The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  At school, the swottiness I’d long displayed also intensified. It wasn’t good enough to come top in the end-of-year exams any more. I had to come top in every single test and exercise. And my relentless sucking-up meant that over four years I was made milk monitor, litter monitor, stock room monitor – a prized job, for it meant being let off hymn practice – and tuck shop monitor. When the school got delivery of a keyboard synthesizer, even though I had no idea how to play it, I was the only child allowed to use it without supervision. One of my more surreal childhood memories is of sitting in my grey shorts and grey shirt and maroon tie and black topknot, on stage in front of a hundred kids during morning assembly, demonstrating the school’s expensive new asset by playing it, a task which involved pressing the ‘samba’ button and sitting motionless for five minutes. In some ways the performance echoed that of Chris Lowe from the Pet Shop Boys on Top of the Pops, albeit without the singer, the standing up, the fashion sense, the lyrics, the chord changes or the wild applause afterwards.

  But perhaps the most extreme manifestation of my new intense Indian self, the bit that feels like false memory syndrome and makes me suspect we were actually brought up in a district of northern India and not the British West Midlands, was the sewing factory. For it was around the time of my uncle’s murder, when I was about ten, that the bald, gold-watched man who delivered bundles of unsewn panels to our house opened a factory on the industrial estate behind the railway track that ran at the end of our garden – seconds away as the crow flies. Mum was persuaded to take up a job there, and it wasn’t long after she started that she suggested, during a school holiday, that we accompany her.

  ‘Give it a try tomorrow and see if you like it,’ she said. ‘You’ll get paid.’

  As with so many things, I don’t remember the invitation to participate in the great Indian tradition of illegal child labour being extended to Puli. I assumed it was because she had lots of homework, or that working in a factory was another one of those things – like acting in school plays or playing in the garden – that wasn’t the right thing for a girl to do. It was just the three of us – Bindi, Rajah and me – who sidled past the inquisitive glances of Mum’s colleagues, through the cutting room, into a room containing four industrial ironing boards.

  Opposite the boards was a rack on wheels carrying several white blouses, next to which the boss’s bleach-haired teenage son explained what we needed to do. Our job, he said, was to make the sewn and ironed blouses shop-ready: to clip off rogue threads, button them up, attach a price tag using a plastic gun (£9.99), and wrap the whole garment in a cellophane bag. It was eye-straining, brain-numbing work, and Rajah didn’t come back the next day. Bindi lasted a little longer: a couple of days. Then, with her forthcoming CSEs weighing on her mind, she quit too. But I came in day after day. By the end of the week I’d done fifty hours.

  It was one of the most thrilling moments of my short life to receive my first pay packet – I could almost feel myself fulfilling my destiny, lifting the family out of poverty and misery – and one of the biggest disappointments to find it contained no more than a £10 and a £5 note. I hadn’t expected a specific wage, but had let myself expect more than 30 pence an hour. My tears had Mum in the boss’s office on Monday morning, after which my rate was raised to 50 pence an hour, an amount which was – it seems bizarre now – enough to keep me working for up to fourteen hours a day at that factory on weekends, evenings and school holidays. I can’t say I felt exploited at the time: 50 pence was still five times the pocket money I got in a week. I loved hanging out with the boss’s son and daughter. I had little else to do. But given the opportunity to meet my former boss recently – I should say he has helped my mother on many occasions and she regards him highly – I found myself grinding my teeth, going over those thousands of hours of work, unable to remember a single time when he rounded up my wages or gave me a bonus, even though I was doing the work of an adult, eventually operating button and buttonholing machines. In the end I declined the opportunity of a reunion.

  Nevertheless, I can still recall the excitement of being able to buy things for myself. I remember buying a tape recorder with two decks and a radio, which made making George Michael mix tapes easier. A white study desk with red handles – £29.99 from Argos. A picture of a Lotus Esprit – £5 from a shop on Queen Street. A white 35mm camera – £30 from Dixons. And a map of the world from W. H. Smith – £8 – which I fastened with Blu-tack above my desk.

  ‘Think you’re a right intellectual, don’t you?’ hissed Puli when she saw it, making me think, where did that come from?

