Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘Thank you,’ Tochi said, standing.

‘It’s these elections,’ the young man said. ‘People are scared to hire us. The Sena logh have scared them.’

In the western corner of the bazaar, he found the post office, between a liquor store and an open-air stall selling electric fans. There was no door, only a rusting metal shutter rolled up and held in place with a wooden pole wedged at each end. Inside, he couldn’t see anything of the walls: they were hidden behind the immense rows of shelving that gave slightly under the weight of all those paper files. The postmaster sat at his table, writing into a blue ledger. With one hand he held his hair off his face. His cuffs were checked neatly back, revealing a silver bracelet on one wrist and a gold wedding thread around the other. Tochi waited to be noticed. The postmaster looked up, raised his eyebrows and kept them there.

‘I’m here to register, sahib. For work.’

‘Six months,’ the postmaster said and bent back down to his book.

‘I don’t mind what the work is, sahib. Farm work would be best, but I don’t mind as long as it’s work.’

‘Six months.’ He didn’t even look up.

Tochi took out from his back pocket a twenty-rupee note. ‘It’s all I have, sahib.’

When the man didn’t reply, Tochi returned the note to his pocket and made to go.

‘You don’t have a family?’ said the man.

‘I have a father, a mother, a sister and a brother.’

‘Your father doesn’t work?’

‘He has no arms.’

The man clucked his tongue. ‘There’s not much work for you people in this district. The elections, you know.’

‘Thank you for your time.’

He closed his ledger with a dusty thud and reopened it at the first page. ‘Three months. There’s work — farm work — in Danapur in three months. Shall I put your name down?’

‘Do you think they might give me an advance on my wages, sahib?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Then you should not put my name down. I need money now.’

‘Get an auto. Lots of business. Especially with the rains coming.’

‘I can’t afford one.’

‘Since when has that stopped anyone?’ And with that he stretched behind for a file, then sat up straight again, the front chair legs banging the stone floor. Clearly, Tochi was to leave now: he’d taken up enough of his time. He wound back through the bazaar and to the main road. Soon he could see buses up ahead, their fuzzy red lights pitching through the slow dark. He walked three or four miles, maybe, past a newly built hotel and several others not yet finished. Then he was weaving through the city herds of cars and lorries, crossing the chowk to get to the mandi. He stopped outside the market. All the shutters were pulled greyly down: he’d find no auto drivers here. He made for Patna Junction, hands pushed deep inside his pockets and arms rod-straight, shoulders hitched up to his neck. There were no lights here, just the muted silver of the moon trailing the alleys.

He kept his head low, not looking at the men stalking the night for drink and women. Rounding a corner too quickly, he felt his stomach dip and his left side sink warmly down. A drain. He could feel his sandal dredging off. He fetched his toes together and yanked his leg out of the sewage. It emerged in foul sludge and without its sandal. He rolled his sleeves to his shoulders and moved onto his knees, feeling his hand carve its way through the black waste. He closed his eyes and constricted his nostrils, lowering his shoulder to deepen his reach. He couldn’t find it. His arm was dripping great cones of black filth like some diseased and shedding creature. He wiped off as much of it as he could and carried on up the lane, limping with his heavy leg and one sandal. He knew he stank — even the women on the balconies made chi-chi noises.

In time he took off his other sandal and left it at the side of the road. The ground was warm underfoot. Not far from the train station he stopped outside a theka, a liquor store. The owner had a yellow towel slung around his neck, each end held in his fist as if he was a boxer’s mate. He stood there staring out at the night and at Tochi as if all his life he’d been waiting for Tochi to pass. Tochi asked if he might clean himself up. He was searching for a job, he said, and didn’t think he stood much chance looking like this. The man jerked his head to the side and said there was a tap round the back. Soap too.

‘Thank you,’ and Tochi followed the wall down, twisting side on to slip between two giant pipes that climbed into the darkness. He had to grope to find the tap and after maybe a minute or two water started coughing out. He washed his arm as best he could and removed his trousers and scrubbed them roughly. When he put them back on, the stiff blackness remained, and his arm still gave off a thin smell of rotting sewage. He closed the tap and went round to thank the owner.

‘Where are you going?’ the man asked.

‘I’m looking for work.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Rickshaw work.’

The man looked doubtful. ‘You can afford one?’

Tochi thanked him again and turned to go.

‘If you want to make money quick, lots of boys are taking an operation. We could do a deal.’

The man seemed to smile with only one half of his face, which frightened Tochi a little, and he apologized and said he really had to go.

He heard a coal train shrieking to its stop on the other side of a building up ahead. He rounded the building — a cinema — then crossed the rail lines and climbed. The auto drivers were all outside the station, most of them asleep in their taxis while they waited on the morning crowd. One driver stood with his back to Tochi, singing.

‘Bhaiya, can I ask for your help?’

The man turned round, in no hurry. He was shorter than Tochi, and his small moon of a face and thin legs seemed a wrong fit for the rest of his body, as if all the fat in him had deposited itself in a wide belt around his waist. His hair was slicked back. ‘Kya?’

‘I’d like to speak to someone who will sell me an auto.’

The man looked Tochi up and down, at his ruined clothes. ‘Autos don’t come cheap. Who did you rob?’

‘Who do I speak to?’

The man made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘No more licences in the city. Find some other work.’

‘Just tell me who I need to speak to.’

‘You need to speak to me, and I’ve told you already.’

Tochi remained where he was, looking at the man. ‘Maybe I should ask someone else.’

The man chuckled and turned his head to the side. ‘All this government support must be going to their heads. Now they want to work with us, too.’

From the autos came a couple of sleepy, smoky laughs.

He spat at the ground, right between Tochi’s feet, and stood there smirking, arms crossed over his chest as if waiting for Tochi’s next move. Relenting, Tochi returned to the station platform and was about to cross the tracks when a voice called him back. A body pieced itself together through the dark, chest uncovered, an orange lunghi twisted expertly around waist and thighs. The man asked if Tochi was the one looking for an auto, because he had one for sale, or at least his brother did.

‘Where is it?’ Tochi asked.

‘You know the clock tower? By the maidaan? Meet me there in the morning,’ and before Tochi could ask anything else the man turned and hastened up the platform.

Away from the station, he breathed in a clear, great draught of air, looked up and asked God to please let this chance be real.

He checked under each stairwell he passed for a place to lie down, but they were all full, and soon he realized he was near the river. He crossed the flyover, spookily quiet at this hour, and scrambled on down. The water looked seductive, its dips aglow with moonlight. Off to his left was the simple outline of the long red bridge. At the river’s edge, he took off his trousers and shirt and washed them in the water, then returned to the wall in his wet clothes. There were already people bedded down for the night, bodies lying low against the bricks, sheltered from the wind above. He found a space further along and lay on his side, facing the river. It didn’t take long for his eyes to feel heavy, and the last thing he registered was the fat honk of a tugboat gliding darkly by.