Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

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.

The old man gave a little dismissive shake of his stick. ‘How was Calcutta? Everything OK in the factory? They treated you well?’

Tochi said they had.

‘And the hotel was happy to have you? No trouble?’

‘None,’ Tochi lied.

‘Excellent. So now you’ve got that out of your system, there’s plenty of work here to do. When can you start?’

Tochi said nothing.

‘Because I’ve been thinking and it’d be good to try and get three lots out this year.’

‘Babuji, about what we talked about before I left?’

The old man grimaced, revealing perfect dentures. ‘I was hoping you would have changed your mind.’

‘Did you find out?’

‘I found out that it’s very expensive.’

‘I think I’ve earned enough.’

‘So what? Do you plan to live over there in hiding forever?’

‘I will come back. I’ll come back a rich man who can choose his own life.’

Babuji told him that, yes, he had found a man in Patna who did this kind of thing regularly. His fee was heavy — too heavy, as far as Babuji was concerned — but he said he could get you anywhere. Europe, England, Canada, America. Guaranteed.

‘But you have no idea how hard it will be. Here you have a job, food, somewhere to sleep. You’ll be sleeping on the streets over there. It won’t be all playing cricket in their parks.’

‘Where can I find this man?’

Babuji banged his stick. ‘You are not thinking properly!’

Tochi stayed silent for a while, then repeated his question.

Shivroop Skytravel: a small glass-fronted building with a life-size cut-out of an air stewardess in the doorway. Tochi pushed inside, into the freeze of the air conditioning. A dark woman, a perfect strip of vermilion in her parting, looked up from behind her desk. She asked if she could help. She didn’t smile.

‘I’m here to see Mr Thipureddy.’

‘What is it in connection with?’

‘I’m here to see him about flights abroad.’

She sighed, seeming to understand, and leaned heavily to one side, perhaps pressing a button. Several minutes passed before a man stepped through the curtain at the back of the office. He was short, even darker than the woman and with a jumped-up little moustache whose tips pointed to God. The woman said something in Tamil and then the man clicked his fingers and told Tochi to come upstairs.

An hour later and Tochi was back on the street, his money-satchel lighter. Two weeks, the man had said. He’d called someone in Delhi and said that Tochi could be on a flight to Turkey in exactly two weeks. After that he’d be trucked as far as Paris, which was in France, and from there Tochi would be on his own. Did he understand?

‘Yes,’ Tochi said.

‘Of course, I’ll come with you as far as Delhi. Part of the service.’ And then Mr Thipureddy took out some forms from his little Tamil drawer and snatched up the pen leaking in his shirt pocket. There was a map on the wall behind him.

‘Where is France on there?’ Tochi asked.

‘Hm?’ Mr Thipureddy twisted round. ‘Oh, no. France is in Europe. That is South India. I am from — ’ he reached back and jabbed his pen into the map — ‘there. Kanyakumari. The southernmost tip of India. The end of the country.’

Tochi nodded.

‘It is the only point in the world where three oceans meet. So you see it was in my blood to help people straddle the seas.’ He gave a little laugh. It sounded like something he said often. ‘Anyway. I expect you will be wanting to make payment.’

Mr Thipureddy met him twice more in the next ten days to go over what he called Tochi’s itinerary, and the night before departure he confirmed by phone what time they were to meet at Patna Junction. Tochi switched off his mobile — Babuji’s leaving gift — and sat on the plastic suitcase he’d bought that afternoon. There was nothing to do now but wait. He took out a tennis ball and bounced it against the ground and wall opposite, watching its yellow sheen glimmer and die as it ricocheted through the dark. He thought again of that place called Kanyakumari. The place of ends and oceans. It seemed amazing to him that there could be an end to India, one you could point to and identify and work towards. That things needn’t go on as they are forever.

Later that night, Susheel came to say goodbye. He gripped the keys to his motorbike in his fist and said he’d heard bhaji was back. That he was leaving again, this too he’d heard. Tochi told him it was true.

‘When do you go?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Susheel nodded, looked down, looked up. He gave a nervous smile. ‘Papa has arranged for my wedding next month. I thought you should know.’

‘I’d heard,’ Tochi said.

‘Oh.’

The breeze picked up, disturbing the silence.

‘I have to wake up early tomo—’ Tochi began.

‘Why did they find her in the trees?’

He moved a hand down his face. ‘Because I told them to run away. Both of them.’

‘All three of them,’ Susheel corrected.

‘All three of them,’ Tochi repeated, barely moving his lips.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know. Europe.’

Susheel looked to the lane beyond the open doorway. ‘Away from here. Good.’

Tochi didn’t know what that ‘good’ really meant.

‘How did you earn enough?’

‘I worked.’ He didn’t mention the money Babuji had given on his parents’ death — a pseudo life-insurance payout — or what he’d made from selling the rental contract on the land. Even with all that, he’d only just enough to cover all of Mr Thipureddy’s costs.

‘My papa’s been trying for fifteen years and still can’t afford to go.’

‘I guess I was born lucky,’ Tochi said.

Susheel smiled, wry, and extended his hand. ‘Papa asked me to invite you to our house. But it seems we were too late.’

Tochi shook his hand. ‘Good luck.’

‘Good luck.’

Tochi heard the motorbike being kick-started at the end of the lane, and then the sound of the engine withdrawing. He’d been dispatched to ask if he could join Tochi, or if Tochi would send for him, or make some provision for him once he was safely fixed up abroad. Susheel would’ve known that Tochi understood this. But the boy hadn’t asked, for whatever reason. And no doubt he’d go back home and tell his father that Palvinder’s brother hadn’t been in and the door had been locked and that he’d waited as long as he could. And the father would sit there swirling the dirty ice cubes in his whisky, wondering how much to believe his son.