  I also remember buying Mum a green suit for Mothers’ Day and my favourite picture from that time – taken with that camera from Dixons – shows her wearing it, while standing between me and my brother. Rajah hates the snap and will kill me for reproducing it, but for me, no other photograph captures the innocence, warmth, weirdness, bad taste, music obsession, dodgy decor, sticky-out ears, and filial devotion of that time.

  There’s another picture taken straight afterwards, showing me standing between Mum, Puli and Dad, but I’m reluctant to produce it, because my sister looks at odds with the world, as Dad so often does in pictures, and it is obvious she is ill; and looking at it now, I’m alerted to the fact that I’ve digressed from my point, which is simply that, in this context, Puli’s behaviour, even when she was falling ill, wasn’t striking. She enjoyed pop music but she didn’t spend entire evenings transcribing the lyrics to ‘Everything She Wants’. She was the teacher’s pet at school, but unlike me, her sucking up didn’t look as if she wanted the staff to take custody of her. Indeed, she was much more sober than us, an extension of Mum in many ways. It was Puli who washed and cooked for us when Mum was busy, who I ran to for comfort when Mum was busy, who wrote letters to school when I was feigning illness to skive off swimming classes made hellish by my reluctance to submerge my topknot under the water and Mum’s attempt to help with the purchase of a rose-painted swimming hat. Yes, she had a bit of a temper, and, yes, the arguments she was involved in went on longer than they should have done, but we often needed telling off and often she was right, and when she began to get ill, the symptoms were so subtle that I didn’t notice them. Even now, with the 20:20 vision of hindsight, and the floodlights of Puli’s own account illuminating my memory, it’s still difficult to pinpoint a time when things began to go wrong. Difficult, but not impossible.

  To get to that point, though, I need to go back on myself, to a time before Mum got her job at the factory, before Rajah had that moment of epiphany with Billie Jean, to that brief period when, owing to a council improvement programme, we, like our Chacha before us, and many others on Prosser Street, briefly moved out of the disintegrating terraced home we owned into a council house on Springfield Road, a few minutes away, as professional renovators installed modern facilities such as bathrooms, indoor loos and wall sockets that didn’t explode when you touched them …

  … It’s a damp weekday evening in our temporary council dwelling, rain is slapping a wet, grey curtain against one side of the window-pane, an old bed sheet is wafting against the other; the smell of boiling saag is drifting in from the kitchen; a battered black and white TV is struggling to receive a signal from an indoor aerial; a bare 60-watt bulb is struggling to light the room; Mum’s sewing-machine is blaring out a persistent mechanical whirr in the corner; and the whole family – except for Puli – is sitting in the front room.

  Everyone hates the house. The loo keeps on overflowing. The meter needs to be fed a steady diet of 50 pence coins, which we keep on running out of. It stinks of the previous residents: cigarettes and dogs. No one can find their stuff and Mum keeps moaning, believing there is something morally reprehensible about living in a council house, even for a short while. But I like it: school is just twenty seconds away; my best friend is just thirty seconds away; the lack of heat means everyone huddling around the one functional heater in the front room, making it feel cosy; and a few mon
ths here seem a small price to pay for a transformed house.

  Dad sits frozen in his armchair, the one bit of furniture that survived the move on the back of a milk float intact (we’d paid our Indian milkman in cartons of fruit juice). Rajah, deep in his Ralph Macchio phase, reads a martial arts magazine on the broken settee, a blanket over his lap. Bindi, panicking about a school test, consults a biology textbook, memorizing which bits of the reproductive organs go where. ‘Ovaries,’ she mouths under her breath, before sniffing. ‘Vulva.’ Sniff. ‘Fallopian tubes.’ Sniff.

  I’d be embarrassed if I knew what any of the words meant or if I wasn’t so preoccupied with the task of drying my hair in front of the electric fire. With my head bowed, I move around the heater with the efficiency of an automated kebab skewer, making sure each bit gets an equal amount of heat. At Prosser Street, in front of the gas heater, drying my hair would take an hour, but here it can take a whole evening, and involves blocking the one decent heater in the house.

  ‘Can’t you dry your hair in the girls’ bedroom?’ Rajah pulls his blanket over his nose.

