The Year of the Runaways

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘I could see them from our window. The whole time they spent getting drunk in their jeeps. Some revolution!’

  Tochi knew otherwise. He’d driven through the alleys leading off Gandhi Chowk and seen the burnt-out tanning yard. And he’d heard his passengers talking: it seemed that at least three men had been killed, and maybe even a child.

  Palvinder and Susheel were wedded that winter in an open-air ceremony and travelled to Shimla for their honeymoon. Then, not a year married, Susheel called to say he was bringing Palvinder back for the birth of their first child. Tochi’s mother ordered that a new charpoy be bought – one in the double-weaved style – and placed this in the room they’d added to the rear of the house last summer.

  ‘Tochi must be doing well,’ Palvinder said when she arrived, testing out the bed. ‘And what’s this about using hair gel? You becoming a goondah now?’

  ‘Doesn’t she look different!’ Dalbir said.

  His mother said that of course she looked different. She was carrying a child inside her.

  Tochi thought Dalbir meant something else, though, something to do with not looking like a girl any more. Perhaps that was why for the first time ever he’d heard her using his name, to his face.

  Outside, a couple of kids were arguing with a passing dhol-player, pestering him for a go on his drum, and somewhere a man was selling hot peanuts and chai.

  ‘It’s nice to be home,’ Palvinder said, a hand on her belly. She gestured for Dalbir to come sit beside her, saying how tall he’d grown and that she’d heard he was back at school now. No time even to call his old sister?

  ‘I’m a busy man,’ he said.

  She laughed and held his face. ‘Have you started shaving?’

  Their mother came back and shooed the boys out. She wanted to speak to her daughter in private.

  All month Tochi stopped off by the buffalo on his way home because his mother insisted Palvinder have fresh milk every night. She refused to reheat what was left from the dawnlight milking Dalbir completed before school. One evening, during Navratri, as Tochi drove back with the milk, his mother met him halfway. The baby was coming, she said calmly, so he needed to go find Prakash Kaur from the next village and bring her here. Tochi passed her the bucket of milk and turned his auto around.

  At the gate to the neighbouring village, two women stood chatting, baskets of winter spinach on their heads. Tochi asked if Prakash Bibi was at home. They said she wasn’t, that she’d been doing seva at the city gurdwara all week. Tochi frowned. He’d been careful all day, after the havoc of last year, and didn’t want to return to the city now, with the night looming.

  ‘Is there any other midwife?’

  They looked at each other and shook their heads.

  As he raced off he heard them shouting their blessings for the newborn, perhaps mistaking him for the father.

  The city roads were still quiet, too quiet for Navratri. Thankfully, Tochi found Prakash Bibi in the gurdwara canteen, scraping huge steel vats with wire wool. The sleeves of her widow-white kameez were rolled back into the fat of her elbows. When she saw Tochi she seemed to understand immediately and from a knot in the end of her chunni handed him a list of items to fetch from the Vishwanath Medicine Store.

  ‘It’s near the bus station. Come back here with it all and we’ll bless it before we go.’ She asked him if he needed money. He’d already turned for the door.

  He followed the river, past the ghats, where vendors were clearing away their unsold shoes and handbags. Two beggar kids came dancing through the night, excitedly shouting, ‘Khoon kharaba! Khoon kharaba!’ Tochi turned up Tanners’ Alley, engulfed in its sudden dark. The ground was uneven, forcing him to slow-swerve around the dust heaps. A couple of men were slumped against the exit. He thought they were drunks, then noticed one of them clutching his head, blood running down his wrists. There were voices, too, chanting, coming from the centre of the city, near the maidaan. He’d thought this might happen and reversed and went the long way round to the medicine store. But its shutters were down and it didn’t matter how hard Tochi banged, no one opened up. Suddenly, four, six, eight motorbikes roared past, two men on each bike, a third standing at the back. They were whooping, holding aloft makeshift orange flags that cracked in the air. Across the city, fingers of smoke began to rise and spread. He knew of one other large medicine store, near Gandhi Chowk, but when he got to that roundabout some twenty or thirty motorbikes were circling it, revving their engines and pulling wheelies. A crowd watched on. He got nowhere trying to barge through a side gully – it was too narrow, too packed with exhilarated children and anxious adults. He headed back to the chowk, looking for another exit. Then a man ducked into his auto and asked to be taken to the train station.

