The book opens with a description of your father’s death. How central was your father to your life?
Very central. I would not have been who I am today if he had not been who he was. He held the family together, he gave me my values. He is the reason I wrote this book. He gave me the balance I needed.

It sounds shallow but in a sense, you were the most normal member in your family. What kept you sane?
a) My father,  b) The fact that though our household was troubled, the space of the house had enough room for me to hide away from the reality and read comics and children's books,  c) The desire to write about all this one day, and  d) My need to find my voice

Would you trade your childhood for anyone else’s?
No. If I trade that I would not have a book. Just joking. I have often wondered what if life were something else, but I have never been able to understand how that would have been possible. Given a chance I would live the same life once again. It was my life, this is my life, I am who I am because I had this life. Else I would have been a different person.

Your father’s advice to you (pg 171) on life, is a poignant moment in the book. Comment...
The more I think of it the more I believe that God does not distribute happiness and sadness. The human race is part of a system which engenders events. The events in themselves are neither good nor bad. Our thinking makes them happy or sad. God has nothing to do with it except spinning the wheel, setting the world in motion. Now its own force carries it forward.

Much of the book is a description of events as they happened when you were quite small. Why this time period specifically? Is it because of Mando?
I had to limit the book in some way. I wanted a sense of closure to what I had started writing about. Mando is important but more than that I showed a situation, an upheaval, and a resolution. I hint in the epilogue that the pattern I saw set in my childhood repeated itself in the coming years.

You have hinted in your book many times of the deep love your father felt for his wife despite her illness and her obvious dislike for him. How would you describe your father as a person?
When my father was a child his mother left him at the local Gurudwara during the Partition of India. My grandfather was not able to provide for the family because he was busy with the freedom struggle and then in rehabilitating refugees in both countries— India and Pakistan.

One day my father saw a man herding cows and buffaloes across the border. Among the cattle was a naked woman, with her ears lopped off. In the same days he also saw a fakir in his village. The children in the village stoned the fakir, the women in the village gave him food when he turned up at their door. As far as I can make out, these two experiences determined my father’s persona.

More than anything else, I think my father was a kind man who hated the way women were treated in the world. I write that he was not above board, from time to time he did give in to his own anger and sorrow, but it was his broader nature to accept his life and handle it the best he could.

Not only did you have a rough time at home, you were also sexually abused as a child. How difficult is it to come to terms with a childhood as brutal as yours?
Another journalist asked me how did Mando deal with her life. Later I called Mando and she said, “At that time we were simple. We did not know right from wrong.” That, I think, is my answer too. To survive anything we need a certain sense of innocence, a childlike way of looking at the world. An ease in the way of dealing with difficulties. I think if you try to understand what happened to you, separate yourself from what your circumstances do to you, it is not so difficult to deal with experiences in life.

Your father spoke of Sanyog, Nanaji spoke of it too. Do you believe in Sanyog?
In a limited sense yes. We are making a mistake by identifying the book too closely with my life. The situation in this book is such that ‘sanyog’ or determinism makes a big impact. But life is bigger than a book. I think fate plays a great role in our life but I do not discount the possibility of human action to create one’s own fate.

What have the reactions been of people that figure in the book?
That was my greatest fear. How will my mother accept the book. She read it and asked me if I wanted it published. I said yes. She blessed me. On the afternoon of the evening my father passed away he said in his eyes I had become a writer. My father’s sister and mother’s brother came to Delhi for the release. They travelled out of Punjab for the first time in their lives, at the age of 70+. Mando’s husband said he did not know so much had happened to her. I think I have every one’s blessing for the book.

REVIEW
W riters spend a lifetime searching for the perfect subject. Amandeep Sandhu only had to dredge the annals of memory. He has described Sepia Leaves, as a political, social and personal novel that also takes a ‘bold, moving look at living with schizophrenia’.  After reading the book you might not remember it is political and historical because schizophrenia and the impact of the illness are the heart and soul of the story.

Sandhu’s mother (Mamman) suffered from the disease and the novel is a rough memoir of how he and his father (Baba) lived out their daily lives with a seriously ill mother and wife.

‘Appu’ is about 6-years-old when the story begins and ‘Baba’ has just appointed a 15-year-old girl, Mando, as a maid at their house. It is ironic that while Mando’s arrival brings some semblance of order to Appu and Baba’s lives she triggers a deterioration in Mamman’s condition. Mamman firmly believes she is a prostitute brought home to be Baba’s mistress.

Whatever little normalcy prevailed in their house disappears as Mamman now begins to ‘despise’ Baba in earnest and violently lets loose abuse— verbal and physical— upon him as a result. At the same time Appu begins to realise that others do not see his mother as normal. He overhears a maid calling Mamman ‘pagli’ and asks his father for the meaning of the word.

Mamman’s behaviour eventually leads to a breakdown in the family and Appu is sent away to a hostel in Dehradun. But distance does not mend hearts and Appu pines for his mother, no matter what the world thinks she is. 

Mamman is the central figure in Appu and Baba’s lives. Despite the overwhelming stress her illness lays on them, they cannot do without her. She is their family and families stick together. This book is ultimately a testament to love and acceptance and redefines the true meaning of ‘commitment’.
Cheryl D’Souza