The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Despite this, sometimes, tired out worrying, I would allow myself to think positively. Sometimes – encouraged by friends – I’d decide things weren’t that bad. The Sikh faith, founded by Guru Nanak, was liberal. It taught monotheism, the brother hood of humanity, rejected idol worship, the oppressive Hindu concept of caste, and had tolerance at its heart. Its gurdwaras were open to anyone; it was unique in respecting other religions and other people; Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth guru, had preached equality and proclaimed that his disciples should ‘recognize the human race as one’. Besides, Mum must have worked out what was going on. She was so sensitive that sometimes she could tell if something was up at work from the tone of my voice on the telephone. She had to know about Laura. Maybe when she said, ‘I just want you to be happy,’ she actually meant it, without the thousand caveats. Maybe I was just being neurotic.

  But these moments of optimism were the worst. With metronomic predictability, a crash would follow. I would visit Mum and she would present me with gold jewellery she’d bought for my future bride, or would insist on a particularly depressing arranged marriage meeting. The worst crash came when she rang in tears, announcing that a great scandal had afflicted the family in India: a pretty and lively cousin of mine had run away to marry a boy. When I pressed for further information, it transpired, between her sobs, that the problem with this boy was not that he was from another religion, or from another caste, or the wrong age, or had bad prospects, or was even the wrong height or skin colour. The scandal, it turned out, was that he was – get this – FROM THE SAME VILLAGE AS THE GIRL. Which, apparently, is a no-no.

  More than anything else, this story brought home the bleakness of my situation. The only option I had was to ride things out, hoping my secret life wouldn’t be discovered and that Laura wouldn’t force the situation. And the thing is, she never did. Throughout she was supportive and understanding, even when I started suffering from recurring nightmares. In the nightmare – which I still have – I hear that my father is ill, go home to see him, only to have my mother refuse to let me into the house because of what I have done. The look on her face when she opens the door is the one she flicked in my direction at my graduation ceremony. It was a special kind of hell to wake up from this nightmare and to be comforted by Laura, to switch immediately from the guilt I felt about my family to the guilt I felt at what I was doing to her. I could almost hear the foundations of our relationship buckling under the weight of my indecision.

  However, as I floundered, I found a way of plastering over the worst of the anxiety: work. With a deadline approaching, there was less time and space to worry about being found out, or having to come to some kind of resolution. And as I let my relationship drift, my career took off. I met my heroes, was promoted, won some of the awards that journalists love giving one another. Holidays were difficult: things would always catch up with me then. But I found an effective solution for these too: I stopped taking them. Laura complained, but seemed to understand. She always seemed to understand.

  But, eventually, I had been caught. There were so many heart-stopping moments during those years, when I thought I’d been spotted, and it could have been any one of them, but there is one moment that frightened me more than any other. I was sitting with Laura on the Tube one Saturday morning, and in a rare, possibly guilt-induced, display of public affection had my arm around her, when I noticed an Indian of my kind of age sitting opposite, staring. The staring was not in itself notable: Indians always glare at other Indians. But there was something about this man – I thought I recognized him from somewhere – and something about his smile, almost a smirk, that made me think he was making a mental note to pass on some gossip. Having said that, it might have been speculation or gossip that instigated the crisis. Who knows. All that mattered was that Mum had found out, and now my aunt was calling me, asking me about it.

  ‘Hello. You there?’

  ‘Yes, sorry, bad line …’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘—’

  As I held the phone away from my ear, the initial shock gave way to something else: anger. Suddenly, I was furious about Mum’s reaction (the hysterical mother is the ultimate Indian cliché), my extended family’s involvement (who were these people calling me, judging me? I barely knew them), the distant relative who had supposedly passed on the information (gleefully, no doubt), the way in which the media always portrays men as the beneficiaries of arranged marriages (some of us were just as trapped as women), and the racism of the word ‘gori’, a word spat out as if it were interchangeable with ‘whore’, a word being used to describe someone who had only been kind to me, who had done more for me than many members of my extended family had ever done.

