's column in this newspaper, now read extracts from his book. A feature writer in London, on a home visit Sathnam Sanghera discovers that he has grown up with two schizophrenic family members without realising it. Quirkily, in denial, he ignores this information for the next five years. In what follows, an intimate journey into the family's collective archive becomes an epic immigrant journey told with warmth and compassion and humour.
Drinking alone needn't necessarily be a lowering experience. If you're in the right place, say Paris or New York, in the right bar, somewhere with pavement tables or window seats, and in the right frame of mind "" having just made a couple of billion from shorting the US dollar, for instance "" I imagine it would be quite pleasant kicking back with a whisky sour, watching those less fortunate (i.e. everyone) shuffle past as you sit snug and smug in your tailored Gucci suit.
But sipping neat vodka smuggled into your mum's house in a promotional Fitness First rucksack,dressed in a lumberjack shirt that cost £7.99 fifteen years ago, and peering out at a double glazed view of Wolverhampton, a town that was once the beating heart of Britain's Industrial Revolution but whose only claim to fame now is that it is home to the headquarters of Poundland, 'the UK's largest £1 retailer', isn't so cheerful.
This isn't where I pictured myself as a thirty-year-old. But then very little of what has happened recently was planned, and I certainly didn't expect to do what I'm going to do next. You see, after a few more weeks behind this Argos flatpack desk, and a few more bottles of this Asda own-brand vodka, I'm going to type up a letter I've been drafting, in one way or another, for half a lifetime.
When I'm done, I'm going to send it to someone in India who, for an almost unethically small fee, will translate it into a language I can speak and understand but cannot read or write, and when he is done, I'm going to get him to read it out over the phone. Finally, if satisfied with the diction and the tone, I will hand it over to the person I love more than any other and let the contents break her heart...
If memory serves, on the Friday night before I set off there was a dinner party at Laura's flat in north London. All the guests, like us, worked in the media, the menu consisted of recipes from Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef, and discussion ranged from complaints about Tony Blair's religiosity, to complaints about the celebrities we'd respectively met, to extended moaning about how much we wanted to quit our lousy highly paid jobs, which allowed us to meet our heroes, wangle backstage tickets and hold the high and mighty to account, in favour of less stressful, more meaningful lives as bricklayers in the Outer Hebrides.
Throughout, I stayed true to three fundamental tenets of middle-class London life: never confess to religiosity (you may as well confess to paedophilia); never confess to being impressed by a celebrity you've met (you may as well confess to paedophilia) and always moan about your job (it seems the price for a flash job in your twenties is self-loathing).
In practice this meant suppressing the fact that there was once a time when I prayed for an hour every day, concealing the fact that I'd entered the number of every celebrity I'd ever interviewed into my mobile phone, and ignoring the voice of the Indian immigrant in my head which, during the Hebridean bricklaying fantasies, kept on muttering: there's a lot to be said for an office job and an opportunity to contribute to a money purchase pension scheme.
...With Mum gone, my editing became brutal. Two of the three prayer books went. The teabags and Rice Krispies went. But then, underneath the cereal boxes, I came across something more surreal than even the coconuts: two 2kg boxes of East End Vegetable margarine "" 'made with 100% vegetable oil, no animal fat'. Incredible, Mum had allocated a fifth of her allocated luggage weight, on her flight from Birmingham to Amritsar with a five-hour stop in the horrific-sounding metropolis of Tashkent, to...margarine.
I laughed, made a mental note to tell Laura about it later, and tried to think of a possible explanation. Maybe she was planning to make chapattis along the journey to my father's village? I flicked through my mental database of Punjabi folklore.
It was good luck to mutter 'Waheguru' before you embarked on any task.
It was bad luck to wash your hair on a Saturday or a Tuesday.
It was bad luck to look at the moon.
It was bad luck to sneeze when setting off on a journey (a nightmare when you have allergies, like I do).
It was bad luck to step on money.
It was bad luck to leave one shoe resting on another.
It was bad luck to point your feet at a picture of a guru or a prayer book.
It was bad luck to spill milk.
It was good luck to scoop up the placenta of a cat that had just given birth.
It was bad luck for a nephew or niece to be in the same room as an uncle from their mother's side of the family in a thunderstorm.
No. I couldn't remember anything margarine-related...
But picking out the boxes with the intention of storming into the living room and remonstrating, I found they were lighter than I'd expected. They rattled too. Phew. Mum was using the boxes as containers.
