Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

Born back home, clearly. Probably came over to be married. ‘Ji. In the evenings. Cleaning, shelf-stacking, I can do anything.’

She thought a moment. ‘I’m guessing you’re illegal.’

Tochi nodded.

‘Pind kerah?’

‘Mojoram.’ It was the name of the Panjabi village he’d worked in. She asked him his name and again without hesitating he said, lied: ‘Tarlochan Sandhu.’

‘Jat, then?’

This time he paused. ‘Ji.’

She said her husband was in India for a few weeks but they had been looking for someone. Especially now they were both getting on a bit. It was just so hard to find someone honest, you know? You couldn’t trust a gori and her sons weren’t interested. Tell them to stand in the shop for even an hour and you’d think they’d been asked to reverse the cosmos.

Tarlochan asked if that meant he had a job.

The landlord knocked on the first working day of every month. A compact forty-something, he had neat, short popcorn-coloured hair and his long nose made his eyes seem deeper-set than they probably were. He was called Mr Greatrix and he always wore the same tie.

Narinder handed him the rent, which he took with a resigned sigh and counted out very slowly.

‘This is all very cumbersome,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I have to come here to collect it and then I have to go to the bank. It’s all very. . cumbersome.’

Narinder didn’t know what to say. She wished he’d turn round and go down the stairs and leave.

‘Do you not have a bank account?’

‘Sorry.’

‘What about your husband?’

‘I’ll ask him.’

‘Don’t you know?’

She said nothing.

‘I’m going to have to up your rent.’

‘Pardon?’

‘For the costs I incur in coming here.’

Narinder looked to the wall over the man’s shoulder, at the cracks in the plaster, like branches. ‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘You what?’

‘I don’t think you’re doing the right thing.’

He nearly laughed. ‘I rather think that’s for me to decide.’

‘Imagine it’s not me standing here. Imagine it’s your sister or your mother. Would you want them to be treated like this?’

‘But you’re not, are you? Either my sister or my mother.’ Adding, muttering, ‘Thank the good Lord.’

‘But if I was. How would you feel if someone was trying to use them in this way?’

He pressed the silver top of his pen, so the nib disappeared. ‘I think we’re going off point.’

‘I think you have to be fair, Mr Greatrix. To treat people as kindly as you’d want those closest to you to be treated. I might be your tenant but I’m also your friend and neighbour.’

Someone once said to her that when she spoke she made people feel naked against the world.

‘Maybe we can discuss this another time,’ he said, blushing as he made his exit.

She was woken by a rattling sound, as though someone was trying to trip the lock. Momentarily, she thought Mr Greatrix was back. She sat up. Her heart was thumping. The clock-radio blinked 12:00. The light had cut out, or had been cut out. She told herself not to get like this, not to let fear take her over. She held the kandha at the hollow of her throat and listened for Him, and something like the stroke of a wing disturbed the air beside her face. She moved to the bedroom door — heel to toe, heel to toe — and opened it. She must have forgotten to draw the curtains because the main room was bathed in a geometry of light, shapely blocks of blue that made a cityscape on the floor and walls. There it was again, the rattling. She found the torch-pen she’d bought the previous week and with a rolling pin in her other hand opened the apartment door. In the dark the stairs looked even narrower, longer. It was only the wind in the letter box. Sighing, a little irritated with herself, she took a pink token from the tin under the sink and kept one hand to the wall as she went down to the meter. When she came back, she couldn’t sleep, so drew out from under the mattress her letter, the one she’d a few nights ago started drafting to her father. She wanted to write a letter to her family every month. This was her second. She’d gone back home to Croydon after the visa marriage, not telling anyone. The lawyers had said it was important she had a fixed address, at least until her interview, until the visa was granted. The interview, mercifully, was short. As instructed, she said she’d met Randeep four years ago, on one of her yearly visits to India, and that they’d fallen in love and decided to get married. She had photos and witness testaments to support it. The interviewer — a kind-looking man, close to retirement — smiled and said it all looked in order and that he was happy to support her application. Soon, she received a call from the Indian lawyer confirming that Delhi had granted the visa, and that Randeep and his family were extremely grateful, that they said it was as if she’d been delivered to them from God. Narinder could expect her first payment by the end of the month.

One month after that, mere weeks before her real wedding to a man called Karamjeet, Narinder left home. She wrote the most difficult letter of her life and secured it with a hairclip to the front of her gutka, and placed this on her dressing table. She’d not said anything about Randeep — they’d only notify the police and put an end to it all — she’d only said that she had her reasons for not being able to go through with the wedding right now but that she’d be back in one year and hoped with enough time they’d be able to forgive her. At four in the morning, an hour before her father woke for his morning prayers, Narinder carried her suitcase down the stairs and stepped outside, where a taxi was waiting to take her to the station.

Now, she attached a stamp and sealed up the envelope. Like last month’s letter, this one simply communicated that she was fine, that she’d be back by the end of the year and that they weren’t to worry. She folded out her map across the bed — she’d take a train somewhere tomorrow and post it from there.

She never attended the gurdwara on Sundays, always fearful of finding herself in the middle of a wedding, face to face with an overpowering aunty who knew her family. But most other evenings she took the bus from the bottom of her hill and would arrive in plenty of time to hear the evening’s rehraas sahib. Unlike the gurdwaras she loved in Croydon and Ilford and Southall, the Sheffield one wasn’t domed and the windows had no balconies cut with gentle fretwork. It was a plain brick building with five uneven stone steps leading to a black door and gold knocker. It could have been someone’s house and, once, probably was. To the left of the door a large blue plaque was inscribed with the kandha and next to that a nishaan sahib waved its little orange flag. After prayers, she’d repair to the canteen kitchen, and more often than not to the giant concrete sinks where she’d spend the rest of the evening hosing down the dirty dishes passed her way.

One evening, she was doing just that when Randeep saw her and halted. Avtar was with him and they’d finished eating and been on their way to hand in their thalis. They didn’t come to the gurdwara often but sometimes, like tonight, because there wasn’t a milk run to do and because Vinny had dropped them off early, they’d put their kurta-tunics on over their jeans and bussed it up.

‘What is it?’ Avtar asked.

‘Nothing. Here. Take mine. I need the toilet.’

‘Take your own.’

‘Please,’ he pleaded. ‘She’ll see me.’

Avtar looked. It was mostly old women. There was only one who was young, scrubbing hard at the insides of some steel glasses. ‘Is that our Narinderji? She does seva here?’