When Jaz Singh took part in this year’s hit reality series The Traitors, he earned the nickname Jazatha Christie for being the only faithful able to sniff out the bad guys. Then came a shocking revelation that explained how he came to be so good at spotting the signs – his father had lived a double life with a secret family. “I know what it’s like to be betrayed. I’ve had first-hand experience,” he said.
After the show, hundreds of people messaged Singh to share similar experiences. He says: “At first, I thought: ‘Surely not? These guys must be lying, they’re just fans of the show who want to get in touch.’” What made him realise they were genuine, though, was the fact that they had the precise feelings that he had felt: mostly shame, confusion and loss.
He has now taken some of these stories and explored them in the programme The Psychology of a Second Life, part of BBC Radio 4’s new Illuminated series. The details are shocking, but most alarming is how common these situations are.
Singh’s father, he says, was a prominent figure in Manchester’s Sikh community. “All my friends loved him; he was an affectionate, personable character. I always thought: ‘Yeah, I’ve hit the jackpot here. This is my dad.’” Now 31, Singh is still reluctant to share the specifics, but says he discovered his father’s second life at “quite a young age”. His father had a partner, an older son and a younger daughter. “This was going on for a significant amount of time. I don’t know how he was managing it.”
For years, Singh didn’t tell anyone outside his family. “You almost feel as if it was your responsibility,” he says. “It was shameful for me to carry such a burden and I felt embarrassed.” But then he fell in love.
He told his then girlfriend, Honey, in the car park at the Trafford Centre in Manchester. “I just cried in the car. Within our culture, it’s not just the bride and groom getting married; the families need to get on. I knew this could ruin the relationship. I thought her family probably wouldn’t accept the mess going on in my household.” He and Honey have now been married for two-and-a-half years.
Over time, Singh realised the shame is not his to carry. He made this cathartic radio documentary to try to overcome the stigma that attaches to those affected.
Eve, who took her “caring, romantic” husband to court for bigamy, reads out the victim impact statement she made at the trial: “At the time of the bigamist’s wedding, we had been married for 17 years.” She describes how other family members knew he was getting married and didn’t tell her. The response she is always prepared for is: “She must have known what was going on?”
Emily was 31 when she heard rumours that her dad had another family with two children. She only knew for certain after he died, but her mother refuses to talk about it. “I wish I’d had the guts to ask him about those rumours when I first heard them,” she says. The trauma is clear and she is almost in tears as she recounts her experience: “There is no closure. This is something I will think about until the day I die.”
“How?” is always the first big question. The three people Singh talks to remember their family members variously making regular business trips abroad (one even managed a holiday to India), daily visits to the shop for milk, and – despite these odd details – somehow having a general sense of a normal, secure family life. “The perpetrators almost sound like the same person,” says Singh.
He gets the experts in for that tricker question: why? “One of the things that came up was sex: is it more than an affair getting out of hand? And it is,” he says. “It’s actually fulfilling a deeper desire that people require in life.” He also proffers, perhaps generously, that it can be a defence mechanism after experiencing trauma in their own lives. “Somebody who has lost a parent at a very young age wants to almost play safe in life, to have two of everything: two cars, two phones, two bank accounts, two families.”
This deepening understanding has been a long process. Singh and his family parted from his father after he tried to justify his actions rather than accepting responsibility. “I don’t see any value in it,” he says. “As you get older, you develop resilience and a courage to step away from something so toxic.”
The programme only scratches the surface of something that affects a surprising number of people. Among the hundreds of people who messaged Singh with their stories was a woman who didn’t realise she had half-siblings until they turned up at her father’s funeral. With Singh having only a half-hour episode to do justice to these tales, she is one of many people whowho didn’t get the opportunity to share their experiences. He is hoping he will be able to take them to the screen in a TV documentary series.
“The children of the next generation are left to pick up the pieces with very little guidance on what to do. I felt really alone, not being able to share it,” he says. “But this trauma is huge. It’s not just me. I suppose that’s why I’m doing this now – I find it so therapeutic to talk about it … I want to try to help as many people out there who are in this situation.”
The Psychology of a Second Life is on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday
