The Year of the Runaways

by Sunjeev Sahota

  They bought milk, flour, bread, potatoes and toilet roll and went back to the house. Others were returning with their milk and shopping too, and it all got piled into the fridge, done for another week.

  *

  Randeep took a step back from the door and looked up to the window. The light was on. He rang the doorbell again and this time heard feet on the stairs and Narinderji appeared on the other side of the thick glass – ‘I’m coming, I’m coming’ – and let him in.

  ‘Sorry I was in the middle of my paat.’

  ‘I didn’t realize,’ Randeep said, following her up to the flat.

  With each step his suitcase hit the side of his leg, and, as he entered, the gurbani was still playing. She hadn’t changed anything much. It was all very plain. The single plain brown leather settee. A plain tablecloth. The bulb was still without its shade. Only the blackout curtains looked new. A pressure cooker was whistling on the stove, and the whole worktop was a rich green pasture of herbs. In the corner, between the window and her bedroom door, she’d created a shrine: some kind of wooden plinth swathed in a gold-tasselled ramallah, and on top of this both a brass kandha and a picture each of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind. In front of the plinth, on a cushion, her gutka lay open, bound in orange cloth, and beside that a stereo player. The gurbani began to fade out and the CD clicked mournfully off. Randeep set his case by the settee.

  ‘How have you been?’

  ‘I’m getting used to it.’ Her hands were clasped loosely over her long black cardigan.

  ‘You are getting to know your way around?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘At least the weather is getting a smidgen better now. I thought the snow would never stop.’

  She gave a tiny smile but said nothing. Randeep wondered if she just wanted him to hurry up and leave again. He knelt before his case and thumbed the silver dials until the thing snapped open.

  ‘Well, as I said on the phone, I’ve brought some clothes and things for you to keep here.’

  He draped a pair of matching shirts across the creased rump of the settee, along with some black trousers and starched blue jeans, all still on their bent wire hangers. He took a white carrier bag tied in a knot at the top and left this on the table. ‘Shaving cream, aftershave, that kind of thing. And also some underwear,’ he added in the casual manner he’d practised on the way down. Then he reached back into his suitcase and handed her a slim red felt album. ‘And these are the photographs I think we – you – should hang up.’

  He watched her palming through the pages. The first few were taken on their wedding day, in a gurdwara outside his city of Chandigarh. The later ones showed them enjoying themselves, laughing in a Florentine garden, choosing gifts at a market. ‘They look believable to me,’ she said.

  ‘Vakeelji sorted it all out. He said sometimes they ask to see where we went on holiday.’ He sidestepped saying ‘honeymoon’. ‘There are dates on the back.’

  ‘Are there stamps on our passports?’

  ‘It’s all taken care of.’

  Suddenly, her nose wrinkled and she held the album face-out towards him: the two of them posing in a busy restaurant, his arm around her waist.

  ‘Vakeelji said there have to be signs of – intimacy.’ He’d looked past her as he’d uttered the word.

  ‘I don’t care what Vakeelji said.’ She shut the album and dropped it onto the settee. ‘This isn’t what I agreed to.’

  He felt himself getting riled, as if discarding the photos in some way reflected her feelings towards him. ‘Look, can’t we just do what Vakeelji said? I’m the one with everything to lose here.’

  ‘I’ve put a lot at stake too.’

  ‘Yes. I’m certain you have. And I’m very thankful for all you’re doing. I’m sorry if that isn’t clear. We won’t use the photos.’

  The silence seemed calculated, forcing her to relent.

  ‘Most are fine to use,’ she said, and he nodded and retrieved the album.

  ‘I only hope we’ve got enough. I’m hearing rumours of raids.’

  There was a sort of frozen alarm in her face which thawed to incomprehension. ‘You think this place will be raided? By who?’

  ‘It’s just people at work talking. And there are always rumours. But it’s better to be prepared. Maybe I should come and live here?’ he said, testing the water a little.

  The shock of the suggestion seemed to force her mouth to open.

