The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘Sounds stressful.’ My potential future fiancée had both hands around her mug, like a model in a hot chocolate advert. ‘Sometimes I’m glad I’ve got a small family. But why don’t you just write the story like your mum told it? Keep it simple.’

  Ha! If only it was that easy. But didn’t she read the papers? Every week there seemed to be a new memoir-related scandal, where someone was crucified for getting things wrong, for claiming they’d spent six years in prison for kidnapping but had in fact only been cautioned for jumping a red light, for writing an account of getting lost in the Amazon when in fact they’d just taken a wrong turn in a safari park. And the problem was that my mother’s account was full of gaps and inconsistencies. Not major inconsistencies. The kind of inconsistencies you get if you come from an oral culture, if you haven’t had novels and Radio 4 to condition you into remembering and talking about things in a certain way. The kind of inconsistencies you get when you are discussing very painful things that happened a long time ago. Besides, if I was going to pen a journalistic account of my parents’ story, I would have to obey some of the basic rules of journalism, including those on sourcing, which state that it is important to get two, or three, independent sources for each story, always to ask yourself why your source has chosen to tell you something, and to seek to disprove what you’ve been told, even if it takes time.

  ‘Blimey.’

  I’d finally moved from the subject of the book to a set of more general anxieties, including the post-romantic stress I suffered after breaking up with Laura, and my inability to make relationships work longer than three or four months, and my worry that all the stress I was currently under would result in the loopings of my mind accelerating out of control, forcing me to succumb to schizophrenia too, when I noticed she’d wrapped the strap of her handbag around her index finger, was looking over my shoulder, and that the remains of the muffin I had been prodding while talking were scattered across the table between us, washing around in the remnants of my preceding cups of coffee, looking like … well, like a physical manifestation of my emotional diarrhoea.

  As much as arranged marriage meetings differ from conventional dates, there are certain rules that apply to both. It’s important to pay your date compliments, for instance. To dress well. To talk more about the other person than yourself. To not go on about your exes. To be happy and upbeat. To not drink too much. To pay. And the only commandments I’d managed to obey were the not-drinking and the paying. I asked if she wanted another coffee and she said no, she ought to be heading off – lots of marking to be done – but thanks very much for the coffee, it had been lovely to chat, she just had to pop to the loo before going, but I shouldn’t wait, she’d be in touch, and yes – handshake – it would be lovely to repeat the experience over a proper drink soon.

  The remorse I felt on the walk home was savage. By the time I got to the end of my parents’ street I’d concluded that suicide was the only option. But then I saw the local off-licence and had another idea: alcohol. And so – because Mum hates there being booze of any kind in the house – I found myself smuggling alcohol into my bedroom for the first time since I was seventeen. Thus fortified, I began trying to write Mum and Dad’s story.

  The following morning Jito prepared Cugi’s breakfast – a paratha with yoghurt – and packed his lunch into a tiffin box – carrot and potato (?) sabzi packed with chapattis. As he left for work at a local timber yard/concrete factory (?), he instructed her not to, under any circumstances, leave the bedroom while he was away. She wasn’t to have contact with anyone at any time, not even with the children of the household. Jito did as she was told, beginning her morning by making the bed, emptying the contents of her red (?) suitcase into the solitary (?) wardrobe standing at the end of the room (?), straightening the cracked (?) wall mirror, putting up a picture/calendar (?) of Guru Teg Bahadar/Guru Nanak/Guru Gobind on the windowsill and using her fingers to pick out debris from the brown (?) carpet (????????).

  Christ, what was wrong with me? People wrote about their families all the time. But I couldn’t get beyond the first page. I slammed my laptop shut – though not so loud as to wake my parents, who were in bed already, though it was just eight – and had a few more glugs of neat gin.

  It was not until this time of my life that I began to understand the appeal of alcoholism. Previously, I’d watched, with varying degrees of puzzlement, several relatives drink themselves to death,* and wondered how they could stand the hangovers and the effect the drinking had on their relationships. But finally I got it. You drink and you keep on drinking not because you enjoy the alcohol and don’t mind the hangovers: you drink because you feel better drunk than you do when you’re sober. It’s not about where alcohol takes you, it’s about what alcohol takes you away from.