  As I put the receiver back to my ear, the anger gave way to a sense of the imminence of a turning point, one of those rare critical moments in life, where you can change things for the better, or carry on badly, as you have done. I stood up, thought of Laura lying in bed next door, of how warm she would feel when I slid into bed next to her, and then I thought of my mother sobbing at home. In the end, I did what came naturally. I lied. I lied three times, like Peter.

  It’s not true.

  I’m not seeing anyone.

  I don’t know why they would say that.

  Asking my aunt to convey the message to my mother, I hung up, sank to my knees and knocked my forehead against the floor. It was my sincere hope that the laminate boards would splinter, that the splinters would penetrate my skull, and that I would die an instant death.

  4. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

  There was a time when I would have accepted the accepted wisdom about the end of love affairs: that, as with bereavement, there are five stages – denial, depression, anger, resignation and acceptance – and that one must go through each stage in order to reach the happy ending. At least, my response to Laura’s inevitable decision to end our relationship followed that emotional arc. But with subsequent failed relationships it has become evident that things are more complicated.

  There are, I realize now, many more intermediary stages between denial and acceptance – relief and bitterness, for instance; in some cases you can go through the grieving stages before the relationship actually ends, you don’t necessarily go through all the stages with every relationship, and one’s journey through them varies according to an impenetrable chemistry of: (i) the quality of the relationship; (ii) how you met; (iii) your initial expectations; (iv) timing; (v) whether someone else is involved; and (vi) the vital fact of who dumped who first.

  Indeed, after Laura, there was a five-month relationship with a lovely recruitment consultant, which ended quite pleasantly; there was no denial or anger when we decided to give up, just immediate and mutual resignation and acceptance. There followed a three-month relationship with a Sikh doctor, the entirety of which, both before and after the break-up, was characterized by irritation and anger. Then four months with a blonde solicitor, the culmination of which bought acceptance; but then, five months later, on hearing she was engaged to a good-looking and successful acquaintance, I was suddenly punching walls. After this came four months with a brunette teacher, the termination of which mainly made me sad because she was so adorable and so upset. And when my sixth relationship ended in as many years – let’s say her name was Alison, that she was a lawyer and that she at least had the courtesy to dump me on a Friday evening, just before a holiday, which, experience has taught me, is the best time to end a relationship, as you at least give the dumpee time to lick their wounds – initially I felt nothing at all.

  I simply took the bag I had packed for France from the flat that I now owned in Brixton, south London, got into the canary yellow Porsche 911 Turbo I was test-driving as a new element of my even more ridiculously perfect job, slumped into the firm contours of the sporty bucket seats, and made off in a racket of engine noise and wheelspin which must have looked deliberate but was in fact caused by the combination of my unfamiliarity with the car and p
oor driving skills. Before I knew it, I had shot past the excessive number of fried chicken outlets in south London, over the silver-gleaming Thames, past those always-empty so-called steakhouses in the West End, through leafy north London, up the M1 and the M6, and, after the hills and spires on the horizon began to be replaced with shabby factories and the shimmering tops of newly built gurdwaras, I once again found myself in Wolverhampton, the arse of the Black Country, in itself the bumcrack of the West Midlands, in itself the backside of Great Britain.

  Within moments of pulling up outside my parents’ semi-detached home, the spoiler crunching expensively against the steep tarmacked driveway, one of the ever-declining number of white residents on the street had come up to say hi – ‘Alroight, cock?’ – and an Indian neighbour I hadn’t seen in ten years or more, on his way back from the Three Crowns, asked with a directness that was almost physically winding what kind of salary I was on. ‘Must be on a fair whack to afford those wheels.’ I shrugged vaguely in a way that intended to convey frustration with the Punjabi obsession with status symbols, but in actual fact implied, incorrectly, that my salary was so large that I didn’t want to talk about it, and then tugged my LVMH bag through the double-glazed UPVC porch door of my parents’ house.