  ‘Unless they’ve been scared off by these hooligans, too. They make things so difficult, yaar.’

  Tochi asked what had happened and he said it was the damn Maoists. They’d dumped a truckload of Brahmin bodies in the maidaan a few hours ago, all wrapped in an orange sheet painted Happy Day of the Pure Anniversary. But this was only what he’d heard. None of it might be true. The cheers and calls for revenge amplified, and more rioters appeared from the direction of the maidaan, displaying what looked like green petrol canisters.

  ‘The poor chamaars are going to get it tonight,’ the man said, tutting, and then perhaps he noticed Tochi’s name on the licence card because he held Tochi’s shoulder and told him to go home and look after his family. ‘I’ll walk. You go. Go now and I pray may God be with you.’

  Villages burned as he sped out along the city road. Orange flames were thrown up everywhere and great flakes of ash drifted against the windscreen. Parents were dragging their children into the fields. He braked at an abandoned PCO and called Babuji, who said the world was going crazy and that he was on his way in the Contessa. If Tochi got there before him then he was to get his family and come to the big house at once. He’d left the rear gate open for them. Tochi hurried back into the auto and soon saw that his own village was on fire. He drove harder – ‘No, no,’ he kept muttering – and forced his way through the rush at the gate. He found Dalbir shaking at the end of the lane, beside their father in his wheelchair. Tochi told them to get in, then ran up and ducked inside the house. His mother was in the new room padding a wet poultice against Palvinder’s brow.

  ‘What’s happening? What’s this shor-tamasha?’ his mother asked.

  He said they had to go. They rolled Palvinder onto her side and put their shoulders beneath each armpit and hefted her up. They walked like that up the lane, Palvinder counting her breaths and both arms circled low around her huge belly. She sat in the back with her parents while Dalbir jumped in the front, their father’s wheelchair folded on his lap.

  Tochi kept the headlights off. All around him huts were ablaze, and from within the burning shacks came screams. He stopped at the fountain, inside which a woman lay dead – she must have tried to douse the flames by rolling in the sand. Beyond her more orange-clad rioters were charging through the arch, banging their canisters together. And amongst it all was Babuji’s silver Contessa, honking, stuck in the crush. Tochi turned round and drove past Kishen’s and past their lane and made for the fields, urging the auto up onto the long dirt road. The track was full of half-submerged rocks and each sharp bump had Palvinder calling out for her mother.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Tochi’s father asked.

  He didn’t reply. He knew the track would eventually lead them to the river but from there he didn’t know what they would do or where they would go. Branches whipped across the roof. He heard his sister say she was scared and his mother said not to be, that it was all going to be fine. He ripped his licence card from the dashboard and threw it outside. Then he looked at his brother: Dalbir was staring straight ahead, his hands gripping the wheelchair.

  ‘Bhaji?’ Dalbir pointed. There were buffalo, tethered to the trees. And people standing around. Motorbikes, too, and a jeep. Tochi slowed right d
own. If he turned round he wouldn’t be able to outrace them.

  ‘Just say God’s name and all will be well,’ Tochi’s mother said.

  The men were calling to him, brazen and gesturing with their bottles. He shunted the auto on until they were ten or so metres away. ‘Kapoor,’ he whispered, and left the engine wheezing as he stepped outside. They were six or seven in number, smoking and drinking. Orange sashes were belted through their jeans and they’d dressed the buffalo in big floppy orange bow ties which gave the whole scene a grotesquely comic edge. One of them slid down the bonnet of his jeep and walked with expansive steps out from under the trees. Looped around his wrist, a small stereo crackled jazzily. A Bollywood song: tu cbeez badi bai mast mast . . . He asked Tochi where he thought he was going.

  ‘Doing my job. Getting our people away from the dirt.’

  The man – the leader – nodded and said that was good, very good. Then he jutted his chin at one of his men who now walked past Tochi and towards the auto.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Tarlochan.’

