It is a near-universal truth that no matter how old and accomplished you are – Sathnam Sanghera is 41 and a successful journalist and author – in the presence of one’s parent, you can still glimpse the teenager.
Sanghera guides his mother Surjit inside, out of the murky Wolverhampton drizzle. He is sweetly protective, but a bit awkward too (he asks if his mum can answer questions first so she can get home; only after she has gone does he seem to relax). We sit in a restaurant on Dudley Road, the centre of the city’s Sikh community. A few hundred yards away was the hairdresser’s where Sanghera went, aged 14 and without his mother’s knowledge, to get his topknot cut off. Across the road is the clothing shop where the family did the wedding shopping for his two sisters. Surjit, who seems to know everyone, stops to speak to two women on the way in. And she makes sure we all have food. “She’s worried about your wellbeing,” says Sanghera.
Surjit’s story is at the heart of the BBC adaptation of Sanghera’s memoir The Boy with the Topknot, which stars Sacha Dhawan and will be broadcast later this month.
Surjit understands English but isn’t confident speaking it (Sanghera translates from Punjabi), and she doesn’t read it. She knows, of course, what was in her son’s book, subtitled A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, because she spent months talking to Sanghera, who had left his job as a journalist at the Financial Times to move back home and unravel his family’s history.
It had started as a way of building up to explaining to his family – especially his mother – why he wasn’t going to marry a Sikh girl. His three older siblings had been married by the time they were 21; at the time he was writing the book he was approaching 30 and living a secret life in London (he had had white girlfriends) and the stress of keeping his two lives apart was becoming too much. But then the book became something else – he discovered that his father, Jagjit, had been living with schizophrenia, and he later realised that so too was his eldest sister, Puli. How could he have not realised, he thought.
What unfolds in the book is a compelling and deeply moving family history in which Surjit emerges as nothing short of heroic. She was brought to Britain as a teenager in 1969 to marry Jagjit, a man she soon realised was mentally ill (none of those around him realised). His illness made him violent and she bore the worst of it. On top of that, she was blamed for it – his superstitious family claimed she had put some kind of curse on him.
Later, Jagjit was stabilised with medication and became the kind, gentle man that Sanghera knows, but his father was unable to work. Surjit worked as a seamstress at home, and then in a factory, to support the family and raise their four children.
If the journey for Sanghera, the youngest, from a decaying house in Wolverhampton to Cambridge University via grammar school, and now a job at the Times, was dizzying, then it was equally momentous for his mother, a farm girl from rural Punjab.
What was it like to tell her son about the painful early years of her marriage? She speaks to Sanghera in a steady voice. “She said she cried while she told the story, and I cried while I wrote it,” says Sanghera. “That’s true. She said she cried when she watched the film as well. She’s saying it’s very painful to watch her daughter being taken away.” Puli, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia but not told, had stopped taking her medication and was hospitalised for several weeks. “That was the hardest bit for me as well.” He walked out of the read-through of the script, he says, and also the first time he watched the film. Surjit wipes tears away from her eyes.
What kept her going? “No one got divorced then,” says Sanghera, translating. “She’s saying her mother and father would say: once you go to another household, the only way you leave it is in your funeral box. It was all about pride.” Surjit continues to talk for a while. “She’s saying when things were really bad and my dad was violent, a lot of the family got together and said ‘we’ll send her back to India’. She said she’d rather die than go back because she knew it would kill her parents.” Her faith helped her cope, she says, as did knowing that her husband’s behaviour was caused by illness. “She says she knew from the beginning he wasn’t a bad person.”
Answering Sanghera’s questions for his book was the first time she had talked about it for many years, and the first time she had told one of her children. “She says it’s like she had a book inside her and it all came out. In a way I felt like my mum wrote it, and it’s interesting she says that phrase. My mum’s always been an amazing storyteller and I feel like the way she told me slowly over months, she structured the book. That’s why I feel it was her thing.” She is pleased, he says, that the TV adaptation will reach a larger audience. “She says there is a reason for it to be made – it’s about an illness and it might help people.”
I ask her how the experience of her son writing the book changed their relationship and Sanghera laughs. “That’s a very un-Punjabi question. To talk about feelings, I don’t know how to do that.” He starts speaking to her, then stops. “I don’t even know the vocabulary for that.” Surjit smiles at him. “She’s saying it is really satisfying that people now know what happened, given how she was blamed. I feel weird saying this – she says people say that it’s a beautiful thing, that your son will be the one who vindicates you.”
It is time for Surjit to go. She clasps my hands before making her goodbyes with just about everyone else in the restaurant. “Phew,” says Sanghera, exaggeratedly comic. Awkward? “It’s awkward, but great. It’s only in this sort of situation that we talk about it. I spent a year and a half asking lots of questions, and when I stopped writing the book she carried on telling me stuff. I was ready to draw a line. So we’ve become more touchy-feely, I think. But also it’s nice to go back to normal.”
Sikh Punjabi culture, he says, “is not very ‘talky’. We’re kind of farmers and soldiers by heritage. No one talks about their feelings. When I was looking up other memoirs for inspiration, I don’t think I found more than one or two Indian family memoirs. It’s a very western form. To apply that to an Indian family, who by definition are very secretive … I think I only did it because of my education.”
It was difficult to get people to talk to him, he says. “Just practically to get them to sit down. And there is a real thing about pride. You’ll notice [he gestures out of the window] a lot of people here have private number plates and flash cars – it’s about putting your best face forward. Loads of families went through stuff like we did, they just hid it, they don’t talk about it and I think that’s one way of coping.” This isn’t just “an Asian thing”, he says. “It’s an English thing, a class thing and a Midlands thing – I hope people connect to it on a universal level. Families and secrets, we all have them.”
If the stigma around mental illness is breaking down, it is happening more slowly in some communities, he says. “Loads of people have family with schizophrenia and they don’t talk about it for several reasons – the symptoms are often very difficult, sometimes there is violence, and there is serious shame with that. But in the Indian community, you’ve got the superstition – this idea of black magic. That’s still really prevalent.” After his book came out, he was criticised by people who told him he had brought shame on the community.
As for Sanghera, there is no longer any secret double life. It worked, he says of the letter he finally wrote to his mother explaining how he felt. “I can’t believe it did.” He has taken non-Sikh girlfriends home. What was that like? “Amazing. And it wasn’t just amazing for me – my nephew, who hadn’t read the book, could barely speak because he was so shocked that I had brought home a girl who wasn’t Sikh, and everyone was being so nice about it. I just suddenly felt less lonely. It felt like a massive relief.”
Just before she left, I had asked Surjit how she’d felt the first time her son had brought a girlfriend home and Sanghera had laughed with embarrassment. “Times change,” Surjit said in English, then turned to her son and spoke Punjabi, while he smiled at her. “She was really pleased,” says Sanghera. “The point is, I could be free. She’s saying I’m free. She just says she’s happy.”
The Boy with the Topknot is on BBC2 on 13 Nov at 9pm.