When Sathnam Sanghera was 24 years old, he found out – accidentally, while helping to pack his parents’ suitcase and discovering a cache of prescriptions – that his father had been receiving treatment for schizophrenia for 30 years. Making belated connections, he realised that his eldest sister had had the same condition since adolescence.

Unable to comprehend how he managed to overlook his father and sister’s suffering for so many years, Sanghera did something courageous and honourable: he made himself get closer to his family. If writing a book about their experiences seems an unorthodox way of doing so, it’s proof of his sensitivity and his tenacity that his approach succeeded.

He puts his sort-of wilful ignorance of his family’s history of mental illness down to a combination of youthful self-absorption, “cluelessness” and the “sometimes subtle nature” of schizophrenic behaviour, particularly when modified by strong medication, even though, as he notes, “the term ‘schizophrenia’ may bring to mind images of young men smearing themselves in faeces in lonely bedsits and pushing hard-working media professionals under the wheels of oncoming trains”.

Sanghera spoke only Punjabi until he started school, and until the age of 14 never once had his hair cut (his mother treated him as the family’s “religious experiment”, keeping his coccyx-length locks in a topknot). Buses were deemed too expensive, meaning the family walked two miles to the shops and two miles back every Saturday laden with cut-price onions; and because he grew up surrounded by cousins, in a heavily Asian part of town, he had no white friends until junior school. Nor had he met “a Muslim or a Tory or a Jew”. His early life was one of close parameters and of unconscious difference.

Integrating himself back into his family in order to learn more about them wasn’t easy, given that Sanghera bolted from Wolverhampton (home to Britain’s largest Sikh community, of which his huge extended family formed a part) at the age of 18, to Cambridge, then London, where he glided into a job as a celebrity interviewer on a national newspaper.

In the intervening years, he had created a deeply compartmentalised life that, in more flippant circumstances, might be described as “schizophrenic”. His mother cleaved to the belief that her youngest son would marry a Sikh girl from the same caste, when in his London life Sanghera was dating an atheist white woman called Laura. He tossed away his salary on expensive dinners and Prada trainers while, back in Wolves, his parents subsisted on unemployment benefit and bulk-bought lentils.

Most significantly, he spoke English as his first language and spent his days immersed in its endless variety. Had his father not been illiterate and his mother literate only in Punjabi, they may have understood far sooner that they qualified not for dole but for the much higher incapacity benefit. This needless disadvantage is one of many caused not only by their inability to understand English, but by being working-class and, therefore, Sanghera asserts with justifiable anger, invisible to those in positions of power.

A particularly moving chapter takes the form of an unsent letter to a man who probably doesn’t exist, his name having been conjured out of the air by an obfuscatory employee of Wolverhampton Crown Court. While researching his parents’ story, Sanghera found a microfiched newspaper article from the mid1970s detailing his father’s arrest and imprisonment for trying to throttle a local schoolgirl whom he believed was taunting him.

Jagjit Sanghera, in his youngest son’s lifetime a passive, taciturn, gentle bear of a man, had once terrorised his extended family. He punched the author’s mother in the stomach on their wedding night, and continued to mete out beatings of such force and regularity in the early years of their marriage that she fled their original home in Essex for Wolverhampton, without being able to read station signs or ask for directions. Jagjit followed soon after and promised he would never do it again.

He couldn’t keep that promise because he had yet to be diagnosed with schizophrenia; had he been so earlier, he would have been hospitalised, rather than incarcerated, for the attack, and would not have been treated for depression with electroconvulsive therapy. His wife, brave and resolute, kept the family together and protected her children from the worst. Such was her love for them that Sanghera, his brother and his two sisters were each convinced, at some point during their childhood, of being their mother’s favourite.

Sanghera’s account of his social ascent through education (motivated in part, he writes, by an unconscious urge to make up for his family’s sadness) is funny and revealing. It turns out that I applied in the same year as the author to study English literature at Christ’s College, Cambridge. At his interview, Sanghera was presented with a Shakespearian sonnet that he had encountered at grammar school and, having discussed it with his interviewer, was awarded an unconditional place.

At my interview, having attended a secondary school in the bottom decile of the league tables, I was asked to read out a Wordsworth sonnet and was rewarded for my halting efforts with snorts of derision from the tutor. I mention this only because had our paths converged, and the warm, witty, neurotic, self-deprecating, wordplay-loving Sanghera of this book resembled his undergraduate self, I’d have wanted to be his best friend.

In bearing witness to his family’s experience, Sanghera has brought to us rare news of working-class life, of living with mental illness and of overwhelming filial love. A family photo near the end of the book shows the author in his graduation gown and cap surrounded by his parents and siblings. How far he’s come, you think, against such odds, and you want to punch the air and cry at the same time.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW by Sathnam Sanghera
Viking £16.99 pp319

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