  Even though the visit was unannounced and it was at least three hours past Mum’s bedtime, she insisted on the usual ritual of hugs, running hands through birdseed, having chillies twirled around my head and curry, during which I told her I’d be spending a week in Wolverhampton.

  ‘… your brother-in-law’s cousin Harbjit was let off the kidnapping charge in the end …’ she was saying, as I informed her.

  ‘Mum, is it okay if I stay for a while?’

  ‘… it was ridiculous it went to court. I mean, all he did was drive them a few miles out of town …’

  ‘Mum – did you hear what I said?’

  ‘… I just don’t think the police like Indian taxi drivers …’ A pause. ‘Did you say you’re staying for a while?’

  ‘I’ve taken a week off work.’

  ‘A week?’ She looked delighted. The longest I’d managed to stay in Wolverhampton in the preceding years was forty-eight hours. ‘Chunga, chunga.’ It was evident from the faraway look in her eyes that she’d already begun planning the menu. ‘Though God knows why you can’t live here. There are newspapers in the Midlands, you know.’

  I went to bed straight after dinner and didn’t get up until midday. Mum must have heard me stirring because when I got to the bath, it had already been run and Mum was standing next to it, pouring holy water into it. I was downstairs in the living room an hour later, where I waved a doll at one of my nieces, remarked on the weather to Dad, munched my way through lunch – more to appease Mum than out of any desire to sustain myself – and returned upstairs. I did a version of the same thing the next day. And the day after that too. God knows what my parents thought I was up to. Maybe they thought I was working. In reality, I was either sleeping or staring at the wall-mounted gas heater.

  I suppose the symptoms could be interpreted as those of depression. But my mental state differed from melancholia in one crucial respect: while the spiralling, endlessly looping thought processes of depression are negative, I wasn’t really experiencing any real thought processes at all. I thought of nothing as I lay in bed. I thought of nothing as I stared at the wall-mounted gas heater. I thought of nothing as I went downstairs and stared out of the patio doors at the cats in the garden, which spent their days staring at the birds in the garden, which spent their days staring at the mounds of food and seeds my mother put out at 7 a.m. every day. I’ve tried to find a word that might describe this not pleasurable, not unpleasurable state of intellectual and emotional suspension, and an online dictionary suggests ‘hebetude’, which apparently means ‘dullness of mind; mental lethargy’. But the offline Collins Dictionary suggests the word doesn’t actually exist, which seems apt somehow, for a state of blankness.

  There was a breakthrough on day four, however, in the form of a thought. Not a particularly profound one, but a thought nevertheless. It was: ‘God.’ As with buses, soon several other thoughts had arrived. They included: ‘Maybe all my relationships have been a waste of time and energy’; and ‘Maybe I would have been better off marrying one of those Indian girls I’d been introduced to’; and ‘Why have I been putting my family life at risk for nothing?’ I’d thrown myself wholeheartedly – well, a little neurotically, perhaps – into a series of relationships, put everything on the line, though admittedly I’d never come close to telling my parents about any of them, and where had it got me? It had got me back to my mum’s.

  And because, in my mind, I connect relationships to work and London, I had a concomitant downer about these other things. Where had journalism got me? I had the mobile numbers of several celebrities who would struggle to remember who I was if shown photographic evidence of our meeting, and a tiny flat in a violent neighbourhood. As for London, I’d fetishized it for years, had wanted to live there before I’d even been there, had written a dissertation on London in the modern novel at university. But if I was honest, was it fun to live there? The parking wardens were tossers. Brixton was scary. Everything was too expensive. No one ever popped over to see how you were. If you were in trouble, you had to ask for help. And what was the point of that?

