Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘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.