  The leader waited.

  ‘Kapoor.’

  The man at the auto called out, ‘Arré, she’s having a baby.’

  ‘What’s his licence card say?’ the leader said, still looking only at Tochi.

  But he said he couldn’t find it. ‘It’s not here.’

  ‘Stay here,’ he said to Tochi and went to the auto. Tochi followed behind anyway.

  The leader peered in, his forearms on the roof, the stereo dangling its song. Yeb pyar bada bai sakbt sakbt . . . ‘Is this your husband, sister?’

  Palvinder was crying into her mother’s neck.

  ‘Are you going to the hospital?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Let us go,’ Tochi’s father said.

  The leader walked round to Dalbir. ‘What’s your name, chotu?’

  ‘Dalbir Kapoor,’ he said, no hesitation.

  The leader sighed. ‘I better let you go, then.’ He gave Dalbir the stereo, a gift for being brave, then with that long careful walk of his rejoined the others.

  Tochi waited, then edged back into the auto. He spoke quietly, clearly. ‘When we get around that bend, I want you all to get out and run into the trees.’ Dalbir nodded. In the mirror he could see his sister and mother, foreheads pressed together, praying.

  ‘Arré, aaja,’ the leader called. ‘She’s having a baby!’ Someone laughed from further back in the trees. Someone else looked down and nodded.

  Tochi clicked the auto into gear and inched forward. As they passed the motorbikes and orange-bow-tied buffalo, the leader salaamed and wished them well. Tochi tracked them in the mirror, shrinking, until he rounded the wooded curve and they slid out of view. He slowed, but didn’t stop. ‘Go.’

  Dalbir vaulted out, then ran round and prised his sister away from their mother. He tried to pull his mother out too, but she said she couldn’t leave their father behind.

  Tochi looked left, at his brother tunnelling into the night, leading his sister by the hand. He applied his foot to the pedal and pressed, and the harder he pressed the more the auto juddered over the rocks. Already he could see their headlights in his mirror. Star-shaped bulbs easily closing in. He thought it was the jeep, but then the headlights split off into motorbikes and came up on either side of him. They were dousing the auto, inside and out. His mother screamed and shouted for them to in God’s name show some mercy. Tochi swerved towards one of the bikes, but the rider laughed and dodged out of the way. A rag was lit and thrown and there was a sudden whooshing upthrust of flame and noise. Tochi stopped and as he tried to pull his parents out, arms snaked around his waist, his neck and legs, and hauled him back. The smell of the fumes stunned him. They held him down, his cheek pressed hard into the road. He felt their knees all over him and could hear something being unscrewed and then the thick glug and plash of petrol pouring onto his back. He fought to breathe, arching his neck as if sucking up the pale moonlight. In front of him the crops flickered in fiery shadows and all around he could hear the blister and the pop and two voices becoming one, and a third, perhaps his own, joining them.

  To lift the basket of bricks onto his head he had to squat so deeply that his knees flared out and his arse touched the ground. He tottered the length of the factory and stacked the bricks in the vault of the lorry in piles two bricks wide, alternating longways and crossways. On his first day he’d been told that would stop them toppling over. His first day – when the scars had still stung. He returned indoors, the shallow basket lolling by his side, and rejoined the queue at the brick mound.

  At midnight the green bulb flashed and the conveyor belt groaned to a stop. The production team began to take off their gloves and dust masks, heading home. He figured there were still a good forty baskets left: he’d become expert at judging how many trips to the lorry remained after the belt had closed. He organized the bricks into his basket and raised it towards his head. But his arms were trembling and then his right hand collapsed and it took two men to rush up and steady the thing.

  ‘Arré, go home, yaar,’ one of them said. ‘Don’t kill yourself in your last week.’

