The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘They ended. For various reasons. A couple are married now. With babies. They might not have worked out anyway. But part of the problem was that I could never tell you.’

  ‘So who do you like now then?’

  ‘I “like” no one.’

  ‘You haven’t got a friend – what’s the pressure then?’

  ‘Because …’ I remembered what my emotional blackmail coach had said: be firm; stick to your guns. ‘Because … whenever I meet anyone I start worrying they won’t be acceptable to you and the family and before I have even worked out if we get along or not, it’s ending. It’s up to you: either you can tell me I can do what I want and I can have a life, or I am never going to find anyone and be happy.’

  At this point she stepped away from one CD stand, the tower dedicated to the works of Stephen Duffy and Ryan Adams, towards another, dedicated to the works of George Michael and Stevie Wonder (what is it with me and male singer-songwriters?), and moved to the leather sofa. It was a sign of the uncharted territory we had entered that Mum actually sat on it. I took the Habitat armchair at right angles to her and listened as she churned out the objections. She said she disagreed with what I’d said about our religion: Guru Nanak was beyond caste because he was a spirit of God, his rules didn’t apply to mortals like us; Guru Gobind Singh went into battle to defend the religion and said it was important to stay true to your culture. It was crucial to know about your caste and to marry within it. What was the point of an education if I didn’t understand that? Why did I think I should be an exception? Everyone else seemed to manage it. She went on for some time. But there was something about the relaxed way in which she ran through the arguments – she actually laughed at one point – laughed – that gave me the surreal sense she was only going through the motions. And then, finally, they came, the words I thought I would never hear.

  ‘Having said that, I’m not going to pressure you. I don’t want you to wreck your life. I didn’t work so hard bringing you up so you would be unhappy. What would be the point of that? I’ve read your letter, and I understand. What time has come has come. You shouldn’t struggle to fit into a role you can’t fit into …’

  Even the police sirens perpetually ringing around Brixton seemed to be stunned into silence by the revelation.

  ‘… There is only one thing I ask …’

  Ah, the caveats.

  ‘By all means get married to who you want, as long as she is not a Churi or Chamari.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Churas and Chamars are different from us.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘In India …’

  ‘Mum, what are you on about?’ I think she was confusing my incomprehension with objection.

  ‘So if you met a Chamari girl – you wouldn’t know how they differed from Jats?’

  ‘I know the Chamars are a type of caste but have no idea of the significance.’

  ‘In India the Chamars are leatherworkers.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And Churas are sweepers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They have a different culture to us.’

  ‘Mum, we live in Britain and we’re not farmers any more.’

  ‘But this is your history, your culture.’

  ‘I have few Indian friends, and those Indian friends I do have, I don’t know or care what caste they are. And that’s not the point anyway. To be honest, if I ever manage to persuade anyone to marry me, they will probably be …’ It was so weird and so amazing to be able to say the words ‘… English.’

  ‘It would be better if you married a gori than a Churi or Chamar.’

  I laughed out loud, partly out of overwhelming relief, partly at the ludicrousness of the distinctions.

  ‘A Takan, someone of the carpenter caste, would be better too, or a Hindu, but it would be difficult with a Chamar. Not because they are inferior, I have lots of friends who are Churas and Chamars, they are good people, they are just different. They don’t like to marry outside their caste either. I mean if you want to do it, if you really want to marry a Chamar, go ahead and marry one, but …’

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘… there are so many lovely Jat Sikh girls out there …’

  ‘I know. But if it doesn’t happen you have to accept who I end up with.’

  ‘You should try to find a Jat Sikh girl but don’t screw up your life for us. If you have no love, there is no life. I have passed my days with your father, and he is unwell, but he has always loved you kids, he has never wanted to leave me and it’s my duty now to look after him. Maybe I will have a better life next time. But you have to be true to yourself. I want to see you happy. From the youngest age you have not caused us any trouble. Your brother has sorted his life out, now you should. You are very old now.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘What will be will be. It’s neither in your control nor in my control, and even though I say don’t get married to a Churi or Chamari, if that is who it will be with, then that is who it will be with. You have a holiday from me. I did put pressure on you, I know, but you were a child, and I was worried you would get divorced.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘One of the reasons I didn’t want you going around with girls, was that I had your fortune told and he said, if you got married before twenty-eight you would get divorced. I almost made myself ill with worry.’ None of this was going in: I still had the Punjabi for ‘You have a holiday from me’ going around my head, and had suddenly remembered that I hadn’t watered the plant next to the telly for a month. ‘But now it’s okay. I had your fortune told again and he said everything is okay for you now. You’ll get married in a year or two. We will see what happens.’ She was smiling, as if she knew something I didn’t. ‘You think I don’t know what’s going on, but I listen to the British news on the Punjabi radio station and I talk to people and I have changed. I have my values, I am religious, but I don’t live like I’m in India. There is only one thing I ask of you …’

  ‘Yes, I understand, no landless labourers.’

