The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  During the following weeks, my uncle and aunt didn’t see much of my parents. Mum says my father went round to their house and said he wanted to permanently sever all contact. But my uncle continued to witness his behaviour at work and socially. ‘He would swear at people, get into fights. He would throw glasses at people in the pub, grab friends by the arm and try to wrestle with them. When he got sacked I got him another job at a wood factory – where they made doors – but he got sacked from there too. Everyone was scared of him. He could have killed someone.’

  He very nearly did kill someone: my mother. My parents’ landlady was so worried by the incessant beatings that she came over to my uncle’s house to beg them to do something. But it must have been hard, when my father had told them to stay away. My aunt did what she could and asked her mother in Wolverhampton to come and intervene. My grandmother did so, but unfortunately, her help, according to Mum, consisted of little more than a sudden appearance on her doorstep and the confident declaration that my parents’ problems were the handwork of malevolent forces – maybe someone had put a curse on her son or put something unscrupulous in his food. The only course of action, she said, was to have prayers said in India. And as prayers didn’t come for free, she asked for some cash. Mum remembers handing over £150 of the £500 that Dad had saved since he came to Britain. And then my grandmother left. That was it. God knows what happened to the money: maybe it was actually spent on prayers in India, but most likely it was used by my father’s elder brothers in Bilga, who had by this stage settled into a life of alcohol and drug abuse and wife battery that they would remain committed to until they reached their respective premature deaths.

  But then, one night, my mother was beaten so badly that she left her room in the rented house in the middle of the night and appeared on my aunt’s doorstep, asking to be sent to safety in Wolverhampton, to the house in Park Village where my grandparents and my Pindor bua, another of my father’s sisters, lived.

  ‘She came very early in the morning,’ my aunt remembered. ‘It was 4 a.m., Cugi was asleep. The kids were asleep. Your phupre got up and said he wouldn’t go to work, would stay with the kids, while I dropped her off. I took her on the train to Euston and then put her on the train to Wolverhampton, telling her which stop to get off at. I think it must have been the fourth or fifth stop. When I returned, Cugi was here, shouting and storming around the house, asking where Jito had gone. I said I didn’t know. After searching the house, he demanded we phone Bibi, to ask if Jito had turned up in Wolverhampton. But when we got through, Bibi told him Jito wasn’t in Wolverhampton. Which was the truth: she hadn’t arrived at the station at the time she was meant to. Your Pindor bua had come back alone. But he was convinced she was there and got a taxi to Wolverhampton.’

  ‘A taxi?’

  ‘Yes, for £25. It was a lot of money then. He put all his stuff into the car and went. And that was it. Your parents didn’t come back to live in Grays after that.’

  The statement hung in the air between us. Rain beat against the windowpane. I’d asked maybe a quarter of the questions I meant to, but I shut my pad nevertheless, telling myself I would come back and ask them at some other point. The time-counter on the dictaphone said an hour had passed, but it didn’t feel that long. Eventually my uncle spoke.

  ‘Towards the end, some people – his friends – started saying he’d gone mad.’

  My aunt flinched. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Some of the boys we used to hang out with.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never said that.’ She sounded affronted. ‘And I never would.’

  Even after all the revelations, this one took me aback. Despite having had to live with such trauma, not only did my uncle and aunt still not have the diagnosis of schizophrenia, they still didn’t realize my father had a mental illness. I felt a deep well of pity for them and for my father and mother, brief astonishment at the incredible ability of families to not discuss things, and then a powerful surge of anger at the multiculturalists out there who argue that immigrants shouldn’t be forced to learn English. This is the consequence of not understanding English. It means ethnic communities can’t educate themselves, don’t understand what is happening even when the most extreme things occur.

  ‘They were right, though,’ I said eventually. ‘Something had gone wrong with his mind. He’d fallen ill … with a disease called schizophrenia.’

  ‘What kind of disease is that?’ asked my aunt.

