The comedian said one of his biggest regrets “is not having enough empathy or understanding” of the situation his mother, Shanthi, faced when she moved to the UK aged 19.
“The difference between her experience and my dad’s,” Ranganathan said, “is my dad was going off to work, where you’re immediately thrust into social connections and situations and you’re making friends just by dint of that being your lifestyle.”
In contrast, he said: “My mum is at home and going to the shops and doing whatever, but thinking about it now, that’s a 19-year-old girl who had kids in a foreign country. I don’t say this lightly, my mum is one of my heroes.”
He recalled that, when he was 12, his father “had fallen into financial trouble, he’d lost his job and he was trying to make money in his sort of Sri Lankan Del Boy way, and it wasn’t working out and couldn’t keep up the mortgage repayments on their house”.
His father was later arrested and imprisoned for two years for fraud, when Romesh was still a teenager.
Ranganathan said he has always struggled with his mental health, but had a particularly challenging time as a teenager, when he was doing his A-levels and his dad was in prison. His father died in 2011.
“I’ve been through in my life a number of periods of suicide ideation,” Ranganathan said, but added: “As I speak now, this is running close to one of the best places I’ve ever been in my life mentally.”