Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

The jealousy always got Avtar in the gut, though he tried not to let it show. ‘I hope so. God willing.’

‘Nothing to do with God. You just have to go where the money is.’

Avtar’s mother was at the stove, struggling to spark up the hob. Navjoht, his brother, sat on the spongy two-seater, a comic open on his lap.

‘How can we be out of gas so soon?’ his mother said. She tucked the end of her pallu into her waist and blew across the hob, trying the clicker again. It didn’t catch. ‘Beita, can you go buy some before it closes?’

‘I only put some in yesterday,’ Avtar said.

He stepped over the urine bucket with its large plastic lid and twisted the gas pipe further into the stove valve. It slipped loose again so he lifted the stove a metre to the right, closer to the gas cylinder. Then the flame caught.

‘It’s too far from the window,’ his mother said. ‘The room will be full of smoke.’

‘I can move it by the sofa.’

‘I’m busy,’ Navjoht said, pre-emptively.

Their mother said she needed the rice so Navjoht stood, pen clamped in his mouth, and lifted the brown sofa cushion and took up the small sack and passed it across.

Avtar gathered his pillow and rug from on top of the sofa and moved through the shower curtain they used to screen the main room from the balcony. He rolled out the padded rug, arranged the pillow, and lay with both knees pitched up to the sky, for the balcony was too short for him to lie at full stretch. Hands behind his head, he closed his arms around his ears so all he could see was the blue above, all else in the world blocked out. He stared hard at the sky until the familiar alchemy occurred and it felt as if the blue was lifting him away. He smiled and closed his eyes.

When his father arrived, twilight had fallen and the bulb on the wall cast the balcony in bronze. Avtar hadn’t meant to fall asleep and turned on his side, drawing his knees to his chest. The shower curtain was thin enough to see through and Navjoht was clearing away his books so their father could take the sofa. The old man told the boy to carry on working but Navjoht said he’d ‘continue’ in their bedroom. Probably, on hearing their father, Navjoht had switched the comics for his schoolbooks.

‘Another English word?’ their father said, lowering into the cushions. He kept his hands on his knees and rested his back. ‘Smells delicious, Shanti,’ he managed, still breathing hard from the climb up.

He was as white-haired and aged as his wife was youthful. Smells delicious. The flat looks nice. That colour suits you. Sometimes Avtar thought that each compliment contained an implicit apology for the twenty-year difference in their ages.

Later, after the small collapsible table had been folded and stowed under the sofa and the dishes washed, and after Avtar had been downstairs and back to empty the urine bucket and use the toilet proper, his parents retired to their room and Navjoht rolled out his sleeping mat with something of a waiter’s flourish. Avtar returned to his own rug on the balcony. Through the rusting white fretwork he stared out at the spread of the city. Above him, the amrood tree dangled its branch and he propped onto his elbow and broke off the fruit. Bitter. Still maybe a month too early. He threw it over the top and into the dark.

When he thought his brother had fallen far enough asleep, Avtar rose to a crouch, then slowly onto the balls of his feet. He watched him breathing, curled up in a moonbeam, and took one step into the room. When he let go of the curtain behind him, the dark shadow closed across Navjoht like a cupboard shutting. He stepped over him and toed the urine bucket to one side so he could get at the door. Then he retracted the lock with infinitesimal slowness and slid into the mottled light of the corridor and down the thirteen flights of concrete steps and out into the night.

He waited in the dead-end alley beside the bankrupt Bismillah cement factory. Shards of slate littered the ground. He heard voices, low tearful singing, and a band of semi-naked pilgrims filed past with wispy-haired chests, ribcages pressing out. They played their tiny cymbals and chimtas and did not once look towards Avtar in the alley, as if they’d been dismissed from the temple in howling disgrace. Above, smog dimmed the starscape, the pale-grey heights punctured only by the red dot of a plane blinking itself away.

She arrived, nervous and beautiful. Her frock, red-blue with elasticated ribbing beneath her breasts, showed her collarbones, flaring out. Around her throat she’d tied a silk scarf. She wore these kinds of dresses more often these days. He wasn’t sure how he felt about them but he didn’t comment. She hung by his side until he circled an arm around her waist. She stalled and looked over her shoulder and then yielded.

A year ago he could never have thought of himself as the person he was now, someone consumed with this girl and her body. He’d been aware of girls, for sure, but he’d never associated with them. His friend circle both at school and in the one year of college he’d completed had only ever consisted of boys: like-minded, serious boys, into cricket and their studies. Not the type who spoke much about girls, let alone sex; sex, as far as Avtar was concerned, was not something boys from respectable families got themselves involved in. Respectable. That was the word Avtar had used — or its formal urdu variant ‘shareef’ — when she’d stopped him in the college grounds one day.

‘I’ve not seen you in class,’ she’d said, as if they were already good chums.

He’d recognized her. Lakhpreet Sanghera, from his combined studies class, the only class open to everyone. Her family had lived for a short while in the same block of flats as his, but in the larger ground-floor apartments that had their own bathrooms. She was maybe three years younger than him.

‘I’ve left. I came to pick up my leaver’s certificate.’ He indicated the cardboard folder in his hand. ‘You need it to get the coupons.’ He doubted she knew which coupons he meant. She didn’t look like the type of girl whose family needed state help. Wasn’t her father something in government?

‘Oh. That’s a shame. I liked looking at you in class.’

He felt his face stiffen, his embarrassment fuelling a sudden anger towards her. ‘Miss, I’m from a shareef family. Please don’t trouble me again.’

Later that evening, lying on his balcony, he wished he’d not been so rude. He thought of her large black eyes and her glossy lips and cinched turquoise tunic. He thought he’d lost her, but the very next day the PCO man said he had a phone call.

‘I never said you weren’t shareef.’

‘I’m sorry. . Miss,’ he added, regretting it even as the word left his mouth. She laughed.

One month later they had sex in the bell tower of the cement factory. He held her tight against him, rubbing her bottom, her thighs, her long brown back. He loved how hot and flushed her skin felt against his, how perfectly her nipples pressed into his mouth. His own desire surprised him, but her need came as a shock, and when he lay on his back, spent, she moved on top, craving it once more.

That was months ago, and now they jumped the gate round the back of the factory and snuck up the stairs. He cleared some space among the discarded timber and spread his jacket on the ground. Behind them the tower’s big iron bell hung godly and silent. In front, a few miles away, the Golden Temple shone, a tiny intimate lantern. It was a cool September night.

He said nothing when she told him her father had won the promotion and they were leaving next month. She leaned forward and locked arms around her knees, each hand holding the other hand’s wrist. Her hair screened her face from him.