  I closed my A4 pad and for some reason became suddenly aware of my legs, like I hadn’t noticed I had them before. When I crossed them, it seemed effeminate. Spread open, the posture seemed too aggressive. I settled for closing them back together in front of me.

  ‘It’s called schizophrenia. It affects 1 out of every 100 people around the world.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘I didn’t know Dad had it until recently.’

  ‘Does it affect young people?’

  ‘It tends to.’

  ‘You know, sometimes you could almost see his anger building up. He would boil away and then explode.’

  ‘My sister Puli has the same illness.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Nor did I until recently.’

  As my aunt nodded in disbelief, my uncle spoke. ‘His friends left him one by one. He would swear at them, pick fights. Everyone was scared of him.’

  My aunt said: ‘We didn’t know what was happening. I thought maybe your mum had done something …’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘Your grandmother started saying that she must have done something to him.’

  ‘Black magic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So that’s where the witch thing began. Not only was Mum married off to a violent, mentally ill man, but she was then blamed for his violent mental illness. I loved my grandmother: she was so sprightly and funny when we were growing up, and didn’t understand why Mum was so wary of her. But now it made sense.

  ‘Indians always need to blame someone,’ I said. ‘It’s just a disease, like Chacha’s leukaemia was just a disease, like the cancer that killed Lock, my best friend at school, just after he left university, was just a disease, like the diseases that will probably kill us are just diseases. Just bad luck. Just really bad luck. Sometimes bad things happen for no reason …’ I stopped when I thought I heard someone raising their voice in another part of the house. But it was just my echo.

  My uncle looked stunned. ‘So all that time, it was an illness?’

  I ended the interview as awkwardly as I started it, by saying thank you, forgetting that Punjabis don’t really say thank you, as it is regarded as a kind of payment and hence insulting.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked my uncle. ‘We weren’t doing anything … we just talked.’

  ‘I meant, I’m grateful that you talked to me about this.’

  ‘So is this what you do for work? Talk to people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then you write a story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you get paid for that?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And then it appears on TV?’

  As we drove away, it occurred to me that we could stop off at the houses my parents had lived in, walk along the riverbank they had ended up on, maybe even see the football field that Dad used to play on – to verify and flesh out some of the details of the two accounts I now had. But we didn’t. We drove in silence towards my flat in London, which I’d prepared for Mum by removing all the alcohol and all the things that might have betrayed the fact that I’d ever had a girlfriend: the tampons in the bathroom cabinet; the surplus toothbrushes; the earrings in my bedside cabinet; the photographs on the walls. It can take you by surprise, sometimes, the number of ways in which people leave marks upon your life.

  15. I Remember That

  A cocktail of fear and excitement ran through my veins as I walked through the school gates without a topknot for the first time. I wen
t straight to reception to sign the late register – half wanting, half dreading bumping into someone I knew – and remember scrawling ‘broken down bus’ in the slot reserved for excuses. But this can’t have been true. It seems more likely I was late because I’d spent too long getting ready in front of my bedroom mirror, trying with the aid of my brother’s gel and mousse, my mother’s moisturizer and jasmine oil, to get my hair right, not realizing it was normal for a style to lose its salon-look within minutes and that most boys settled for a dab of spit. It was ironic that one of the reasons I’d wanted to get rid of my long hair was the hassle of maintenance.

  My German set, shivering in a Portakabin as some part of the school received a makeover of its own, swivelled around as I entered. Jaws dropped, classmates did double-takes and for a millisecond I was a transformed Sandy in Grease. At breaktime, my form gathered around as if I was an exhibit in a motor show, staring, asking for the name of my stylist and attempting to ruffle my hair, only to realize it could no more be ruffled than a lump of granite. It was surreal. I’d wanted to blend in, to no longer stick out and face mockery, but now I stuck out for different reasons and was actually being admired. It continued being surreal for some time: a boy in my chemistry set asked me my name; a boy who fancied himself as the class Lothario asked if I had any sisters; a bus driver hesitated to let me on to his double decker because he didn’t believe I was the topknotted kid with the crap moustache on my bus pass photo; I was invited to my first ever house party; and, most thrillingly, having not even established meaningful eye contact with a girl before, I was felt up by two members of the opposite sex within the matter of a few weeks.