  ‘No, the one thing I ask is …’

  ‘Mum, you already said you only want one thing.’

  ‘The second thing I ask is that if you are going to hang out with goris and goras, just don’t drink too much with them.’

  ‘Mum. No one drinks more than Punjabis.’

  ‘You see goras on TV sometimes, drinking …’

  ‘Mum. No one drinks more than Punjabis.’

  ‘… acting crazy, jumping around like baboons.’

  ‘Mum. No one drinks more than Punjabis.’

  ‘I know, I know, your brother-in-law tells me the stories of picking up people in his taxi, of how even Indian boys and even Indian girls behave these days.’ She shook her head in despair. I was shaking my head in disbelief. ‘Anyway, I want you to write in your book that I told you you were free.’ She picked up the letter, folded it up and put it into one of her carrier bags. ‘Now tell me, how much did the translation cost you?’

  ‘Two hundred dollars.’

  She clutched her chest.

  ‘But he did such a good job I ended up giving him three hundred.’

  ‘Hai rabba. For that much money, I would have written it for you.’

  Curiously – but then, as I said when we began, none of this was expected – there was no euphoria in the weeks that followed. There was relief. Incredible relief: my heartbeat slowed down to below 180 b.p.m.; I stopped wanting to throw up; and I slept well for the first time in months. But there was no celebratory bhangra, no bopping around to Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move On Up’, no sudden desire to start campaigning for greater understanding of schizophrenia, or against the imprisonment of the mentally ill.

  Maybe it was because when I went home with Mum to Wolverhampton – I wanted to spend some time at home, to make sure she wasn’t putting on an act – we immediately returned to our usual bickering, spending the train journey back arguing about everything from my refusal to wear a jacket in the t
wenty-four degrees of sunshine (‘You’ll catch a cold!’); my purchasing of a book (‘Can’t you borrow them from a library? You waste so much money’); to the fact that I had two coffees (‘You’ll send yourself around the twist with all that intoxication’).

  Maybe the urge to whoop was instinctively checked out of sensitivity for my siblings. After all, their lives had been defined by similar anxieties, and some of them were still suffering the repercussions of trying to please Mum – I had to be careful about how I told them. Or maybe I couldn’t make sense of Mum’s reaction. Had she been persuaded by the arguments in the letter? If so, which ones? Meanwhile, the stuff about the fortune-teller was flummoxing. If he’d predicted I’d be divorced if I got married before the age of twenty-eight, and if that was why Mum didn’t want me to have any relationships, then why did she try to set me up with so many Punjabi girls during that time?

  Indeed, it is only now, sitting at a table in a West End restaurant renowned for its service and its seven-hour lamb, a list of forty-six questions inscribed on an A4 pad sitting on my lap, a moderately famous businessman sitting opposite, explaining that there’s no such thing as a typical day in his life, or giving me his views on climate change – to be honest I’m not really listening – that something resembling if not euphoria, then satisfaction, is kicking in. And it is kicking in because my mobile phone, sitting on the table between us, is blinking at me, telling me I have an incoming call, and the incoming call is from my mother, and seeing the letters ‘HOME WOLVES’ flashing, I realize that the jolt of fear I used to experience whenever my two lives short-circuited like this, the worry that my family had found me out and that my mother was calling to disown me, has gone; and though I don’t entirely understand why Mum was so cool about the letter, I understand it doesn’t matter, I just need to accept she has changed, and the thing is, it has taken me so long, a lifetime, to understand the basic fact that people and things can and do change, that Wolverhampton has changed, my father has changed, Puli has changed, Bindi has changed, Rajah has changed, that even I have changed, though not as much as my mother – the distance she has travelled, from collecting cow manure in baskets for fuel in the fields of the Punjab to my leather sofa in Brixton, is a greater distance than I have travelled from Prosser Street to this restaurant – and not completely either, because I’m not suddenly going to give up George Michael for Bob Dylan, or stop worrying or change my life by beginning a campaign for greater understanding of schizophrenia, because another thing I have learnt about myself, or rather, had confirmed about myself, is that dwelling on misery makes me unhappy, that I prefer flitting around lighter subjects, and, you know, even though I suspect this executive has little to say, it’s such a pleasure and a privilege to be here, to have a new job on a new newspaper that pays me to listen, or not listen to him, to know I’m not going to need a bottle of vodka to get through writing about the encounter, but I have changed, most importantly in the respect that I’m no longer running away from my family, I talk to Puli all the time, I’m taking my parents to visit Bindi in Canada next year, my best friends, a boy and a GIRL, are coming to spend time with me in Wolverhampton soon, and now my interviewee has noticed I’m not really listening, and is asking whether I need to take the call, I’m not going to say, ‘It’s just my mother,’ and let it go to voicemail, like I used to, I’m going to take it, and talk to her, even though I know she is only calling to ask whether I’ve eaten my lunch, or tell me what she has been up to, or possibly give me the mobile number of a potential bride, because she hasn’t changed completely either, and still wants me to marry a Punjabi girl, and, you know what, I might even meet the girl, because I’m looking for love, and another thing I have learnt is that you can find it anywhere, and if we get on, we get on, but if we don’t, or if I find someone else who is a Zulu or a leatherworker, I’m not going to beat myself up about it, because I know now my family will love me regardless of what I do or do not do, and that is a feeling I never expected to feel and this is a moment I wouldn’t change for anything.

