew black magic. Apparently, he asked the man to be taught it and it was while dabbling in black magic that something happened to his mind. He never went back to teaching. Lost his job, started living on the khuh, died quickly.’

  ‘It was black magic that sent him mad?’

  ‘That’s what Chacha used to say.’

  It was at this point that I made my now well-practised Punjabi speech about schizophrenia: explaining that it was the disease that had made my father violent all those years ago; that it was the disease that had hospitalized my sister twenty years later; and after I let her recover from the revelation, I put it to her directly.

  ‘Do you think Meemal could have had the same illness?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She adjusted her chuni as her eyes brimmed with tears. I remembered my aunt in Grays, her sister, doing the same. ‘I can only tell you what I was told by Chacha. I didn’t see it happen, you see. I never met him. It’s possible, though. You’ve got to remember that your Baba didn’t have much education. But I suppose he could have had the same illness. Maybe.’ She gazed through her double-glazed patio doors, at the perfect vegetable patch beyond. We had tried to grow vegetables in our garden when we first moved down the road, but the plants had failed to thrive in the compacted soil. ‘You know what they used to say about him? They used to say they chained him up. When he started going on about how he wanted to beat people up and kill them, they tied him up at the khuh …’

  Not that any of this gets us closer to an answer to why. As E. Fuller Torrey observes, to say a disease is familial is merely to say that it runs in families; it doesn’t tell you why it does. Moreover, the genetic picture about schizophrenia is murky. The disease runs in some families, but many people who develop the illness have no family history of it at all. And the fact that a second identical twin has only about a one in four chance of also getting it means that non-genetic factors must be important. Some researchers even suggest that living in a city is a more significant risk factor.

  My point is simply this: maybe, if my great-grandfather’s (possible) mental illness had been discussed and acknowledged within the family, then maybe, when my father started showing signs of psychosis, he would have got the treatment he needed sooner, and maybe my mother would have been spared the violent attacks she endured, and maybe she wouldn’t have been blamed for the illness, and maybe the family would have made more of an effort to ensure my father stopped drinking, which might have meant he had fewer relapses and wouldn’t have throttled that poor schoolgirl, and maybe, if these things had been understood and acknowledged, then maybe my sister would have been made aware of the extent of her illness sooner and maybe she wouldn’t have stopped taking her medication and ended up in hospital.

  Put it another way: sometimes it’s better to talk about difficult subjects rather than conceal them beneath a web of secrets and lies. And it’s probably time I took my own advice.

  20. If You Don’t Know Me By Now

  My dearest Mother

  There’s something important and difficult I’ve been meaning to tell you and because it’s easier to be brave on paper than in person, I thought I would do it by writing this, my first ever letter to you. But now I’m sat here, I wonder whether it’s such a good idea. The way I write English is different from the way I speak English, the way I speak English is different from the way I speak Punjabi, and like all mothers and sons, we have been conditioned into communicating with a certain degree of intimacy and distance, so it’s possible you won’t even recognize my voice in this. But with no better options coming to mind, I will try to do what seems so difficult: stop worrying, trust my translator and hope for the best.

  Anyway, as I said, I have something important to tell you, and it relates to the book I’ve been working on for the past eighteen months. There were a great many reasons why I wanted to write it – to make sense of how Dad’s and Puli’s lives have been affected by their illness, to attempt to rescue their experiences from oblivion – but one of the reasons I persisted even when it became very difficult was my desire to create some kind of tribute to you. I’ve always thought you were amazing, Mum. I know you must sometimes think I don’t listen when you complain about your ailments, but I know it was all those days at your sewing-machine, to make sure we were clothed and fed, that have left your body wracked with aches and pain, and I know I complain you nag, but I understand your phone calls and advice are just your way of saying you wish you saw more of me. But knowing now what you went through with Dad, and then again with Puli, that admiration has deepened.

  I was puzzled when I discovered the extent of their illnesses, wondered how I hadn’t worked out they were so sick sooner. But now I understand one of the main reasons is that you shielded me from the harshest aspects of the truth, to ensure I had an untroubled childhood. And that’s what I had, Mum. Nearly all my memories of growing up are of feeling loved and happy. You have always given me the support I needed, have taught me the value of hard work, and the importance of keeping the show on the road. Without you and Dad, I’d be nowhere. And without you, Dad would have died, killed someone or – I’m just quoting his psychiatrist here – ended up in a home of some kind. I can’t say it has been easy hearing your story, and I know I haven’t done it the justice it deserves, but I needed to get to the end because I want everyone willing to listen to know what happened and to understand that there isn’t a son on this earth who loves and respects his mother as much as I love and respect you.