  ‘Moooooom.’

  ‘But it’s freezing. And he’s stinking the room out.’

  He’s right about the smell. I’ve a chronic dandruff problem, which requires the use of a near-radioactive medicated shampoo, and which makes the house smell like a road works on bath nights. But Mum always takes my side when it comes to my hair.

  ‘Oi.’ She doesn’t even turn round from her sewing-machine. ‘Leave your brother alone.’

  I continue, revolving my hair around the fire as Rajah hisses, ‘You’re a girl. You look like a girl, you sound like a girl, and you’re a grass like a girl …’

  The remark makes me whimper like a girl. Meanwhile, Dad does what he does more than anything else when he is in the house: he gets up from his armchair, walks towards the TV and switches from Channel 1 to Channel 4.

  Bindi, Rajah and I groan in unison. ‘De-diiiiiiiii!’

  ‘None of you were watching.’

  ‘But Dad, it’s time for Dallas.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He does the journey in reverse, without protest, as he does everything.

  I can’t say I’m a big Dallas fan. Even though my favourite programme is Knight Rider, an American television series featuring a sports car with artificial intelligence of sufficient level to reason, talk and deliver sarcastic one-liners, I find Dallas far-fetched. But I watch it religiously, nevertheless, because it is the one thing Mum always watches, the one time of the week she isn’t sewing or washing or cooking or praying or taking one or other of us to the dentist’s or the doctor’s. And I can see why she likes it: she clearly identifies with the long-suffering Miss Ellie Ewing, a strong woman at the head of an unwieldy household; being Indian, she has no problem accepting that a family with billions of dollars might still live together in one house; and like other programmes she takes a passing interest in – Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and anything featuring Norman Wisdom – Dallas, with the angelic Bobby, and the evil JR, has a certain easy-to-follow pantomime appeal. The dialogue requires only minimal and occasional translation, a job, like so many jobs in our household, that falls to Puli.

  There’s a rush to get ready, as the time of the broadcast approaches. Wrapping my still-soggy hair into a fluffy towel, I take a seat at the end of the broken settee. Mum turns off the sewing-machine to join me – you don’t notice how loud it is until it is turned off. Rajah pops off to the kitchen to fetch a bucket of hot water and jasmine oil, into which Mum will place her feet to soak. But as the Dallas theme tune blares out, and as Bindi and I sing along loudly and in tone-deaf fashion – de der, de der, de der de de der – there’s no sign of Puli.

  I shout up for her. ‘Puleeeeeeee! Dallaaaaaas!! It’s starting!!!”

  ‘Oi.’ Mum puts on her spectacles again. ‘Stop blarting like a bullock and go up and get her.’

  ‘Puleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!’

  ‘Oi! You’ll disturb the English goras next door. Go get her.’

  ‘But Mum …’ The reluctant Messiah. ‘Why me?’

  ‘Just go …’

  I go, after receiving promises from Bindi and Rajah that they won’t steal my prime seating position, tempering my speed only to make sure my towel turban doesn’t collapse – calling as I scramble up the wonky stairs.

  ‘Puleeee!’

  ‘Puleeeeeeee!’

  ‘Puleeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’

  The exclamation turns into a question as I push open the door of the bedroom she shares with Bindi.

  ‘Puleeee?’

  Bloody hell. She’s in bed already. Totally submerged under her duvet, in the way I totally submerge myself when playing with the glow-in-the-dark stickers you get in packets of Sugar Puffs. I walk up to the bed and prod her.

  ‘Oi.’ Prod. ‘Dallas is starting in a minute.’ Prod. ‘Mum says come down.’ Prod.

  The prodding merely sends the human chrysalis rolling away from me, to the other end of the bed, so I jump up on to the mattress and pluck the duvet away, an act which reveals Puli curled up with her knees to her face and her hands against her ears.

  ‘Dallas has started. Aren’t you coming down?’

  When she opens her eyes, there’s something I’ve not seen in them before.

  ‘Tell Mum I’ve gone to sleep.’ She pulls the duvet back over her.

  ‘So you’re not coming down?’

  She rolls away from me again. ‘No,’ comes the muffled reply.