  Though the first of these molestations probably doesn’t count, as it was a sanctioned element of the school curriculum, occurring one afternoon during a ‘PSHE’ lesson. The subject – the initials standing for ‘Personal, Social and Health Education’ – had been introduced on to the syllabus under the eye of a liberal new headmaster who had surveyed the boys in the school (there were only girls in the sixth form) and concluded, astutely, that while we were heading for some of the best exam results in the country, we had the emotional intelligence of doilies. And, if memory serves, one of the first lessons in this new subject, presided over by a not entirely unattractive female member of staff, was structured around the foreign concept of ‘trust’ and involved a role-play exercise in which we were asked to pair off and then take turns to close our eyes and fall backwards into the arms of our partner, ‘trusting’ them to catch us.

  Anyone who has witnessed teenage boys interact won’t be surprised to hear that the classroom was quickly filled with the sound of skulls cracking against floor. Of course we didn’t trust each other. That was the point of being an adolescent boy. Durrr. However, those of us who survived were punished with an exercise perhaps even more unsuited to our sex and age: we were asked to pair off again, to close our eyes again and this time let our partners feel our faces with their hands.

  This kind of crap might wash with middle managers on bonding weekends, but we reacted as if we’d been asked to sodomize each other. I can’t remember whether anyone went along with it – somehow I doubt it – but I do remember the teacher attempting to demonstrate what was required by picking me out and using me as a guinea pig. It was the first time a woman I wasn’t related to had ever touched my face, and was not entirely unthrilling.

  The second molestation occurred in a slightly more conventional venue: in the garage of a friend’s house, at that house party I’d been invited to. In a sequence of events I still replay in my mind three or four times a day, the prettiest girl in the house – a Kylie lookalike according to the host – strode into the room, surveyed the quivering specimens before her, walked up to me, told me I had pretty eyes (what?), suggested we retire somewhere private (the garage), and then … snogged me. And I mean precisely what I say: she snogged me. I made very little contribution. I’d watched a thousand kisses on screen, and thought I’d know what to do if hell actually froze over and a member of the opposite sex allowed me to touch them, but it quickly became apparent that watching Madonna tonguing a black saint in the ‘Like a Prayer’ video had no more prepared me for the task than watching Back to the Future had taught me how to time-travel. Wolverhampton Kylie would’ve got a bigger kick out of kissing the Flymo at our feet. Still, for me it was the most erotically charged ten minutes of my life. I told myself to get used to things like this happening all the time. But nothing quite so wonderfully uncomplicated ever happened again.

  Forcing myself to look at pictures from this period, it’s a puzzle why my haircut elicited such a reaction. I was a strange-looking child. The CFCs from the hair products had turned me an odd magnolia colour, and there was something worryingly Engelbert Humperdinck about my bouffant. Meanwhile, my face was permanently lacerated. No one had taught me how to shave, and as I still regarded the act as shameful somehow, I surreptitiously and guiltily ran my father’s brutal steel razor over my acne and bumfluff, using soap rather than shaving foam as lubrication, assuming it was normal to lose a pint of blood during the process.

  The only explanation I can conjure up is that what happened was a demonstration of the role that confidence plays in attraction. The excitement I felt at no longer feeling hemmed into myself, of being able to relax, must have been palpable. Bus journeys that were previously dreaded, for the sweet wrappers and paper balls hurled at my topknot, became opportunities for flirtation with members of the Girls’ High. Points of difference that had previously caused anxiety became opportunities – I started, for instance, asking Mum to pack aloo gobi parathas in my lunchbox, because Matthew Davies would buy them from me and I could use the cash to buy chips. I went from running away home at end of school, to chairing the fundraising committee, helping set up a school council and a debating society. And I realized that what I had seen as the intellectual superiority of my peers was in some cases just expensive schooling. Their prep schools had given them a head start, but with Mum insisting I give up the factory to concentrate on preparing for my GCSEs, I found I could, with hard work, not only excel again, but even have energy spare to cultivate the air of effortless superiority so prized by the English private school system: working like crazy at home, and acting up in class, pretending it all came easily.

