Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘Make sure you give it all to your father, acha? It’s my neck on the line if you don’t.’

‘Of course. What else am I going to do with it?’

No more was mentioned about the party, but after work on the appointed day Harbhajan arrived at the flat, bending to touch Avtar’s mother’s feet.

‘Ah, what a good boy. Aaja — come in.’

‘Next time, aunty. We’re late.’ Avtar drew the shower curtain aside and was coming through from the balcony as Harbhajan said, lied, ‘It’s my birthday. We thought we’d go for a burger-cola. Is that OK?’

They drove straight out of the city on Harbhajan’s new motorbike. The engine was fierce and Avtar gripped the metal handle behind him, feeling the warm air sear past, taking determined hold of his hair. For a minute he feared they were heading into Pakistan, but Harbhajan swerved east at the roundabout.

‘Where are we going?’ Avtar called.

‘You’ll see!’

He’d expected him to turn off the GT Road at Kapurthala — Harbhajan had been seeing a girl there — but he carried straight on and some ninety minutes after leaving Avtar’s flat they slowed into the flashy nightlife of Jalandhar. Toes on the ground, Harbhajan nosed the bike through the crowds and parked it among others at a leaning rack. Above them, Rainak Bazaar spun in neon revolutions, the k dimmed out.

Avtar stalled Harbhajan with a hand to the shoulder. ‘What’s the place called?’

‘1771.’

‘Blue?’

Harbhajan grinned and carried on.

The lane seemed to strip on for miles. Then, without warning, Harbhajan stopped and said he thought he’d missed it. He turned on his heel and saw the jeweller’s he’d apparently been looking for.

‘It wasn’t shuttered up last time.’

They snuck along the trickle of an alley down the side of the shop and at the end of this, several wider lanes branched into view. No light seemed to enter them.

‘Do you think it’s this way?’ Harbhajan said.

‘Yaar, I don’t think—’

His friend walked off and, exasperated, Avtar followed.

The window of the bar was black, with 1771 gold-stamped across in a cheap diagonal. The long downstrokes of the 7s morphed into a woman’s fishnetted legs. At the door, a man in a white kurta was talking sweetly into his phone of how glad he was they were getting married soon. Harbhajan clicked his fingers and showed the man some sort of card or ticket which allowed them up the stairs and through double doors with large porthole windows.

At first it seemed that there weren’t many people present — Avtar counted only three women and a man at the bar. The place felt strange and he realized there was no music, only sibilant conversations and smoky laughter, and these he traced to the unlit corners of the room, where women sat with the men who’d picked them up.

The man at the bar slid off his stool and with each step his smile widened and his arms opened out, as if feet and hands and mouth were all connected by some complicated puppetry. His wide-collared orange shirt looked crisp in the dim light, and his eyes were jittery green.

‘Driver sahib! I had a bet you would still come.’ He looked to one of the dark corners of the room, where a pair of slender female calves were closing around a leg wrapped in its tube of denim. ‘Rustom, you owe me. Our turbaned master has, after all, come.’ No response came from that quarter. ‘He’s busy,’ the man laughed.

‘This is my friend Avtar. Avtar, this is Venkatesh.’

Avtar said hi, but Venkatesh just kept smiling at Harbhajan. ‘What would you like to drink, friend? Anything you want. Anything.’

There was a slight rounding out of Harbhajan’s shoulders as he said, ‘You know what I want. Get it me.’

Venkatesh beamed, as if he’d expected to have to work harder than this. ‘As you wish, huzoor. They are all upstairs.’

‘I’ll be ten minutes, yaar,’ Harbhajan said, eyes fixed on a door at the back of the room. ‘Will you wait for me?’

‘What’s upst—?’

Venkatesh said that of course Avtar would wait and, in fact, Sonya would look after him, won’t you, baby? With that, Harbhajan strode for the door, Venkatesh rushing on behind like a little meerkat, and somehow Avtar was left standing in the centre of the floor, alone.

He moved to the end of the bar, away from the girls, and sat with arms folded on the gleaming black of the counter, his legs right-angled around a corner. He looked at his watch and decided to give it twenty minutes. Then he’d go and drag him out. It was drugs, obviously. The stupid idiot had got himself sick on drugs.

Twenty minutes came and went and then a further ten, and now again Avtar checked his watch. Another five, he decided. He sat there tapping his thumbnails together, pinching back the cuticles. One of the girls eased smoothly onto the stool beside him. She placed her glamorous purse carefully on the bar and just as carefully crossed her legs and put both hands on her knees, below where her red skirt stopped. She had big curls and pink lipstick that made her already sullen face look even more so.

‘I’ll have a Mumbai Sling.’

‘I’ve no money.’

‘Why did you come here with no money?’

‘Why did you?’

She unclipped and unzipped her purse and held up a plastic card. ‘What will you have?’

He shook his head.

‘Does my money offend you?’

‘Not your money. How you earn it.’

‘Good. So what will you have? I have orders to look after you.’

He said nothing, then asked, ‘Is Sonya your real name?’

‘Harinderjeet.’

‘A good name. A strong name.’

He could see her face in the bar’s surface, frowning as she returned the card to her purse. ‘Is Sonya not a nice name?’

He felt her leaning in.

‘A sexy name?’

He flinched away. She laughed.

‘Are you a pindu farm boy? Because they’re usually the disgusted ones. Either they rush on their clothes and run out or they stand there telling me how ashamed I make them feel, how if I was their sister they’d definitely beat me. . Strange boys.’

‘If you were my sister I’d feel ashamed, too. But only a coward would hit a woman.’

‘Ah, so you are a pindu.’

‘I’m just an honest and hard-working Indian.’

She sighed, as if bored. ‘You say that as if you’re the only one.’

He looked at his watch, then around the room again. Nothing had changed. ‘Who’s up there?’

She shrugged. ‘Could be anyone. Maybe even your sister.’

He slid off the stool and went round the bar and through the door. A short flight of lavishly carpeted stairs brought him to a second entrance beyond which he could hear the undefined mangle of music and chatter. The guard dozed in his chair so Avtar shouldered through the surprisingly heavy door and into what looked like a slapdash gambling den. There were flimsy card tables covered in threadbare green, and matka stands and shoot-’em-up video games and a tribe of college-looking boys intent on the money machines. He could hear other accents — UK, American — brought here by their desi cousins in a bid to impress. He saw Venkatesh first, slumped against the jukebox, head lolling low. He looked asleep. Avtar shook his shoulder hard, and slowly, as if it were a giant weight, Venkatesh rolled up his head. His eyes had lost their shimmer and as he slewed his head from side to side, gibbering, he looked amused to have found Avtar standing there.

He looked in the toilets, then did another circuit of the room, locating Harbhajan behind one of the leatherette settees, curled up like a baby. He tried waking him, but there was no point, so he hefted him up by the armpits and secured an arm around his waist. The idiot’s topknot swung loosely around his head, coming undone.