If You Don't Know Me By Now - CULTIVASIAN

Times newspaper journalist Sathnam Sanghera was twenty-four years old when he discovered his father and eldest sister suffered from schizophrenia. He also learned that in the early years of his marriage to Sathnam’s mother, his father had been terrifyingly violent towards his family. These painful discoveries are charted in Sanghera’s new book If You Don’t Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton. The book covers his family’s past: from his father’s harsh life in rural Punjab, to his parents’ early years in England; from his mother’s extraordinary resilience as she brought up her young family in a foreign land, without any knowledge of the language, to the author’s happy memories of his own childhood. The discoveries Sanghera makes finally force his own secret life into the glaring light: his longing for romantic love which he had, for fear of family rejection, kept utterly hidden from his beloved mother in the Midlands. Sanghera talks with Herpreet Kaur Grewal.

Why did you choose this cover and title?

Penguin picked it because I looked quite desperate, pleading, and eager to please. I like it but I didn’t like it initially because my topknot was wonky(!) The title is partly a reference to the fact that most memoirs are celebrity memoirs but nobody knows who I am. It’s also a reference to how families are strangers to one another. Your parents are not people but areas of irritation and warmth and it’s hard to see them as personalities. It’s most obviously a reference to eighties pop music. The music is a metaphor for my mum’s success because she was so good at protecting me from my father and sister’s illnesses that I spent the entire eighties lost in a fog of cheesy pop music. My childhood was really happy because of my mother.

How does it feel to make yourself so vulnerable by telling your family’s life story?

The weird thing is I wrote this book for my family and for myself so the whole publication process is a massive surprise. It’s weird. It’s like walking naked down a street and everyone looking. And the publication is like standing naked in front of people and asking ‘what do you think?’ There are some really nice things about the process but it is odd too.

You say mental illness is something Asian communities do not talk about but is it not an issue inadequately addressed by wider society?

Yes, it’s a taboo generally but it’s is a particular problem for Indian families. When I was doing my research there were almost no books from a cultural perspective written about Indians and mental illness. I am intrigued by the number of emails I have received from Indians now saying mental illness existed within their families but was hidden. I think this is more of the case within Indian families. Research has shown that people with schizophrenia in Indian families tend to do better than western families. It’s got something to do with the fact that Indians don’t comment on ‘weirdness’. If someone is ill in a western family they’ll try to change their ways, they’ll constantly be commenting on it but in an Indian family it’s kind of ignored. It can be argued that that attitude is better for the person who’s ill. My father has always been involved in my family life because his illness has been ignored and that’s good for him. But then you could say that it’s tolerated but it’s also not tolerated because my great grandfather [who had schizophrenia] was tied to a bed and was left to die. The west hasn’t got much to gloat about when it comes to mental illness. Until recently it was blamed on masturbation and witches. Literally ten or fifteen years ago the argument in the scientific community over schizophrenia was all down to schizophregenic mothers – which is basically bad mothering and that was the official line.

The book is framed by this letter to your mother in which you say to her that you want to marry someone that you choose and not go down the arranged marriage route. Whilst that’s not the point of the book, how did you feel writing about this worn cliché of the British Asian experience?

Well it [arranged marriage] was the point [of the book] for me but the real point of it is mental illness and schizophrenia – it’s more profound. The whole arranged marriage thing is a cliché, but it is also one of the oldest and most important stories of all time. It’s what Romeo and Juliet is about – love and duty. It’s a cliché but it’s important and lots of us are caught up in it and not just Asian people, but Jewish people and Catholic people, it’s a universal subject.

In the book you say you’ve been on a number of arranged marriage dates and in your experience most second generation Punjabi women are “depressingly servile or terrifyingly aggressive”. Do you really believe this?

They are in my experience. There might be some in between. It’s a generalisation. By definition it’s not true but its true at the same time…I say these things but they are not meant to be concrete. It’s for discussion, it’s like an essay question: discuss. If I had to compare Asian men to Asian women, I would say Asian men are madder.

How do you feel having written the book?

When I had finished it, I kind of forgot about it. I found it painful to read it again. It feels like someone else did it. A lot of my life feels surreal, like the fact that I went to a grammar school. I am also often shocked at the idea that I went to Cambridge University and being a journalist at the Times. I never had ambitions. I thought I’d be a bank manager in Wolverhampton, none of this was planned.

Has your relationship with your family changed after writing this book?

Part of my coping mechanism back in those days was not seeing my family very much. But now I see them so much more and we’re much kinder to each other. The book has been an amazing process and it has completely changed my relationship with my family in a good way. I want to see them more. It’s helped my sister to talk through what happened to her and my mother has loved the publication process. I was traumatised by it but she loved it – people come up to her in the Sikh temple saying I can’t believe what you went through, you’re such an amazing woman, we’re so proud of you. The extended family come over and said that they hadn’t realised the full scale of what had happened. That makes it all worthwhile. I would have a thousand bad reviews just for that.

If You Don’t Know Me By Now: a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton published by Penguin is available now.

If You Don’t Know me by Now

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