The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Indeed, while there was a time when I thought I could carry on living my secret life in London indefinitely, it has become untenable. The strain of all this deceit has had a cumulative effect on my happiness and relationships and that is why, after a decade of keeping things to myself, this public act seems necessary. And I should be clear here. When I say the book is also about me, I mean it mentions some of my relationships. This letter is going to be a chapter, and your response the final chapter. You can decide how it ends.

  If it sounds like I’m blackmailing you, it is because I am. I’ve always sensed a struggle in you between the Punjabi values of your parents and your natural intelligence, a struggle between your izzat and more modern ideas, and my hope is that with this I can drag you out of your Punjabi world into my world.

  So this is what I want from you, Mum. I want you to stop insisting I marry a Punjabi Jat. Of course, it is possible after all this pain and agony that I will meet one anyway, but it is not something I will do with a gun held against my head. I want you to meet my friends and accept them. I want you to come and stay with me more in London. I want you to promise you won’t try to get any of the family to change my mind – I will refuse to discuss things with them. I want you to accept this decision as my own. And if you have any problems with what I’m saying, I want us to have a calm discussion, without screaming and tears. For once in our family life I want us to deal with something important without tamasha. For once in my life, I need to feel that you love me unconditionally, the way I love you.

  21. Postscript: Freedom (Back to Reality Mix)

  The plan was to just do it. Discussing the letter with a family member was to risk attempts being made to discourage me, innocent victims being caught up in the crossfire afterwards, and news leaking out in advance. But I found myself blabbing it all out to my brother anyway. We’d met for a drink and a movie in London (he was in town on business, I was having a break from Wolverhampton) and he’d asked if I was seeing anyone – I’d given him an edited version of my relationship history by this stage, but the language of relationships still didn’t flow easily between us, and it all came out in a weepy, anxious mess.

  When he turned a disconcerting grey colour I tried to lighten the mood by asking: ‘So you think Mum’s going to kill herself then?’

  An answer came after he’d polished off the remainder of his lager in a single mouthful: ‘Yeah.’

  But a few minutes later, he was saying: ‘Actually, I think she’ll take it okay. Whatever happens, I’ll support you.’

  The expression of solidarity was welcome, and the contradictory prediction oddly reassuring too: at least it showed I wasn’t being crazy in having absolutely no idea how Mum might react. As part of my preparation, I’d come across a book called Acts of Disclosure – The Coming-out Process of Contemporary Gay Men, by Marc E. Vargo – and was struck by how much of it related to my situation. ‘As it stands, too many gay people respect other people’s feelings more than they respect their own, at times being too selfless for their own good. In some cases, this is because the person was brought up to think primarily in terms of the needs of others …’ Yes! ‘Most sons tell their parents because they want to be honest with them. It is often that simple … In fact, not doing so may cause his relationships with them to feel unreal, partial and deceitful … Still others come forward because they are tired of living two separate lives.’ Yes! ‘Camouflaging one’s true sexual nature can become increasingly tedious over the course of time.’ Yes! But the thing that struck me most in the book was the simple observation that ‘parental reactions are not predictable’. I didn’t, in truth, think my mother would top herself, but in my darkest moods I did think disowning was a possibility, which was almost as terrifying. At my most optimistic I let myself hope she would be hysterical for a while but eventually accept my decision. Acts of Disclosure mentioned a study which said it generally took parents two years to accept a son’s homosexuality. Two years seemed to be the most I could hope for.

  The conversation with my brother was important in another respect, in that it made me realize I hadn’t thought through the practicalities of my plan properly. I was intending to hand the letter to Mum in Wolverhampton, switch off my phone, go for a long drive – Scotland was meant to be lovely at this time of year – stay at a country house hotel where the staff were surly and the chef had ideas above his station, and return to face the music a couple of days later. But it was becoming clear that not only would my time away be drenched with nervous apprehension, it would also be selfish to leave my siblings to deal with the fallout, unfair on my mother not to be around to clarify things that weren’t clear, and dangerous to leave her to discuss the matter with people who would only reinforce her view of the world. The better thing to do, I realized, would be to drag her into my world, to be there immediately afterwards, to force her to talk to me directly without anyone else getting involved. If I was finally to become a man, I shouldn’t be scampering away like a pre-teen girl teased for having the wrong type of Barbie doll.

  So I invited Mum to spend a weekend with me in London: the first whole weekend we’d ever spent together, alone. I told her I needed to run what I’d written about her and Dad past her – which was true; that she needed a break – which was true; and I posted her a return train ticket to London. Unfortunately, there was a large gap between arranging this, getting the letter translated and Mum’s arrival, during which time I lost and regained my nerve a thousand times.

  The first wobble was instigated by my translator, a young and efficient linguist from Patiala in the Punjab, where my great-grandfather was a teacher, as it happens, who had responded to an advert I put on a website for freelance translators. I had made it clear to him from the beginning that I didn’t want advice about the content of the letter – the last thing I needed was to be made to feel guilty by a stranger – and that he was not to discuss the letter with anyone; such is the efficiency of the links between the Punjab and Wolverhampton that it would be the gossip of the Dudley Road in no time. He behaved himself. But when he emailed a question about the source of my religious quotations (‘Can you give me the Punjabi (source) for this???’), I panicked. I’d taken the words from the internet and had obviously never actually sat down and read the whole of the Guru Granth Sahib in original text. Maybe something had been lost in translation. Maybe my arguments were more outrageous than I realized.

