Books & Poetry

If you met Sathnam Sanghera now, you’d be hard pushed to tell him apart from any other smartly dressed, articulate London media professional. He writes a business column for The Times, and before that was a feature writer at the Financial Times, where he began his journalistic career as a graduate trainee in 1998. This swift ascent didn’t endear him to everyone. ‘I remember people having a go at me for being a bit of a spoiled brat and having this great job,’ he says. ‘It made me feel inexplicably angry and teary. I just thought: You have no idea.’
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In case this sounds melodramatic, it’s worth considering the facts as they stand. Sanghera was born in Wolverhampton in 1976 to parents who had emigrated from the Punjab in the late ’60s. He was raised as a devout Sikh in a community almost entirely insulated by language, ritual and superstition from the ‘gora’ (white) world. From the age of ten he worked part-time in a sewing factory for 50p an hour. ‘By the time I was eight,’ he writes in his memoir ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’, ‘I had never been to a cinema, used a telephone, been inside a church, used a shower, sat in a bath – we still used a bucket and jug – seen the countryside or the sea, read a newspaper, had a white friend, owned a book, met a Muslim or a Tory or a Jew.’ Over time his observance of Sikh traditions lapsed – in his teens he cut off his top-knot and threw the long plait into a nearby canal – but until recently he was still expected to have an arranged marriage to a girl from the right caste.

‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ is the gripping, tender story of his escape from that community via education (he got into Cambridge, emerging with a First in English) and of the accommodation he’s since managed to reach with it. It is, Sanghera concedes, a familiar story – ‘almost a cliché’. What animates it is partly the way he tells it (wryly, with an appropriately sardonic self-awareness), and partly the very specific way it relates to his family and its grim genetic payload.

When he was in his early twenties, Sanghera discovered, in a suitcase his mother was packing, boxes of unfamiliar pills together with a letter from the family doctor declaring ‘to whom it may concern’ that his father was a paranoid schizophrenic. Sanghera was dumbstruck; he had had no idea. Why had his family covered this up? And why hadn’t he suspected anything?

It took five years for Sanghera to pluck up the courage to find answers to these questions. He spent them living his ‘London life’, having relationships with white women he went to mind-boggling lengths to conceal from his mother. He knew that if he was going to confront his father’s illness (also his eldest sister’s: she developed it as a teenager), he was ‘going to have to rake over [his] childhood and work out whether everything was as it seemed’. It isn’t giving anything away to say that it wasn’t.

The decision to write a book was triggered by a break-up that hit him particularly hard. ‘The sheer number of relationships I was having and which were failing started to make me feel ill,’ he says. ‘I read a lot of books about coming out as gay, which is an equivalent experience. The main reason people decide to come out in the end is that they’re exhausted by all the lies and secrets, by the feeling that they’re living half a life. I thought: If I have one more meeting about an arranged marriage I’m going to kill myself.'

If parts of the book resemble a misery memoir, the subversive glint in its eye recalls Dave Eggers’ ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’. Sanghera’s writer hero, however, is another son of the West Midlands, Jonathan Coe. Coe’s generous endorsement of the book – he provided a quote for the cover – was, for Sanghera, the ultimate compliment.

‘I like to watch cheerful films and read cheerful books,’ he admits. ‘My original intention was to write about the really depressing stuff in the third person in a novelistic way, but it was just too bleak. How do you get into the head of someone whose mind is disintegrating?

‘Mental illness is taboo in England, but it’s particularly taboo in Indian culture. While I was researching the book, I couldn’t find any books at all about mental illness in Indian families, though I did find one about representations of madness in Bollywood films. Mental illness is just a source of great shame. My great-grandfather, who I now realise had schizophrenia, was tied to a bed until he died.’

Have his family read the book?

‘My dad can’t read, so he hasn’t. Also, he’s so ill that he would have no perception of what it was. I had it translated into Punjabi for my mother. My brother I was worried about because of all the stuff about him being a Michael Jackson superfan, but in the end he said, “You were too kind about me.” My elder sister, the schizophrenic one, was involved on an almost day-by-day basis. I gave her chapters as I wrote them and she wrote her reactions, many of which I included. My other sister, who lives in Canada, has only read 40 pages of it so far.’ He shrugs off my surprise: ‘Those of us who write for a living think that what we do matters much more than it does. If you come from an oral culture, you don’t care so much about books.’

So far, he says, the book has had only positive effects on his relationship with his family. ‘My main reason for writing the book was therapeutic – to draw a line under it all and forget about it. And that’s actually what’s happened.’ He laughs: ‘I’ve forgotten everything I wrote!’

‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ is published by Viking at £16.99.