  However, there is another reason I needed to lay out your experience, a reason I have, I’m afraid, deliberately concealed from you. You see, as well as being about you and Dad and Puli, the book is also about me, a letter from me to you, explaining what I want to do with the rest of my life and why. Of course, the only problem with this is that you won’t actually be able to read it. Hence this: a letter, digesting the letter. And to digest further, my message to you, Mum, is this: I love you and I appreciate everything you have been through and done for me, but I am not going to marry a Jat Sikh girl just to please you. This isn’t because I have someone unsuitable in mind I want to marry. I’m not seeing anyone. It is simply that I want to marry someone I love, rather than someone who fits your criteria.

  I know this will come as a disappointment to you. So much so that you might stop reading at this point. Which is why I’m getting my translator to make a tape recording of these words, so I can force you to listen to my arguments even if you refuse to read them. And the first of my arguments is simply this: I don’t believe it is right, morally speaking, even on the terms of the Sikh religion, to pick a spouse on the grounds of caste and religion. Indeed, when Guru Nanak established our faith, one of his motivations was to free people of the burden of caste. ‘Caste is worthless and so is its name,’ he wrote in the Guru Granth Sahib. ‘For everyone there is only one refuge … Recognize the light, do not ask about caste.’ Furthermore, it was one of the founding principles of our religion that people should not discriminate on the basis of religion. ‘God is in the Hindu temple as well as in the mosque,’ wrote Guru Gobind
Singh. ‘God is addressed in both the Hindu and the Muslim prayer; all human beings are one though they may appear different … They are all of one form and one God has made them all.’ If this is true, then why should it be wrong to marry someone of another caste and religion?

  Maybe you’ll reject such reasoning as perverse. Sikhs have had a caste system, in defiance of the founding principles of their religion, for centuries, and have married within their religion for just as long. Why should I be an exception? Well, Mum, with your encouragement and support, but also because of good luck and my own hard work, I have benefited from an education, and that education has taught me how to think for myself. Sometimes I think you think learning is like something you might buy from a shop, like a new washing-machine or refrigerator: something that improves your life without changing you. But that’s not the way it works. My education has changed me, and just because everyone else does something, it doesn’t mean I have to. And just because you believe something, it doesn’t mean I have to agree.

  We’ve had such different lives, Mum. By the time you were thirty, you had been ripped away from the family that had brought you up, married off to a violent, mentally ill man you hadn’t met until your wedding day, were providing for four children and an unemployed husband, and for support you had to rely on a family who didn’t always respect you. Meanwhile, you didn’t speak the language of your adopted country, your view of the world was informed by just four years of education in India, you had never had a conversation with a white person, had never worked alongside a man, everyone you knew was from India, and work was something everyone around you did to survive.

  At the same age, I am unmarried, with no children. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by both family and friends I love. I have a job which involves me using the language of the country I live in – a job I do because I love it, not to survive. I’ve had eighteen years of education – free education, thanks to the great country I’ve been allowed to grow up in. I work alongside men and women, I have male and female friends and I have a million and one opportunities within my grasp. And yet you still want me to live my life as if I am a Punjabi farmer in the 1950s. Surely you must understand why I might find this difficult?

  The world has changed. Even India has changed: people have started marrying outside their caste there. It is only a matter of time before it starts happening in our family: the next generation growing up in this country, your grandchildren, and their children, will marry who they want. But you never acknowledge it. You get upset when a cousin marries a Sikh boy from her own village. I suppose I could just accept it as my destiny not to enjoy such freedom, but I don’t want to live a partial life. I want to make the most of the freedoms I’ve been granted and I want to end up with someone who wants to be with me for who I am, not for what I am.

  Having said that, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest my decision is entirely intellectual or moral. I think I believe in God. Or at least I believe we all have to answer for our actions, in one way or another, eventually. And if I had to pick a religion according to its founding principles, I would pick Sikhism. But I’m no saint, and many of my reasons for giving up on the arranged marriage thing are personal. Among them there is the simple fact that in the more than twenty set-ups I’ve had with Sikh girls over the last decade, I’ve not come close to finding someone I could spend the rest of my life with. And God, I’ve tried. There was even a Sikh doctor I spent three months dating, even though it was evident from the beginning we had little in common, that our personalities did not mesh in any way. I told myself I wanted to give you what you wanted, that I could bury my true desires to make you happy. But it slowly became apparent I could never go through with a marriage where I didn’t love the other person. I want more from my life than that.

  And this is the thing: I have had more from life than that. I’ve loved and been loved back and now I know what it feels like, it’s impossible to settle for less.