  The low point came the next day, when, for the first time since I had left home, I was struck by the idea that I could move back. I could work freelance from Wolverhampton, I told myself. Become one of those members of the ‘boomerang generation’ that newspapers were always writing about. A ‘kidult’ who moved back home after university. After all, my parents wanted me to stay. And wasn’t living at home like living in a hotel? A hotel with an extremely intrusive and attentive proprietor, admittedly. A hotel with bizarre rules – no alcohol, no meat on Sundays and Tuesdays, etc. – but a hotel nevertheless. If I sold my flat and pooled it with my parents’ money I could buy a mansion in Wolverhampton. A mansion. With a car and a cat. Maybe I could give up work entirely …

  It took three separate but virtually simultaneous developments to drag me out of this vortex. First, I looked in the property section of a local paper and realized I wouldn’t be able to afford a semi-detached in Wolverhampton, let alone a mansion. Second, I remembered an episode of Seinfeld in which George approaches an attractive woman and says, ‘Hi. My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.’ And then, watching an episode of Bargain Hunt, my father slurping his tea loudly next to me, several nephews and nieces using me as a climbing frame, and my mother prattling on about the importance of listening to prayer tapes (‘Even if you don’t understand the words, it is good to listen’) and the engagement of the girl down the street, who had apparently graduated with a ‘digiree’ in pharmacy – ‘TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD AND STILL NOT MARRIED’ – I remembered that as well as being the most wonderful people in the world, my parents were also the most infuriating, and literally bolted out of the house.

  I walked for hours that afternoon. Down the dual carriageway on which I failed my first driving test, past the pub where I witnessed my first glassing, past the record shop I queued outside – if you can have a queue of just one person – for my copy of Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, past the library where I once took out a copy of Making Love While You’re Pregnant, past the branch of Burger King where a sadistic supervisor once made me clean a single toilet five times in half an hour, past the entrance to the Mander Shopping Centre where two boys once set a Doberman on me for amusement, past the bench where I once kissed a date – she tasted of apples, I tasted of battered sausage – past the concert hall where I once paid real money to see Lenny Henry perform and actually laughed out loud at some of the jokes, and finally into Queen Square, where, of all things, in a space where I think there used to be a charity shop, I found a building claiming to be the ‘Wolverhampton Tourist Office’.

  It’s hard to put into words just how much of a shock this was. I
’ve always taken it as one of life’s certainties, alongside the fact that water freezes at zero degrees, and the fact that Cliff Richard releases a single at Christmas, that Wolverhampton is the crappest town in Britain. And I’m hardly alone: Wolves, or Wolvo as it is known by many inhabitants, has been a byword for misery in books and stand-up routines for decades. But now it appeared it had, of all things, become a tourist destination. I couldn’t think of anything more improbable, and went in, to be greeted by the sound of a DJ on 107.7FM, The Wolf, talking over the opening chords of ‘Against All Odds’ by Phil Collins.

  Once my eyes had adjusted to the light I could make out the shape of a counter, two middle-aged women typing frantically behind it, and, opposite them, a large display of tourist brochures. I had no idea there were so many places of interest in Wolverhampton. And on closer inspection I discovered there aren’t so many places of interest in Wolverhampton. Most of the brochures seemed to be related to attractions tens, and, in some cases, hundreds of miles away: Hampton Court; Snowdonia; Cornwall. There was a section dedicated to more local attractions, but it was more than a little padded out with bus timetables. I picked out the most promising-looking leaflet – ‘Black Country Days Out’ – and after reading about the delights of the Merry Hill shopping centre and ‘Mad O’Rourke’s Pie Factory’, an apparently ‘famous’ pub which produces something called ‘the Desperate Dan cow pie’, I couldn’t help but turn to the less severe-looking of the two attendants, and remark: ‘I can’t believe Wolverhampton has a tourist information office.’

  ‘It ay a tourist informayshun office no more.’ She was still typing frantically. An application letter? A suicide note? ‘It’s a visitor informayshun centre.’