| Before I begin this column, I have to thank Sathnam Sanghera for making me aware of my own prejudices as a reader. |
| Sanghera was born in the West Midlands and now lives in London. When I started reading his memoir, If You Don't Know Me By Now, I thought it was yet another diaspora story about familiar themes: young man struggles in a white world to hide his white girlfriends from his normal, conservative Punjabi family, develops an interest in his family history and his country of origin, yadda, yadda, yadda. |
| But Chapter 2 of this unusual, candid and very touching memoir is appropriately titled 'Vertigo'. "So I didn't realize my father and eldest sister suffered from schizophrenia until my mid-twenties; I didn't start confronting what this meant until my late twenties; and it is only now, at thirty, that I feel the need to talk about it," writes Sanghera. "How did this happen? How can someone grow up with two members of their family suffering from a severe mental illness, the most severe mental illness around, without realizing it?" |
| The answer forms the meat of the book, and it takes Sanghera through a deepening understanding of mental illness, and of the violence and denial that marked his family history. His honesty carries you through his story, which is often funny, often devastatingly sad. |
| It's not an unfamiliar story to anyone who has kept pace with the growing appetite in the US and UK for the confessional memoir. That genre has grown so much that it's developed its own sub-categories. You have the spirituality memoir (Sarah Ban Breathnach), the love-and-spirituality memoir (Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love), the addiction memoir (Augusten Burroughs' Dry), the anorexia memoir (Caroline Knapp's Why Women Want), the old-fashioned family memoir (Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes), the family memoir noir (Miranda Seymour, In My Father's House), and the beloved pet memoir (John Grogan, Marley And Me). And along with its growth, I assimilated a simple, incorrect but powerful idea: confessional writing is done by people who are not "us", neither Indian nor brown. |
| This is an odd prejudice to have, given that one of the most confessional of all autobiographies is written by one of the most famous of all Indians "" Mahatma Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He writes about death, sex, enemas, sex-and-death in close conjunction and other deeply taboo (to an Indian mind) subjects with a simple eloquence and a devastating candour. Unfortunately, for years very few Indians followed in his footsteps. I can think of a handful "" Vikram Seth's Two Lives, a brave but strangulated attempt to recover his aunt and uncle's story, Ira Pande's Diddi, which revealed her mother's life with honesty, Timeri Murari's wrenching and under-appreciated A Temporary Son, about parenthood, adoption and loss. There are a handful of others, and a few writers, from Nirad C Chaudhuri to Harivansh Rai Bachchan, have been open about their lives in all respects "" political and personal. But taken together, these works would barely fill one shelf. |
| Perhaps that's why Sanghera's book struck me so powerfully. I was moved by his exploration of a mental illness so rarely discussed, so ill understood and so commonplace. I was shaken, however, to discover a hidden taboo in my own mind "" a sense of surprise that an Indian would write with such candour about the private business of his own family. I admit this is racist: if I can read Burroughs on the subject of his alcoholic sweat and vomiting, surely a deeply private matter, it should be easy to read Sanghera's story of how a misfiring synapse, a faulty gene, a missing link in the brain has caused such silent devastation in his family. |
| That discomfort was, for me as a reader, very revealing. Sanghera's honesty allows the reader to share in his family history, to share his sense of shock when he discovers that the father he has always known as quiet and gentle has a history of violence caused by his disease, to share his renewed acceptance of and love for his father and sister as he grasps what schizophrenia really is. It's a powerful book, and what my initial discomfort tells me is simply that it is a necessary one. |
| By sharing his story, Sanghera may have made it possible for hundreds of Indians to emerge from the false shame and genuine despair that mental illness causes "" perhaps they will now share their stories, with the same generosity if not the same skill as he offers. We may see a new age of personal histories, with the emphasis truly on the "personal" for the first time. The writer is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar. The views expressed here are personal |
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