  The teeter threatened to turn into a tumble when the recording of the translation arrived. He’d done a great job: it was technically perfect and clear. But so much of what had seemed passable in English didn’t seem so in Punjabi, in someone else’s voice. The coy Punjabi vocabulary for relationships – ‘girlfriend’ became ‘friend’; ‘love’ became ‘like’ – made me cringe. The Punjabi for ‘love’ – ‘pyar’ – seemed pregnant with unintended sexual implications. The Punjabi for ‘English girl’ – ‘gori’ – seemed implicitly racist. The phrase ‘gun against my head’ sounded too literal, many of my analogies seemed preposterous and elsewhere, whole sentences – ‘I want to end up with someone who wants to be with me for who I am, not for what I am’ – sounded like I’d picked random lyrics from love songs and put them through one of those internet translators. Listening to the sound file, what had seemed like a good idea months earlier, next to the Man on the Horse, and later, after the first of those consultations with Dad’s psychiatrist, suddenly seemed crass and cruel, like a naff reality TV programme.

  I think I might well have given up, if Mum hadn’t called to recount a conversation she’d had with a neighbour in which the neighbour had apparently said: ‘He is thirty years old and he has never had a girlfriend? I don’t believe it.’ I managed to change the subject but realized that if I didn’t have the conversation soon, things were going to come to a head in a way I wouldn’t be able to control. There was never going to be a good time to do it. It was never going to be easy. So I edited the letter, making it shorter and clearer, removed some of the analogies an
d the stuff about the life coach, altered some of the vocabulary, sent it back for re-translation, and though the recording still made me cringe, I settled for it.

  I spent the wide-eyed night before Mum’s arrival running through my mind all the things I would rather be doing the next day than confront her. In the morning I woke up and threw up. And I nearly threw up again when I saw her arrive at Euston, with the inevitable two carrier bags of food. Mum is such a strong presence in her world, but out of context she always looks vulnerable. I used to hate it when she visited me at college: I’d feel hyper-protective to the point of almost physically lashing out at anyone who didn’t open a door quickly enough, or stared a little too long. And while, in normal circumstances, I’m about as forceful as a hamster, I once even found myself shouting at a member of ground staff at Heathrow Airport who had barked at Mum for not following his English instructions. On the train station concourse, the urge to protect her returned. But I wasn’t looking after her, was I? Quite the opposite.

  The nausea – it didn’t help remembering that Euston was where Mum had been dropped off when, still a teenager, she had run away from Dad in Essex – subsided by the time we sat down on a bench a half-hour walk away. After weeks of trying to think of a way to treat her in London, taking Mum to Regent’s Park was the only thing I’d managed to come up with. She really is the hardest person in the world to show a good time. You can’t take her to the theatre or the cinema, because you’ll annoy the people around you with the running translation. You can’t take her out to eat because of her strict religious observance in relation to food. Furthermore, she can’t stand money being spent on anything that doesn’t serve a practical or religious purpose. I once sent her flowers on Mother’s Day, only to receive a long lecture on the importance of saving money and not wasting it on perishable decorations. The next year I sent her dried ones, but she still didn’t approve, saying the only gift she wanted from her children was their happiness, and, in my case, the additional news that I was about to marry a good Sikh girl who displayed the traditional skills of cooking, knitting and sweeping.

  But Regent’s Park actually turned out to be a good idea. It was the first properly warm day of the year, but not so warm that people were lying around semi-naked, offending Mum’s sensibilities, and London was at its international best, sprinkling the park with families from a dazzling array of nations, including India – sufficiently different from Wolverhampton, without being totally alien. We spent two hours sitting on a bench there, as Mum brought me up to date on the latest family news (Bindi’s family had decided to emigrate to Canada, she and my father had opted to leave Dr Dutta’s care and registered with another practice, Puli’s eldest daughter was being put forward for a place at a local grammar school – what I would do for her to get the place) and I began the task of running through her story, checking facts about her arrival in England and her time in Grays. She asked for a few things to be taken out, for a few identities to be concealed, insisted I was nice about relatives – she didn’t want anything to ignite any festering feuds or start new ones – and then, because she wouldn’t let me get a taxi, we got the Tube home.

  This time I hadn’t prepared my flat for her arrival. I left it as it was: wine in the fridge; bottles of vodka and sherry on the sideboard; photographs of me with both male and female friends on the walls; multiple toothbrushes in the bathroom. All that went were the men’s magazines with their semi-naked women on the covers, and all I added was a bottle of full-fat milk. I used it to make Mum some English tea, which she accepted with a wince, before we moved to the sitting room, where she flinched at the sight of the leather sofa, as she had done when she stayed on the way back from Grays, and sat on the floor, from where she ran through the second bit of her story: her time in Wolverhampton, Dad’s hospitalizations, the birth of my siblings. This time she remembered an entire committal that she had not mentioned before, a time when my father, who had taken to walking around the streets with a radio, smashed it in a hospital corridor while waiting to see a hospital consultant, and her first trip back to India after being married, when her own mother didn’t recognize her, because she was succumbing to dementia. By early evening, we were spent: it doesn’t seem to get any easier running through the story. Mum suggested we have supper.