  ‘I was not being serious.’

  ‘It’s too small. And the weather,’ she said, randomly.

  ‘I understand completely,’ he said, layering smiles over his disappointment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so warm in a house, with food smelling as good as that on the cooker.

  She made to walk him to the door.

  ‘Shall I help you with this first? It’s not fair to leave you to pack it all away.’ Delay tactics. She said she’d do it later. That it wasn’t a problem. Reluctantly, Randeep followed her down the stairs. As she opened the door he took the notes out of his pocket and handed them to her.

  ‘Another month,’ she said. ‘The year will be over before we know it.’

  ‘Yes!’ he replied, shaking his head, as if amazed how quickly the time was passing, when really it seemed to him that each new week took on the span of an entire age.

  After he’d gone, she collapsed onto the armrest of the settee, face hidden. This was too hard. This was too much to give. What had she got herself into? She lifted her head out of her arm and was met with the images of her gurus. They spoke to her, reminding her that she always knew it was going to be hard, that doing the right thing is never the easy choice, but to remember that Waheguru is her ship and He would bear her safely across. She felt Him beside her, and felt her resolve return, as if the blood was pumping more thickly through her body.

  She fetched from the drawer the map she’d picked up from the station and zoned in on her street. The surrounding areas didn’t sound like places she wanted to visit: Rawmarsh, Pitsmoor, Crosspool. Burngreave. Killamarsh. They sounded so angry, these northern places, like they wanted to do you harm.

  Across the city, Randeep lay on his mattress. Everyone had eaten early and gone to sleep, tired out from a whole muddy week of shovelling up and levelling out cement. No one had even mentioned his second visit to the wife. He replayed their conversation and was more or less pleased with how it had gone. They seemed to understand each other and if the year carried on like that everything would be fine. He was hopeful of that. He heard the downstairs door go and the kitchen beads jangling. Probably Avtar would stay in the kitchen for an hour, eating, studying, counting how much money he had, or didn’t have. Randeep wouldn’t join him. The last few times he had gone downstairs he’d got the impression he was only getting in the way.

  Rain pattered against the glass. He turned his head towards Tochi. Yesterday, Tochi had moved his mattress out from under the window and turned it at a right angle, so he and Randeep now lay parallel to each other, the door at their feet. Randeep guessed it was so he could sleep facing the wall. His boots were crossed at the ankles and were the only part of him that poked out from under the blanket. Randeep’s blanket. Which he’d not even been thanked for.

  ‘Bhaji, are you awake?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Bhaji?’

  ‘What?’

  Randeep didn’t know what. He hadn’t had a conversation planned. ‘I can’t sleep.’ Then, a minute or so later, ‘This is strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘I mean, when you were a kid, did you ever think you’d be working in Sheffield, in England, and living in a house like this? I’d never even heard of Sheffield.’ There was silence and Randeep asked, ‘Do you still have people back home?’

  Tochi didn’t reply. The rain seemed to be plashing harder and Randeep drew his blanket up around his neck.

  ‘Bhaji?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I like hearing the rain
outside.’

  A pause, and then Tochi: ‘Me too.’

  2. TOCHI: AUTORIDER

  Tarlochan Kumar was bent double under the last huge sack of fodder. He shook it into the buffalo trough and moved away as the animals nosed hungrily forward. He was seventeen; it was his fourth year in Panjab, his third with this family. He’d miss the place.

  He crouched by the pump at the side of his hut and washed his arms, soaping off the grass and sweat. Then he changed into a clean white kurta pyjama he’d that morning left to dry on a branch. As he made his way to the big house, the sunset streaked the horizon.

  The solid iron double gate was closed and its blue rivets still hot to touch. Inside, in the courtyard, his sahib sat cross-legged on his menjha, speaking to a local usurer. The sahib’s wife was napping beside him, her head flopped back over the love seat, and on the floor their daughter crushed herbs in a small ceramic mortar. Once the usurer was dismissed, Tochi knocked on the metal gate and was invited in.

