If You Don’t Know Me By Now,
Sathnam Sanghera,
Penguin

A painfully honest memoir on Punjabi immigrants
There are many stories about the Punjabi diaspora which still need to be told. Whilst the Bengali community abroad has been recording their angst for some time, the Punjabis who went abroad in the first stream of immigration were largely uneducated blue-collar workers, with an obsessive desire to build a better life. Because they are a proud community of survivors, the stories they brought back were mostly of dollars and pounds, glossing over their personal discomfort and often near-death situations. Thankfully all that is now changing. With books such as Sanghera’s If You Don’t Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, the thick curtain which lay over their experiences, especially as a family, is now being lifted.

The stereotypical, lassi-swilling, cheery Southall taxi driver has been caricatured enough in cinema and television. And of course, lately we have been celebrating the millionaire NRIs, again measuring their success in terms of the Rich List. This is where Sanghera’s book digresses — it takes us into the dark corners of ordinary Punjabi homes.
It is now taking a new generation of Punjabi immigrants to reveal their pain, and through this revelation, hopefully, those who now revel in the global phenomena of “India rising” will understand the enormous courage it has taken for the Punjabi community to live abroad — swapping a community-based rural lifestyle for an uncaring, urban one. Sanghera, who works for The Times, belongs to the third generation of Punjabis who live in Wolverhampton in the UK. It is a huge leap forward for the son of a father who was a manual labourer and whose parents remain unable to speak English, and are thus cut off from most of the world in the UK.

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