  And that was it: the beginning of the storm that would wash her away. No histrionics, no pushing of hard-working media professionals under the wheels of oncoming Tube trains. Her schizophrenia began with a need to withdraw, a need to sleep. ‘I spent most of my waking hours looking forward to going to sleep,’ she told me recently, speaking carefully and in full sentences, which is how she talks. Sometimes it sounds like she’s reading. Often, she is reading: her illness can make her lose her train of thought, and she tackles the problem by making preparatory notes before conversations. ‘I used to wake up and think sleep was the best thing in my life. When I was asleep my dreams were normal, the people were normal, my relationships with people were normal. I could recognize who I was in my dreams. But when I woke up, the nightmare began. Does that make sense?’

  8. Doctor! Doctor!

  Four of us ended up traipsing to Bilston on that frigid Monday: Dad, Mum, me and my youngest niece, who was off school sick but evidently not too ill to accompany her grandparents and uncle on a visit to the local mental health unit. We must have been an odd sight to passers-by: Dad, shuffling along in a cream anorak and brown trousers, carrying a T. J. Hughes carrier bag full of medication (‘If you are taking any medicines or tablets please bring them with you’); Mum wrapped up like Sir Ranulph Fiennes on the cusp of an expedition to Everest; a four-year-old girl in a pink tracksuit and glitter-spattered hat, singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round’; and a twenty-nine-year-old man in a black French Connection coat and Prada spectacles, looking like, and sincerely wishing he was, on the way to a film screening in Soho.

  Perversely, my parents took different routes to the bus stop: Dad, slightly hunched, walking with a limp which he refused to discuss with his GP, via the main road; Mum choosing to go via the park, walking a foot behind me, no matter how much I sped up or slowed down. We arrived at the same time, though, and Mum decided to pass the time waiting for the first West Midlands bus I’d caught in eleven years – I’d wanted to take a taxi but she’d refused to let me ‘waste’ £5 – by raising the infernal arranged marriage issue, this time by making an unfavourable and irritating comparison to a family friend who had recently had an arranged marriage to a fat girl from India, and had already produced a fat child to scamper around a £1m Barratt home purchased with the proceeds of a career in some mind-numbingly tedious sector of commercial law.

  ‘Mum, he is a lawyer, he married a girl from India and he lives in Kent. I don’t want to do any of
those things.’

  ‘I don’t understand – you say you went to the best university and yet you only have a tiny flat in London.’ A pause. ‘He has a whole house!’ Another pause. ‘Plus a lucrative sideline in investment properties!’

  ‘Mum, I did a degree in a subject I enjoyed. I enjoy my job. Some people would probably do it for half the salary. Every lawyer I’ve ever met is unhappy. Kent isn’t London. And I like my flat.’

  ‘You’ve one small flat. Noise in every direction …’

  ‘Mum, you’ve only been the once. It’s quiet.’

  ‘… noise upstairs, noise downstairs …’

  ‘Mum, it’s quiet.’

  ‘… noise next door one side, noise next door on other side …’

  ‘IT’S QUIET … for Brixton.’

  ‘… He has a Mercedes. You own no car.’ Sensing she was about to win the argument, she combined her two complaints. ‘GIRLS NOWADAYS LIKE TO MARRY MEN WITH HOUSES AND CARS.’

  As much as I would like to own a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti and a house on the Thames, the way in which the wealthy are respected over the educated or the happy is one of the most irritating things about Punjabi culture. I can just about tolerate such values when they emanate from my extended family, and somehow managed not to lose it at a recent family funeral, when a cousin I hadn’t seen in years greeted me with the remark: ‘I’ve just bought a BMW M5 for fifty grand.’ But I can’t stand it when Mum implies I’m somehow wasting my life doing what I do. Not for the first time, I wished I had a wider Punjabi vocabulary with which to convey my exasperation, but having been taught the language by Mum, I didn’t even have the Punjabi for ‘dammit’ to resort to – it’s ironic that the first words one usually learns in any new language are the ones you shouldn’t repeat too often, but with my first language, I don’t have a single one – and had to resort to kicking the bus shelter in frustration. Dad, the peace-maker, attempted to intervene.