  ‘How many times?’ the sahib said. ‘Treat this place like your home.’ He was in a good mood, which was something.

  ‘Sorry, sahib,’ Tochi said.

  He noticed the wife half open her eyes and tap her foot twice against her daughter’s back. The girl lifted her chunni up over her head, screening her face from Tochi.

  ‘I have to go home, sahib. My papa is not well. I got a call yesterday.’

  His sahib uncrossed his legs so just his toes touched the floor. The taut hairy ropes of the menjha had striped deep red marks over his feet. He watched them fade. ‘It’s the height of the season. You could not have picked a worse time.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why are you chamaars so unreliable?’

  Tochi said nothing.

  ‘How ill is he? Will he not get better?’

  ‘Both his arms are gone.’

  The wife clucked her tongue in sympathy and muttered a waheguru.

  ‘What colours God shows us,’ his sahib said. ‘You understand I’ll have to get someone else. I can’t keep your job for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  Tochi nodded, turned to leave.

  ‘Don’t forget your food,’ the memsahib said.

  He thanked her and picked up the thali of leftovers on his way out.

  The next day, his sahib was waiting outside the big gate, wages in hand. Tochi accepted the wad and bent to touch the man’s feet.

  He walked the two hours to Jalandhar, his belongings in a brown rice-sack slung across his shoulder. At the depot the buses were parked up in their rows, the iron grilles blurring into each other in the mellowing dark. He found his bus, but the conductor sitting on the roof ground out his beedi and said they wouldn’t be leaving until it was full, nine o’clock, at least, so he should pass his luggage up to guarantee his place. Tochi kept his bag with him and went and sat in the station’s chai-samosa dhaba. He ordered some tea and made a cradle of his arms on the table, nestling his head down and closing his eyes.

  It was past noon before the conductor blew his whistle. As they laboured out of the compound, the passengers were rocked from side to side and the man sitting next to Tochi clanged the tiny cymbals tied to his wrists and whispered a prayer under his breath. He was a young man, in a cheap white cotton shirt and faded black trousers. A burgundy folder lay across his lap. He was going for an interview, he said. To be a ground clerk. Tochi nodded as if he knew what that was and told the man he was going home because his father had lost both his arms. Grimacing, the man clanged his cymbals and didn’t speak again, as though he didn’t want Tochi’s bad luck to rub off on him.

  The conductor steadied himself against the pole while he punched Tochi’s fare into his machine, tearing him off a stub from the tape-roll of pink chits. Then, rice-sack clasped against his stomach, Tochi allowed himself to swing in and out of sleep until it was gone midnight and they were pulling into Meerut station and the young man next to him was saying he wanted to get past.

  Outside the depot, tall double-headed lampposts ran up the spine of the road, and traffic swarmed, though no one seemed to be getting anywhere fast. The connecting bus wasn’t leaving until the morning, so Tochi dodged across the road and carried on down the street, hoping to find a hostel amongst the cement stores and Airtel operators. In a two-storey shack with red and green fairy lights all over: ‘AARTI HOTEL’, he paid the boy watching a Bollywood film at the counter. Then he went up to a thin metal bed and fell asleep to the snicker of cockroaches.

  He couldn’t get on the coach direct to Patna – other passengers priced him off – so he waited the morning out under a narrow tree, making a cola and two rotis last until he climbed onto the afternoon bus to Shahjahanpur. He played cards with a young boy sporting a sandalwood mark on his forehead. The boy was sitting across the aisle from Tochi and they used their knees for a table, but when the boy asked Tochi his name – ‘No, your full name’ – and Tochi told him, the boy’s mother made some excuse and switched places with her son.

  He spent three nights in Shahjahanpur, sleeping on the ground behind a mandir, head on his sack of clothes. On the fourth morning he asked the pandit for a bucket of water. He washed himself, then dipped his clothes into the bucket, wrung out the water and put them straight back on. He could almost feel them crisp and shrink against his skin. He went again to the station, and this time the conductor said there were enough passengers for the journey, but only as far as Allahabad. The bus was full of Sikh women, pilgrims with round turbans and small knives. No one said a thing the entire journey, and Tochi sat at the back, staring out at the young green corn. He wondered how they’d coped in the year since his father’s accident. All his brother had said was that money was running out, work drying up. To come home, please.