  But I couldn’t even seem to do alcoholism right: that evening, rather than taking me out of myself, the drink dragged me deeper into myself. Walking around the room, my head spinning with contraband gin, everything I looked at seemed to tell me I was a twat. Here was the Homer Simpson radio my brother had bought me for a birthday, but which I hadn’t taken to London because I had a deluxe Roberts model in my bathroom. Here was a wall clock my sister Puli had bought me when I got my flat – it had probably cost her a good portion of a weekly benefits cheque – but which I left in Wolves because I had my eye on something trendier. Here was the plaque Bindi had made for me when I graduated – ‘To Sathnam; Congratulations on passing your exams, graduated on 26th June 1998’ – but which I didn’t take because I thought my London friends might consider it gloating.

  The view out of the window didn’t offer much consolation either. I’d spent large chunks of time staring out of that window when we first moved into the house. At Prosser Street all I could see from my bedroom window was a railway track and the tops of some factories, but suddenly, with the new house on the foot of a hill called the Beacon, I had panoramic views of Wolverhampton. I was mesmerized, not just at the breadth and depth of the view – you could see for tens of miles across the Midlands – but by the foreground too. We had only moved to a different part of town, but it felt like a different world. Here people kept dogs on leashes, rather than letting them roam the streets, had broadsheet newspapers delivered every day and washed their new cars on Sunday mornings. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recapture that feeling of awe. All I felt was irritation at the sight of our front lawn. I used to spend hours getting the edges perfect and the stripes just right. I wanted it to be indistinguishable from the lawns of our white neighbours. But in my absence, not only had most of our white neighbours moved, and the surrounding lawns been hacked, the edges of ours had been cut away unevenly and someone had made a hole in the middle and plonked a bush in it. It was a mess.

  13. Devil’s Haircut

  After spending all of 1989 and most of 1990 considering the matter, I realized I needed professional help. But not having ever entered a hair salon before, the professional help I required lay beyond a canyon of ignorance. What, for instance, was the difference between a ‘barber’ and a ‘hairdresser’? What, for that matter, was the difference between a ‘hairdresser’ and a ‘hair stylist’? Come to think of it, what was the difference between a ‘salon’ and a ‘parlour’, how come some ‘hairdressers’ charged £5 for a cut and blow-dry, while others charged £15 for the same thing, did you pay more, the more hair you had, and what was with this ‘unisex’ business? – the word seemed to imply one-sex only, like uni-cycle implied one wheel only, but I was sure I’d seen both men and women through the window of the ‘unisex’ salon on the Dovedale Road.

  Looking for clues – and this being an age before the internet – I started browsing hair and beauty magazines in the Mander Centre branch of W. H. Smith after school, standing in the corner opposite – this being an age before the internet – the permanent gaggle of schoolboys foraging for pictures of naked women in photography magazines. Unfortunately, while the titles contained plenty of tips for girls w
anting to jazz up their highlights, few articles were of much use to a teenage Sikh boy seeking his first snip. Even a piece headlined: ‘Tips to Increase Chances of a Good Haircut’ turned out to be a disappointment.

  Tip one. Hang out! Visit a salon, listen to the banter, see how the atmosphere makes you feel!

  I knew exactly how the atmosphere would make me feel: nervous. And if I was going to go through the trauma of appearing in a salon with a topknot gleaming on my head, I might as well go the whole hog and have a haircut.

  Tip two. Ask around! If you see someone with a cool hairstyle, enquire where they had it done! That’ll give you somewhere to check out!

  My brother had a great haircut – he had made it through his Jordan-Knight-from-New-Kids-on-the-Block phase, and now that he worked at a local accountancy firm, had a sensible hair-style that for once wasn’t inspired by a celebrity – but even to mention a haircut to him was to risk him telling my mother, which was to risk her killing me or herself, or both of us, in outrage.