  I don’t think you’ll be that surprised to learn I’ve had a couple of relationships with girls who were not Sikh or Jat. English girls. They didn’t work out. They may have ended for other reasons anyway, but one of the problems has been that I was too scared to tell you about them. And even though they failed, the relationships changed the way I see things. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of how to convey to you what it is like loving someone and being loved back, mentally thumbing through the thousands of songs and books and poems I’ve come across on the subject during my life, but on reflection, I don’t think I need to try. It is because you have loved me that I know how to love others.

  There was one English girl I think you might have really liked. I know she would have liked you. She was always asking about my family and my background and my religion, and though you never met, I told her about you and she thought you were amazing. And this is another thing, Mum: I think you assume that anyone who is not a Jat or a Sikh cannot understand our culture, that if I married someone who was not Jat or Sikh, you would lose me. But that’s not the way things need to be. I would never be with anyone who didn’t respect my background and family. And, if anything, if you accept me for who I am, rather than who you want me to be, we could be closer. The reason I haven’t come home to Wolverhampton much in recent years, why I don’t invite you to London so often, is that I’ve had to keep my two lives separate, to stop you from finding out about things. But if you accepted me for what I was, there would be no need for secrecy and separation. You could come and stay with me in London whenever you wanted. I would love you to meet my friends and they would love to meet you and maybe stay with me in Wolverhampton sometimes.

  I don’t think you understand just how difficult it has been for me. In trying to please you at the same time as trying to have the life I want, I’ve done things I’m not proud of. I’m particularly ashamed of the arranged marriage meetings I went on to just keep up a pretence. There was the guilt of lying to whoever I was going out with at the time piled on to the guilt of lying to the girl I was being introduced to, piled on to the guilt of lying to you. During some of those meetings I acted obnoxiously on purpose, so the girl would refuse me and save me the difficulty of having to explain it to you.

  And then there has been all the help and advice I have sought. I’ll put it in monetary terms, because I know it’s a good way of getting things across to you. Apart from the tens of thousands of pounds of debt I’ve got into since quitting my job, to build up to this, for the past few months I’ve been seeing a therapist once a week, at a cost of £90 an hour, and, in addition, I recently spent £120 on a session with a ‘life coach’ called John Rushton, whose specialist area of expertise, despite being an Englishman, is emotional blackmail in Asian families. I arranged to meet him at the Ramada Hotel in Ealing Common (the taxi cost £15), bought some drinks (£9), and told him about my predicament.

  He listened carefully, made notes and at the end told me my situation wasn’t in the least bit unusual: he’d come across hundreds of men and women facing the same dilemma, men and women you’d think were on the top of the world with their successful careers and money and houses and cars, but who were in fact tormented by their parents – mostly their mothers, it has to be said – who wanted them to fulfil a role they felt they couldn’t. He said the pressure had led to nervous breakdowns and suicides and I needed to resolve matters before the stress and anxiety enveloped me entirely.

  Afterwards he sent a letter reiterating the advice. ‘You have a RIGHT to live regardless of ANYONE else, Santham (sic),’ he wrote. ‘You are 100% entitled to a happy life, Santhan (sic), you live your life for no one else, ever. You are responsible for your life, no one else ever … The biggest hurdle you’ll ever have to overcome is you. Not your mum … You don’t have to be rude, but you have to be FIRM, to the point, strong, and ask her, “Do you want me to be happy?” … Santham, you have a choice, it’s a big choice. You have the potential for a great future with emotional security, happiness, love, joy, passion and h
armony, or you will go forward with a mental “toothache” that will strike at any given moment when your guard is down. Don’t live in dread. Life is really too short … If you want to marry a Zulu girl then OK, go for it, you have to live with her, no one else. And that is that. That is the whole reality of it all.’

  As it happens, I don’t think that is the ‘whole reality of it all’ at all. I don’t subscribe entirely to the Western view that individual happiness is all that matters, that there is no such thing as duty. I owe you a great deal. I have responsibilities to you and Dad in your old age, and I have to make sure Puli is okay. But I do not owe you my happiness and the happiness of some poor unsuspecting girl whose life I could ruin by marrying her, just to please you.

  Sometimes I struggle to understand why you are so insistent on the arranged marriage thing, when you have suffered so much yourself. Maybe it all comes down to pride and izzat. You worry about what the Punjabi community in Wolverhampton and the extended family might say about me, about you, if I don’t do the expected thing. And doubtless some of them might say bad things. But I don’t care. And I don’t understand why you do. I know many members of the extended family have been good to you, and I am fond of most of them, but some of them have blamed you for Dad’s illness, have accused you and continue to accuse you of dabbling in black magic, and now some cross the road when you walk down the street, and refuse to eat food in our house because they think you will put something in it to curse them. Do you really care what they think? I certainly don’t want to sacrifice my life and happiness, or live my life in the shadows, to impress them.