  He walked out, the brick dust ticklish in his hair, all over his face and clothes. He used to wonder what he might look like, a grey ghost stepping through the night. He passed the marble palace, built for some dead English queen, and stopped outside a hole in the wall for his one-rupee cup of mishty doi. It had been a fellow worker’s tip: a cup of this sweet yoghurt after work and he wouldn’t be coughing up dust through the night. He handed the empty clay cup back to the kid-vendor and crossed the tramlines and into the alley. He stuck to the middle of the dark lane, between cheap guest houses on one side and sleeping rickshaw drivers on the other. Past the Nepalese cafe was a large door of solid metal, a square hatch cut into it. He slid aside the bolt and bent through the hatch, entering a small, weedy courtyard. In one corner was a black arrangement of rubber tyres. He hooked one of these over his shoulder and made his way up the open stairwell at the rear of the yard. He could hear people talking behind the doors. Children, grandparents. A television. On the roof everyone was asleep already. The fire was out. He took the knife from his back pocket and drove it into the tyre, tearing along the central seam, wheeling the tyre round with his free hand. He cut the rubber into strips and made a pyramid of them to his left, and then he found some matches in the pocket of one of the men asleep, and on his third attempt the rubber caught and he got a little corner fire going. His stomach was contracting emptily, but he was tired enough that it didn’t matter.

  He waited on the factory floor outside the shift manager’s office. The spinners were on full tilt that evening, filling the air with their grinding. The door opened and Mr Rao came out and said he was sorry to have kept Tochi waiting but Chief Manager Sahib had rung out of the blue, desperate to get his opinion on a most delicate work matter. ‘Great changes afoot. But I have probably said too much already!’ Tochi handed in his folded-up overall, and Mr Rao gave Tochi his weekly wad of notes, saying he couldn’t believe the time had flown by so quickly. Was he going back to his village? In Orissa, was it?

  ‘Bihar, sahib.’

  ‘Exactly.’ The phone rang inside. ‘Excuse me. That’s probably him again.’

  Tochi picked up his sack of clothes, said a few goodbyes, and walked out. The gurdwara was only a short distance through the city gardens and there he bathed and ate. Then he waited outside the prayer hall. Inside, a turbaned old man was sitting behind the palki, reading from the book. He ended the verse with a long waheguru and gestured for Tochi to follow him through a side room and to a tall cupboard with a Chinese dragon print on its black lacquer. The old granthi turned the key and reached for Tochi’s leather satchel. It contained everything he’d earned.

  ‘Count it,’ the granthi said.

  ‘Thank you, Baba.’

  ‘Is your bus tomorrow?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  The old man nodded. ‘
I’ve never seen you once pray. Not once have you entered the darbar sahib.’

  Tochi touched the man’s feet and begged his leave.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve suffered, but you mustn’t blame Him. It’s too easy.’

  Tochi looked to his left, to the rectangle of light in the doorway. He thanked the old man again and walked straight towards it. It had been two years. He was going home.

  The local bus routes must have changed in his time away because he had to get off at the neighbouring village and walk the last two miles home. It was dawn, though stars still showed low in the sky. A white government van, a green cross on its side, stood under his village gate. He remembered it from the days after the massacre, just as he remembered the four bespectacled men and women who, two years on, were still sitting around with their clipboards and pencils. The woman smiled and made an approach, but he walked straight past, down to where Kishen’s store used to be and over the sand-filled fountain. Some kids were playing cricket in his lane and he gave one ten rupees and told him to go ask Babuji if Tochi might come and see him any night this week.

  Inside the house, there was nothing left save for his sister’s red-and-gold chunni, coiled up in a corner. She’d left it behind in the rush to get out and he’d not felt able to touch it. Everything else he’d burned. He put down his sack of clothes and his satchel of money and went to the water pump behind the house. He worked the lever with one hand and splashed his face with the other. Then he heard a bolt slide open and a neighbour from the lane opposite brought him an iron bucket and a bar of streaky green soap. The man’s wife stared from her doorway, curious. He filled the bucket, watching the soap sink cloudily to the bottom, then carried it inside. He undressed and squatted and used his cupped hands to pour the water down his back. These days he washed his back again and again – the absence of feeling meant he could never be sure how thorough he’d been.

  He was asleep when the door opened and sunlight invaded. Blinking, he sat up and saw Babuji, walking stick in hand. Tochi said he’d have come to see him, that Babuji needn’t have made the trip.