  Before my haircut, my behaviour at school was as unadventurous as my taste in music. I was never one of those who set fire to the gas taps during chemistry or who drove the history master half mad by humming throughout his lessons. But suddenly, I was. And given that I was by this stage translating my own school reports to Mum, and could intercept letters of complaint from the school to my parents, and given that, unlike many of my contemporaries, I didn’t have the guilt of my parents paying thousands of pounds for my education, I found I could go further than most. My report for the Michaelmas term of 1992 bears witness to just how much of a pain in the arse I’d become. Maths: ‘Sathnam has generally produced work of a good standard this term and his test results have been most satisfactory. However, I’m a little unhappy with his attitude and behaviour in class.’ Physics: ‘His work has been very good as usual but I’ve not detected any special effort to do well. I still find his behaviour a little immature.’ Form teacher: ‘I’m astonished that he still finds it necessary to misbehave in class.’

  The transformation at school found an echo in my social life. I didn’t suddenly become part of the big group who did poppers at lunchtime and drank in the remarkable number of pubs that served underage drinkers in school uniform around Wolverhampton. In many respects, I was still puritanical and, like anyone who has ever been been bullied, the experience had left me with a fear of groups. But I developed several new friendships, the most important and revelatory of which was with a boy called David Radburn.

  It was revelatory in part because until Dave, all my friendships, such as with Lock, were based on having things in common. But Dave and I were from different planets. He was Conservative in his politics. He was
a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan. And when he first spoke to me it was to mock me for the George Michael picture I had plastered on the inside of my history folder (God knows why I hadn’t been castigated for this earlier). During the subsequent argument he revealed that his favourite band were, of all things … Dire Straits.

  It was also revelatory because Dave was the first white friend I had who seemed to want to visit me at home – as it was an academic school, my mother implicitly trusted any friends I made, and didn’t mind them staying over – and because Dave was the first white friend I had who invited me to stay with his family. Moreover, he was the first white friend I had who invited me to stay in the mansion he shared with his family in the Staffordshire countryside, and the holiday home he shared with his family in Yorkshire. And it was during these stays that I learned numerous important lessons about life, including: bread doesn’t always come sliced; some people have curtains with linings; boiled eggs don’t have to be hard-boiled; there are people out there who allow their children wine with their evening meal; there are radio stations out there that don’t play music; and (this was the biggest shock) there are actually real people out there who behave the same way in front of their parents as they do in front of their friends. I remember Phil, Dave’s dad, a newspaper publisher, taking us out to a Chinese restaurant in Stafford and asking, when he saw me flailing around, if I’d ever used chopsticks before. I didn’t dare mention I’d not actually been to a restaurant before.

  I was reminded of what a culture shock it was recently when a friend, talking about how all families are weird in some way or another, used the analogy of going to the toilet. Raising a family was like wiping your bum after going to the loo, he argued: a private act, conducted behind closed doors, which you cannot do ‘normally’ because you have no way of knowing what ‘normal’ is. I liked the analogy, not only because I am scatalogical, but because for me the shock of discovering families could be so different, via Dave, was epitomized by his family loo. I’d got over the shock of discovering that English families didn’t have water bottles in their bathrooms, like Punjabis, some years earlier. But Dave’s family had dried flowers in their bathroom – DRIED FLOWERS. And BOOKS. Even Lock was astounded when I told him. Doubtless, Dave was equally stunned by some of the bizarre customs in my household.