  I abandoned the magazine and went home to spend the evening doing what I did most evenings at that time: flicking alternately through textbooks, the underwear spreads in the Kays catalogue and the hairdresser and barber sections of local phone directories. And it was while flicking through the Yellow Pages that I noticed something that I’d somehow overlooked the last 342 times I’d gone through it: ‘mobile hairdressers’. It sounded promising. And the next evening I went to the phone box on a nearby main road – you can never be too careful with Mum – and, ankle-deep in discarded copies of the Wolverhampton Chronicle, called the number at the bottom of the advert which said:

  Hair & Beauty by Vicky

  Fully Qualified – 15 years exp

  Eve & Wknd Appts Available

  Wedding Day Hair & Make Up

  Vicky answered straight away. I’d expected a light, friendly, girly voice, but instead got a raddled, almost masculine Black Country growl. The stresses of mobile hairdressing had clearly taken their toll.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Hello,’ I responded, originally. My voice was all over the place. Calling a sex line would have been less stressful. ‘I was wondering whether you … [cough] … I was wondering whether you could explain how you … eeeuuuh … sorry … could you tell me how you work?’

  ‘Oi’yam a mobile hairdresser.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Which means oi’yam mobile … and oi’yam a hairdresser.’

  ‘Yes. But I rather wondered …’ Jesus, my brother was right: my posh school was beginning to make me sound like Trevor McDonald. I tried to sound more Black Country. ‘Do yow cut … or dress … hair in … a van?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘DO YOU CUT HAIR IN A VAN?’

  ‘A van?’

  ‘I thought … [cough] you might work like those … mobile fish and chip vans?’

  ‘Oi ain’t got a van. Oi go into people’s houses. Usually old or disabled folk and what have yow …’

  ‘What do you do about the hair … the hair mess?’

  ‘I’ve a plastic sheet … Hold on.’ Shuffling on the line, and then the voice re-emerging even more growly. ‘How old am yow?’

  ‘Fourteen. Do you charge more the longer the hair is?’

  ‘How long is yow hair?’

  ‘From my knees to my head.’

  ‘Y’am a fourteen-year-old bloke with hair from yow knees to yow head?’ Laughter on the line. ‘Is yow Jeremy Beadle or wot?’

  ‘The other way round, I mean. From my head to my knees. But it’s in a topknot most of the time. Could you come over on a Sunday morning, when my Mum and Dad are at the templ …’

  Click.

  Buzz.

  Shit.

  I was going to have to go to a hair salon.

  After a little more procrastination, a little more anxiety and – this was perverse, given the sacrilegious nature of what I was planning – a little more praying, the possibilities were whittled down to two options: ‘Ranjit, Hairstylist’ on the Dudley Road; or ‘Stylistics’ in the town centre. Over the next month, I staked them out like a bank robber planning a heist: timetables were timetabled; dry runs were dry run; escape routes were escape routed. Eventually, I settled on ‘Ranjit, Hairstylist’ on the Dudley Road, on the grounds that a bunch of Indian barbers were less likely to be freaked out by a fourteen-year-old boy with hair beyond his bum than a salon full of glamorous blonde hairdressers. I scrawled an ‘H’ for haircut in the Friday section of my homework diary. I would go in the evening, after school.

  I suppose I should explain at this point what it was that finally led to the not insignificant decision to cut my hair, defy my mother, and begin a process of alienation from my family and culture which would lead to me dating an English girl and eventually having to come back home to plug the gap that had opened up between what I had been and what I’d become. And there’s certainly no shortage of excuses to proffer. I could mention, for instance, how my Sikh faith had been diluted by years of compulsory Christian worship at school. I could highlight the haphazard nature of my instruction in Sikhism: all that Punjabi classes on Saturday mornings had taught me was how to write ‘the camel went to the well’ in Punjabi script; and while Mum was forever providing moral guidance, she’d provided a random set of rules – don’t look at girls, don’t eat meat or egg products on Sundays and Tuesdays – rather than a coherent belief system. Not least, I could point out that the theological thinking behind the notion of long hair seemed as woolly as the beard threatening to erupt from my chin: some Sikhs said having kes was a necessary way of showing respect for the God-given form; some said it was a necessary expression of love for the Guru (like a married person would wear a wedding ring); some linked it to intelligence, health and spirituality; some said Guru Gobind Singh made the keeping of unshorn hair mandatory to give Sikhs a binding identity; while others argued that long hair wasn’t actually necessary to be a Sikh.