  Dawn arrived grainy in Allahabad and Tochi joined the long queue for the Patna bus, his fourth. He’d got to perhaps six or seven from the front when the conductor announced they were full and everyone would have to wait for the evening ride. Tochi went down the windows each side saying that his father had lost both his arms and would someone please exchange tickets with him. Most passengers turned their heads, but a young man with a professorial look jumped off and cheerfully told Tochi to take his place. He even offered to pay for his ticket but this Tochi politely declined.

  Slowly the heat dwindled. When the bus crawled into Patna, finally there were landmarks Tochi recognized: Vaishali Talkies, Bhavya Emporium, Market Chowk. He stepped off and bent to touch his hand to the soil and then to his forehead. For the final hour-long journey he flagged a packed bumblebee-painted auto-rickshaw and hung onto the side of it, feeling his body curve as the thing juddered out of the city. Tochi jumped off at his village gate, opposite Bicky’s Friendship Store, and as he passed under the arch he again bent to bless himself with dirt from the ground.

  He walked the long white strip of road, past some kids playing with a stick who stopped to watch him. The vast field of wheat either side was still in the hot air. Butterflies flew reed to reed, wide-winged, cabbage-green and peacock-spotted. He turned off into an alley where the sewage moved in sluggish plates in front of the wooden doorways. It was darker here. He came to a red panel, the paint flaking to reveal the green underneath, and he lifted it aside and ducked and turned sideways to squeeze himself through the thin gap and into the room. The sun streamed through holes bored into the back wall and fell like scattered treasure across one half of the stone floor. On the other side, in thick shade, he could see his father asleep on a mattress woven from coconut leaves. His head was turned to the wall and the sleeve of his grey tunic lay empty at his side. The pink shelf his sister had put up was still there but the things on it were new to him: a gold pen, a ration card, an address book still in its plastic wrapping, a picture of a white girl with straw-coloured hair hugging a dog in front of a thatched cottage. There was an English inscription on the picture of which he only knew the word ‘home’. He dumped his clothes in the corner and went back outside. Further up, the lane
forked and at the junction was a large broken fountain now filled with sand. Beyond it were a few shops made from sleeves of tin that seemed to be held together by nothing more than God’s benevolence. The tailor – Kishen – was still there, cross-legged at the sewing machine, under a ceiling fan which made the sheets of fabric displayed behind him ripple. They’d gone to school together, briefly, back when the state had attempted a literacy drive. They shook hands.

  ‘Your brother said you were coming back.’

  ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Running. Papa died last year.’

  Tochi swatted a fly hovering by his ear. ‘Is there work?’

  Kishen said there was nothing. ‘Even Chetan and his sons went to Danapur. They heard there was land there.’ He measured out some tiger-print cloth, looped it back and sliced it in two with scissors tucked beneath his thigh. ‘They came back. Nothing.’

  Tochi looked at the pyramids of hot yellow bricks, at the two rat-thin dogs weaving primly between the wheels of an oxen cart. Some bare-chested kids played cricket in the arid field, and beyond them was a mountain of sewage, looming like a black cliff face. Nothing seemed to have changed.

  He shook hands with the people he passed, confirming that he was back and that he had found work in Panjab. And, yes, hadn’t he grown? He walked slowly, wanting them all to get a good look at him, to understand that there was once again a man in the house, that it wasn’t just the cripple. The villagers understood this. They would have done the same.

  When he had completed his circuit and arrived back at the sand-filled fountain he saw his brother coming down the road. Dalbir. His brown shorts were tattered and his white school shirt not much better. He carried a sack of grain about twice his size. So they had taken him out of school. Tochi approached but Dalbir shrugged him off: ‘I can carry it.’