Smash hit

Sanghera’s mother and father still attend temple twice a day. It’s not this one but a mustard-domed edifice in the suburb of Blakenhall, near where they moved when Sanghera was a teenager. There are three temples in the area – “I haven’t been in that one because that’s for a different caste.” He shrugs at the absurdity.

We pass the very hair salon where the plait was chopped off. The shorn Sanghera went home, terrified of his family’s reaction, but his eldest brother only said: “Bloody hell, you look like Doogie Howser,” and his mother, after a double take, held him. Sanghera thinks she knew all along that he had been bullied for having a top-knot. It was traditional to dispose of the cut-off plait in a running river, but Sanghera had to make do with a canal filled with rusty bikes. When he went into grammar school the next day with his short hair, he was a sensation: “Jaws dropped, and for a millisecond I was a transformed Sandy in Grease.”

The contrast of cultures is often funny, and Sanghera is aware of the nuances. “I tugged my LVMH bag through the double-glazed UPVC porch door of my parents’ house,” he writes, but his veiled criticism is affectionate. As we head towards his family’s house, I ask how on earth his mother managed to afford it on a machinist’s wage. “You have no idea how good Punjabis are with money,” he says, grinning. “They work all the time and save it all and never go out. My parents bought our first house for about £600 and sold it for much more later. And we all worked, from when we were children.” He labelled and wrapped blouses in the factory – one week, he did 70 hours – but he eventually quit to concentrate on his exams.

His acceptance into Cambridge is a tribute, he says, to the old assisted places scheme at Wolverhampton Grammar, where he is now a governor. The fees there are about £9,000, “too much for my sister’s kids now”. Sanghera went on to win a place as a graduate trainee on the Financial Times, where he worked for eight years. Before that, he had a short-lived job on Live TV, where he helped organise the self-explanatory Topless Darts. “It was in Canary Wharf and I think my mum thought I was working in the City. A benefit of the language divide. We had to take models to be filmed playing darts topless – at the ballet, on the farm. My job was often actually throwing the dart out of sight, since they were hopeless at aiming. We laughed from the moment we got in until we left. I also dressed up on the hour as the News Bunny. I had to act out the news. In a furry costume.”

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No wonder Sanghera had to keep most of his London life secret from his parents. He bought a flat in Brixton and started dating English women – goris, as his mother would say – but he told them nothing, even when he had a relationship that lasted more than two years. When his mother came to stay with him, he had to throw away the left-behind nail varnish and knickers, dump the alcohol, and quickly stick internet photos of Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh religion, on the walls.

In the meantime, his mother worked on making Sanghera a fine match with a nice Sikh woman from the right family: indeed, there were at least 20 attempts at an arranged marriage, all of which fell flat. The other children all married young, and it was embarrassing to have Sanghera single in his late twenties. Increasingly, the pressure of leading a double life, and the quiet deceits required to maintain it, began to tell on Sanghera. He became stressed, guilty and torn between the worlds of East and West, unable to reconcile the two.

Writing the book made him miserable. It was a form of breakdown almost, holed up in his old bedroom in Wolverhampton, drinking smuggled-in gin out of a teacup. Finding out about his family’s history was not simple: medical records were vague, news-paper cuttings slim and relatives were not keen to provide “the sort of linear narrative that people who listen to Radio 4 might offer”. Thus the book is sometimes as raw and circumlocutory as its characters.

Eventually, having made an exhaustive examination of his family’s past, Sanghera confessed his own double life to his mother, in a heartbreaking (and uninterruptable) letter to her. He talks about why he needed to write the memoir, and how proud he is of his mother’s role and courage in their lives. But he also admits he has had long relationships with non-Sikh women, and that he does not want an arranged marriage.

Traditional and controlling as she is, Surjit comes out as the heroine of the book, an almost universal loving mother figure, who could equally be intensely Jewish, or Catholic. When Sanghera comes home, he admits, she still has his bath running, and sprinkles holy water in it. And even when she could not provide material things, even when mental illness put a shroud over their lives, she still gave her children a sense of worth.

So it’s time to meet the parents. We drive deeper into the suburbs, “where it’s fashionable to pave over your front lawn so you can park your many cars there,” says Sanghera. There are net curtains, gussied-up garages and long back gardens with bright plastic slides. Surjit answers the door, wearing a scarf and a salwar kameez. “She’s been making onion bhajis all morning,” whispers Sanghera.

Jagjit, his father, rises slowly from an armchair and shakes my hand, then sits in silence, behind the language barrier. He can’t read The Times, but he takes the paper to the community centre and shows friends his son’s picture byline. On the wall are huge photographs of their children’s weddings, grandchildren and Sanghera in a gown receiving his degree at Cambridge.

Surjit will not rest until we are replete. She has two chairs and plates ready, the bhajis, the home-made chutney, the biscuits, the Quality Street, the cups of tea. It’s the first time a journalist has come home to interview her son the writer. I try to get Sanghera to translate, to explain that I love the book, and that she comes out of it as strong and courageous. But he can’t translate, because she’s welling up, and so is he. “What do you feel about your son bringing out a book?” I ask, and she says that she is proud he’s told the family’s story. Slightly hysterical, we move from tears to laughter. “He’s a good son.” She’s grinning. “Maybe now he’s written a book he’ll get married.”

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