  I could mention all these things. But I wouldn’t be telling the truth. You see, there was no crisis of faith, or philosophical dark night of the soul, behind my decision. If there was any theological or intellectual dimension to it at all, it comprised little more than thinking: Dad and Rajah cut their hair, and they haven’t been struck down by lightning yet, have they? And maybe: God can’t be that impressed by my topknot, I’m doing crap at school. Basically, I wanted to get rid of my long hair because: (i) I was fed up of being teased about my topknot; (ii) I hated the way my topknot restricted my freedom – I still couldn’t leave the house until Mum had combed my hair; and (iii) I LOATHED the way it made me look. It wasn’t so bad when I was little. People would say I looked like a girl, but I was an over-sensitive ponce of a child and felt like a girl a lot of the time anyway. But puberty changed things: brillo pads sprouted everywhere, on my top lip, between my eyebrows, all over the place. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand the sight of myself in photos and mirrors. If we had visitors, I’d shrink away to my bedroom. Being within 400 yards of a pretty girl gave me an instant fever of 44 degrees. I felt like a combination of the Elephant Man and the psoriatic arthropath in Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective.

  Trying to think of ways to get rid of my hair, without having Mum freak out, became a chief intellectual preoccupation. Maybe I could have an ‘accident’ with the vibrating clippers I used in the factory to trim threads off blouses, or persuade my GP to say I needed to get rid of my hair for health reasons? Frankly, I considered everything,* up to and including contracting a mild, curable cancer – a spot of chemotherapy would have done the job – but in the end, on seeing the horrendous results of a photo I had to have taken for a new passport, a picture in which I thought I looked like Rocky, the boy with a massive facial skull deformity in Mask, the Cher movie, my unhappiness simply outweighed the anxiety I felt about my mother’s possible reaction and I decided to have it snipped off.

  On the momentous day in question, events stiffened my resolve. Mum, who was running late for work, moaned unsparingl
y as she combed my hair, tied it into a plait and knotted the plait into a bun. ‘Balle, son, when you going to learn how to do your hair yourself? Your cousin Harminder started tying his own ghuti at the age of ten and now does his own turban too. I’ve been up since six, my back hurts, I’m late for work and here I am having to comb your hair as well. Will I be doing this when you are married with children? You should be looking after us, not the other way around …’ At school, there was the usual teasing and sarcasm and low-grade wit: one boy threw a blackboard rubber at my topknot during lunch; and when the Latin master asked the boy behind me why he wasn’t noting down the declensions from the board, he said it was because ‘Sanghera’s head is in the way, sir.’ I bolted out of school at 4 p.m. to catch the number 510 bus, which got me into the town centre in time for the 4.20 number 558 bus down to the Dudley Road.

  I can remember more about what followed than I can recall of what happened yesterday, or even this afternoon. It was pouring with rain: so much so that the windows of the bus got steamed up and I missed my stop and ended up walking, getting soaked through my single-breasted school blazer, my V-necked pullover, my long charcoal grey trousers and my plain shirt. It was dark: prematurely dark. Winter was setting in and the clocks had just been turned back. And standing in front of the barber’s door was surreal and unnerving, not unlike returning to a piece of writing after a month or two: all I could see were mistakes and omissions. Among the things I had somehow missed on my recces was a sign in the window indicating that the shop closed at 5.30, the proximity of the salon to the Sikh temple across the road, and a poster of Hare Krishna on the wall. The closing time was a worry: I had no idea how long it would take to cut my hair and wondered whether I’d left it too late. The Sikh temple was an anxiety too: the priests, and possibly members of my family, might witness the sacrilegious act. But the Hare Krishna poster was the most serious oversight, for it meant that Ranjit was a Hindu.