She hadn't lost the plot completely. I opened one and found it contained medication: Mum's herbal pills for her migraines; non-herbal pills for her arthritis; antidepressants; vitamin supplements; paracetamol. The second one was heavier, and contained five boxes of tablets. The brands emblazoned across them meant nothing to me. But the name on them did. Jagjit Singh. Dad.
I thought this peculiar because my father is rarely ill. He has diabetes, but the condition is managed well. I had a fuzzy memory of him once being prescribed sleeping pills. But I thought that was a temporary thing. Indeed, I couldn't remember a single time that he'd complained of feeling sick.
Couldn't recall him ever having a lie down during the day, for that matter. Ferreting around the box for a clue, I found an envelope addressed 'TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN'. I was "to whom it concerned', so I opened it. It was a note from Dad's GP, Dr Dutta.
This patient has been registered on my panel since 1969 and was re-registered in 1993. In fact, he is known to me from 1969. He suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. (He is often confused and cannot communicate facts and his wife has to assist him.)
He is on regular treatment of injection and tablets (which he often forgets), and his wife has to keep an eye on his medication. He also suffers from diabetes for which he is having regular checkups and treatment. He is visiting his family in India and he is going for a short visit.
Blinking at the words, I thought: f#@*. Schizophrenia.
And then: Christ. That's what my sister Puli must have too.
...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 that 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.
We all cried again, but my mother didn't stop as she switched from the tasks of preparing my sister's trousseau to preparing my trousseau for university. It grew like a hillock on the bed my father would soon return to. Duvets; pillows; jars of Bombay mix; blankets; pictures of the Gurus; boxes of Weetabix and Shredded Wheat and Cornflakes; steel tins of sugar and spices; boxes of paracetamol; cups; saucers; plates; soup/cereal bowls; boxes of long-life milk (just in case); packets of Maryland Cookies; Penguin bars; prayer books I couldn't read; spoons; dinner knives; dinner forks; teaspoons; dessertspoons; dessert knives; dessert forks; serving spoons; a toaster; two sets of salt and pepper mills; a cheese grater; socks' Y-fronts; a saucepan...
I objected to the saucepan.
'Mum, I'll be eating in the canteen.'
'But you'll need a saucepan to make yourself tea.'
'I'll get a kettle.'
'A kettle?'
'Yes. Electric. Kettle.'
'You're going to have gora tea? You can't live on gora tea. There's no...' Her eyes were rolling. 'There's no takat in it.'
'There are millions of people in the country who make their tea by boiling water in kettles, and they are fine.'
'But you like Indian tea.'
'I like English tea.'
'Since when?'
'Since I started...' I couldn't actually remember '...at work.'
'You'll be saying you prefer that water the goras pass off as milk next.' Mum was still having gold-capped milk bottles delivered.
'Semi-skimmed milk is healthier, especially as Indians have a predisposition to heart disease.'
'Pah! Your grandfather lived to ninety and he ate a packet of butter a day.'
'Mum.'
''Look "" I've bought it now, it's brand new. And it comes with your mother's love.' I knew what was coming next: she'd employed the same argument for the apron and the kitchen gloves. 'You should never deny a gift from your mother.'
My dearest Mother
There's something important and difficult I've been meaning to tell you and because it's easier to be brave on paper than in person, I thought I would do it by writing this, my first ever letter to you. But now I'm sat here, I wonder whether it's such a good idea.
The way I write English is different from the way I speak English, the way I speak English is different from the way I speak Punjabi, and like all mothers and sons, we have been conditioned into communicating with a certain degree of intimacy and distance, so it's possible you won't even recognise my voice in this. But with no better options coming to mind, I will try to do what seems so difficult: stop worrying, trust my translator and hope for the best.
...You see, as well as being about you and Dad and Puli, the book is also about me, a letter from me to you, explaining what I want to do with the rest of my life and why. Of course, the only problem with this is that you won't actually be able to read it. Hence this: a letter, digesting the letter.
And to digest further, my message to you, Mum, is this: I love you and I appreciate everything you have been through and done for me, but I am not going to marry a Jat Sikh girl just to please you. This isn't because I have someone unsuitable in mind I want to marry. I'm not seeing anyone. It is simply that I want to marry someone I love, rather than someone who fits your criteria.
...It is because you have loved me that I know how to love others.