  Acknowledgements

  It’s an understatement, but I am grateful to my family for their love and encouragement. In relation to this book, I would like to thank them in particular for allowing me to subject them to lengthy interviews on painful subjects, and for giving me permission to write our story. Which is not to say they necessarily agree with my views or version of events – and, of course, any errors are entirely my own. I am also indebted to those members of my extended family who generously provided background information – Balbir Sangha, Phuman Sangha, Malkit Sohi and Mohinder Sohi – and to the family of my late Chacha, Kashmir Singh.

  These words would never have been written if Mary Mount, my remarkable editor at Viking, had not got in touch, listened, and convinced me that books aren’t always written by other people. Meanwhile, I would not have had the courage to follow things through without the support of my brilliant agent, Kate Jones, and my precious friends Robin Roberts, Lachlan Goudie, Lottie Moggach, Preetha McCann, Joanna Manning-Cooper and Lucy Ellison.

  Further back, I would like to thank Tony Burgess and Keith Ball, formerly at Woden Junior School, for cajoling my family into submitting me for a place at Wolverhampton Grammar School, and at WGS I was fortunate that David Radburn and James Lockley were there when things got dark. I would also like to thank Peter Rhodes at the Express & Star for giving me my first break in journalism, and James Harding for attempting to rehabilitate my career more recently.

  Love, thanks and, in some cases, apologies also to: Richard Adams, Waheed Alli, Harleen Anand, Kamalpreet Badasha, Hartosh Bal, Lionel Barber, Alan Beattie, David Bell, Venetia Butterfield, Tom Catan, Helen Chapman, Peter Cheek, Andrew Davis, Mike Duff, Steve Gandar, Matthew Gwyther, Jennifer Harris, Emma Jacobs, Kate Johnson, Lucy Kellaway, Annie Lee, Jagtar Malhi, Gautam Malkani, Deborah Moggach, Cathy Newman, Alex O’Connell, John O’Connell, Laura Sampson, Gurharpal Singh, Raminder Singh, Bernard Trafford, Emma Tucker and Adam White.

  To the staff at the Croft Resource Centre in Bilston, I would like to express my enduring gratitude for the unrecognized and under-funded work they do; and finally, here’s to the next generation, my adorable and adored nephews and nieces: Harminder, Jaspal, Jasveen, Simran, Manraj and Kiran. Know where you come from, but don’t let it stop you becoming who you want to be.

  He just wanted a decent book to read …

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  We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’

  Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books

  The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

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  First published as If You Don’t Know Me By Now by Viking 2008

  Published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © Sathnam Sanghera, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ‘Club Tropicana’: Words & Music by George Michael and Andrew Ridgley

  © 1982 Wham Music Ltd and Morrison Leahy Music Ltd.

  ‘Careless Whisper’: Words & Music by George Michael and Andrew Ridgley

  © 1983 Wham Music Ltd and Morrison Leahy Music Ltd.

  All rights reserved on behalf of Wham Music administered by Warner/Chappell Music Ltd.

  London W6 8BS.

  Reproduced by permission

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  ISBN: 978-0-670-92309-0

  1. Life of Surprises