  I stood in front of the microwave in the kitchen, watching a plate of sabzi revolve behind the dark glass, and wondering how on earth I was going to bring up the subject of the letter. My chance came when Mum called out for me from the bathroom.

  ‘Come and tell me how much I weigh. I don’t think the scales at home are accurate.’

  I went and read the numbers that were too small for her to see, even with her glasses.

  ‘Excellent, I’ve lost half a stone in a day then,’ she laughed. ‘And what’s your weight now? You look so thin.’

  She would say this if I was thirty stone and waiting for a triple heart bypass, but I saw a potential opening and took it.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve lost quite a lot of weight recently.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A stone.’ This was a slight exaggeration, but I had to use every tool at my disposal, including emotional blackmail.

  ‘Over what time?’

  ‘Month or so …’

  ‘Hai rabba. I knew you shouldn’t have written this story. I told you it was going to be too stressful.’

  ‘Well, there has been that. But there’s something else.’ I felt like I was going to throw up again, but at least the toilet was only a few feet away. ‘Mum, you remember when you started telling me about what happened with Dad, and you said, “I’ve always wanted to tell you this, but didn’t know how?” Well, I’ve got something like that … something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time. I just haven’t known how to … So I’ve written you a letter explaining it …’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘I’ve written a letter and had it translated into Punjabi.’

  ‘Why can’t you just tell me?’

  ‘My Punjabi is rubbish.’

  ‘I can understand you perfectly.’

  ‘But there are some things I don’t have the …’ Gulp ‘… words for … and …’ Oh God ‘… find difficult to talk about. Anyway, I’ve also had a tape recording made of the letter. Which would you prefer?’ She was wearing an expression on her face I’d not seen since I was fourteen and asked if she would pay for guitar lessons.

  ‘I’ll read it, it’s no problem …’

  In the kitchen, the microwave pinged, indicating that supper was ready. It would go cold.

  As Mum read the letter on the living room floor, I did the courageous thing and hid under my duvet in the bedroom, shivering and thinking: this is what it must feel like waiting to be executed. I thought Mum would come and get me when she was done, but after three-quarters of an hour she still hadn’t emerged. I got up and put an ear to the living room door, a thousand fears – heart attack, suicide – racing through my mind. But eventually there was a sniffle and the sound of a page being turned. Which was encouraging, in a way. I went to my study to shiver on the sofabed, underneath the blank, disintegrating wall where the 1800 x 1200mm professional dry-wipe magnetic whiteboard had once hung. When I tired of that I got up and sat at my desk, clicked on ten or twenty websites whose content I couldn’t digest, lay across the floor and stared at the ceiling I was supposed to have painted three years earlier, and the lightbulb I hadn’t replaced for a year, got up and stood in front of my bedroom mirror to squeeze a spot, plugged my mobile phone into its recharger, rearranged the books on my bedside cabinet into alphabetical order, noticed and hid a pair of kinky handcuffs sent by a PR company – how would I have explained those? – and glanced at my watch to discover that the previous hour had actually amounted to ten minutes.

  I was back at my desk in the study, with my head in my hands, when I heard the living room door opening, more than an hour after I’d handed the letter over. I didn’t have the courage to look up, turn around and
make eye contact, and sat frozen as Mum padded into the bathroom.

  She didn’t say anything until the door was almost fully closed behind her.

  What did she say?

  She said: ‘You should eat now. It’s getting late.’

  I knew then I might have something resembling some hope.

  I was standing next to a bookcase with my hands in my pockets when Mum returned to the living room. She didn’t say anything initially: just reached out and pulled me towards her. After the tears had been wiped away, she asked: ‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ It was one of those questions to which the answer was simultaneously so simple and so complicated that I couldn’t articulate a response. Mum continued, regardless. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before? I kept on asking you … “Have you got a friend?” Didn’t I ask you?’

  I eventually managed to stammer some words out: ‘You’ve never asked me!’

  ‘I said it to you the other week: didn’t I tell you what the neighbour was saying? You should have guessed what your mother was trying to ask.’

  ‘Okay, so once, one time, last week, you almost mentioned it, but it wasn’t really a question. What about the years of nagging and photos and phone numbers and set-ups?’

  There was an interval during which she considered what I said deeply, and then decided to ignore it completely. ‘You should have understood what your mother was trying to ask you. For years, whenever people have mentioned you to me, they have said, ‘He must have a friend. No one says no to that many girls unless they have a friend.’ So then, do you have a friend? Do you have a gori you want to get married to?’

  I cringed again at the vocabulary. ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve written here you have.’

  ‘There was someone … a couple actually … have you read the letter?’

  ‘Yes, I read it twice. What happened to them?’