I first met journalist, author and memoirist Mr Sathnam Sanghera in 2011 after a mutual friend suggested that he was perfect for me “on paper”.  We were both media types of a certain age looking to make the next steps. Tick. We were also both single Sikhs in the city. Tick tick. Frankly, I was glad to not be subjected to the tyranny of an internet encounter – and Mr Sanghera, I figured, was a known quantity.

It wasn’t a blind date exactly. I already knew his chops from the byline photo on his Times column, and his smash-hit memoir The Boy With The Topknot – which felt comfortably familiar. There was a certain schadenfreude in reading the account of another human being navigating the jittery horrors of growing up in a dysfunctional Indian family. It made me feel less alone.

In person, I found Mr Sanghera to be preppily handsome, witty and sweet. I was intrigued and platonically smitten. I recognised in him an unspoken shared cultural dynamic and he felt instantly like #fam.

Now, here we are almost nine years later, trying but failing to order a Dusty Knuckle croissant at the Chiltern Firehouse, plotting the small details of Mr Sanghera’s upcoming turn as speaker at my restaurant Jikoni, as part of our Civilised Sunday series where we invite cultural leaders we admire to sing for their supper.

Find more information here:  ** jikonilondon.com**

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Knowing you as I do, I know any kind of public speaking events make you cringe, so why on earth did you agree to sign up for a Civilised Sunday at Jikoni?

You got Nigel Slater for the Birmingham Literary Festival, which I curated, so I think I owed you one. That aside, I love your food, so I obviously couldn’t say no.

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Columnist, author, memoirist and, now, documentary frontman. It’s shaping up to be quite the career. But you had very humble beginnings, right? What was your first ever job?

My first ever job was when I was nine or 10, working up to 90 hours a week for 50p an hour [working in a sewing factory in Wolverhampton]. It was during my summer holidays. I was their best worker and they wouldn’t even give me a pay rise. As a result, I can sew, overlock, buttonhole…

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From child labour in the mills of the Midlands to Cambridge scholar – how does the son of immigrant parents who barely speak English make that hundred-foot journey?

It was definitely a long journey. I am still startled by it sometimes. My dad is illiterate. I am very aware of the fact that he cannot read and yet I have gone on to become a writer for a newspaper, but I see it mainly as other people’s success. At every stage of my life, I have had people helping me. At school, especially.

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Coming from an Indian family, I know a thing or two about how good we are at keeping secrets buried. How do you get started on writing a book and why did you decide to write something so confessional?

I was just so tired of lying to my parents about my life in London. At one point, I had a flat that I pretended to live in on my own while I lived with my girlfriend in another flat. Also, it became increasingly obvious to me that I didn’t really know anything about my own family. When I found out my dad had schizophrenia, I felt that there was this huge gap – I could tell you loads about, say, interviewing David Blaine, but my own parents were a mystery. Mary, my editor at Penguin, suggested that I turn this all into a book…

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The French philosopher Mr Gilles Deleuze once said life is not personal – do you think that you found it easy to write about your life because you felt so many people, particularly British Asians of our generation, shared in your experience?

When you are 30 and writing your memoir, on no level do you think anyone would read it or relate to it. It felt like I was writing a strange book completely for myself.

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Do you have any writing rituals?

I have to write in a library. I have a love-hate relationship with The British Library because it is sort of bland. When you are writing a book, you need to make your manuscript the most interesting thing in your life. Sunshine, internet distractions, coffee shops don’t work for me. Being in a bland space is the only way I can write. Most of my work gets done in the morning, although I am not an early riser; in the afternoon, research and rewriting, followed by The Sopranos.

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Which book or author do you think had the biggest impact on you as a writer?

I think it was The Buddha Of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi – I actually watched the TV show before I read the book. That was the first time I had really seen anyone like me depicted in the mainstream media in a serious drama.

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I think your memoir became a piece of literature, and now a film, in which the British Asian experience is represented.

What makes me sad is that in between The Buddha Of Suburbia and my book there hasn’t been much. Of course, there were shows such as Goodness Gracious Me, and wonderful success of Asians making films such as Bend It Like Beckham in the 1990s and early 2000s, but it’s sad that realistic drama about British Asian life isn’t really being made.

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What are you currently reading or watching?

Well, apart from watching The Sopranos, I am writing a book on the British Empire, so I am reading as much as I can about it – there was a lot of darkness during empire. I am going to bed reading about various genocides and massacres. I think the British Empire is barely taught at all. I want to be able to play a role in forcing people to acknowledge what happened.

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Does knowing those things alter your perception of what it is to be British?

Yes, it has definitely had a profound effect on me. Why is it that we have this amnesia in Britain about the biggest thing we did? Why can’t we confront it? We have this need to feel like the good guys – we defeated the Nazis, but actually we were the bad guys for a pretty long time, too.

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Like you, I was in Amritsar recently, and went to the Partition Museum. I was shocked at how little I actually knew…

I don’t feel instinctively against empire, I just feel embarrassed because I am as British as I am Indian, so hopefully the position I occupy is a good way for me to write about this subject.

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You seem to get about and meet very interesting folks. Who has been the nicest person to interview?

My favourite interviewee ever was Rufus Wainwright. I turned up to the wrong venue. He was playing at the Royal Festival Hall and I went to the Royal Albert. I was half an hour late and only had an hour with him. He could tell I was really stressed out and he simply said, “What can I do to help?” He was such a pro – he told me exactly the stories I needed in half an hour, and in the end, it was better than a two-hour interview.

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In the quest for truth, journalists have to get in people’s faces sometimes. Have you ever had to apologise to anyone?

Yeah. There are interviews I have turned down because interviewing people sometimes requires you to annoy them. I turned down an interview with Nigel Slater for The Times for that very reason – I just want to be mates with him. I wrote a really negative piece about Alain de Botton and then got to a stage in my life where I found one of his books incredibly useful. It was a terrific book and I felt really bad, so I wrote to him to apologise and he was very gracious. I suppose I may as well talk about Salman Rushdie, too. I went to New York to interview him and I loved meeting him, but at the end, I had to ask him about the fatwa and he hated that.

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I would say that you are Mr Popular because this has been our fastest selling Civilised Sunday (we’ve had three so far)…

I bet the one you are doing with William Dalrymple sells out faster. I’ll come to that. I think he’s a great writer and I have read all his books. I can’t wait for his new East India book.

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Finally, any regrets?

The only thing I feel bad about is the amount of time I did s*** jobs in my youth – I could have learnt to play a musical instrument or learnt a language. But that’s not about regret, that’s just about the fact that we were poor. Does that count as a regret?

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Best motto you live your life by?

“It ain’t what you do, it’s what it does to you.” It’s the title of a poem by Simon Armitage.

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