Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘Your mamma’s probably glad to have someone to fight,’ Jaytha said one evening. ‘She sounds like a tough woman.’

Randeep said she was, though on reflection he wasn’t sure, and she sounded far from tough the night she rang to tell him that the bastards had won. They’d forced his father out of his job.

‘What will we do?’ she cried.

‘How’s Daddy? What’s he doing?’

‘Nothing. Staring at the wall. He looks broken, beita.’

Randeep put his fist to the wall and pressed his forehead against it. ‘Tell him I love him.’

‘Hain?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll find some more work. There are more shifts I can do.’

‘We can’t survive.’ She was starting to sound hysterical. Randeep imagined her balanced on the lip of the sofa, hair wild, the twins hiding in their bedroom, Lakhpreet trying to hold it all together. ‘Everyone will find out. We’ll have to move. We have no money. Oh, Rabbah, what will we do? What will we do?’

‘I’ll sort it out, Mamma. I’ll work. Listen to me. I’ll work.’

He joined the processing shift, nine p.m. to five a.m. There were four of them and overnight they had to log the day’s customer claim requests and vet them for ‘completedness’. If information was missing they pulled up one of the three standard templates and printed off a letter. They worked in isolation, one in each corner of the room, the only sounds the snicker of keys, the gurgle of the water cooler, the march of the clock. 2.30. 2.35. 2.37. Sometimes Randeep fell asleep into his elbow, only waking when one of his colleagues flicked a rubber band at him. The night sky had paled by the time his shift ended. He collapsed onto his bed for one, maybe two hours before trudging off to morning labs.

‘This is crazy,’ Jaytha said, one month into his exhausting routine. ‘You’re killing yourself. And you’re failing. When was the last time you failed a test?’

‘It was a stupid test, yaar. It didn’t even count.’

But the next one did, and when he failed that too the deputy principal called him into his office. It wasn’t like him, he said. He was usually one of their finer students.

‘We had you written down as a real contender for NIT this year, Master Sanghera.’

‘Sorry, sir. I’ll do better.’

‘I hear your father has some issues at work?’

Randeep sighed. It was all so predictable, the speed with which gossip spread.

His mother called him daily, on the new mobile she’d finally permitted him to buy. Sometimes she accused him of not wiring all the money through. Mostly she just cried her complaints. That his father did nothing. That he just gazed at the wall listening to his stupid Schubert. They could all starve and he wouldn’t care. What kind of a man was he?

‘We’ve not been to the mall for two weeks. And how long before they ask us to leave this flat? I’m scared to answer the door. Every knock and my stomach falls away.’

‘It’ll get better. Uncle said we could stay in the flat for a year and then I’ll go to NIT and get a good job and everything will be fine afterwards.’

One night, putting the phone down on his mother, he reached sourly into his claims tray. He was angry at her, at himself. She’d said that he wittingly stayed away from home. That they were struggling with his father and he never helped. He’d argued that he was working, working for them. But he knew there was truth in what she’d said, that exhaustion was easier than being at home, and it was this that angered him. He clamped his head in his palms and looked again at the claim. They’d not signed it. Stupid people. How could they expect them to assess their claim if they didn’t even sign it? There was a telephone number scrawled at the bottom, in a shaky blue hand. Randeep punched the digits in so hard his finger blanched. He wanted to tell them how they’d made a mess of everything and that they’d have to fill in another form and send that in and why couldn’t they have just done things properly the first time? As the phone rang and rang, his rage wilted and he looked at the London clock and wondered what the hell he was doing. He had to put the phone down.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello? Oh, sorry, sir, wrong number.’

‘Who is that? John? Is that you again?’

‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t realize it was so late. I’ll say goodbye to you.’

‘Hang on, there.’ There was a dead minute until the man returned, his words now echoing. ‘Better. Who did you say you were again?’

‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t know it was so late. It was simply a courtesy call. I’ll bid you goodnight.’

‘Where you from? You Scottish?’

‘India, sir. I’m Indian.’

‘Oh, Indian. I’ve known a few Indians in my time. We fought together, you see.’

‘OK, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll let you repair to your slumber now.’

‘In Burma. I was stationed with Balwant Singh, if memory serves. And it really doesn’t, these days.’

He laughed, sadly, Randeep thought.

‘Always took a bucket of water to the shitter with him, that one.’ A chuckle. ‘Must’ve had the cleanest arse in Arakan.’

Randeep switched the receiver to his other ear. He knew the battle. ‘The 1944 campaign, sir? We really out-foxed the Japanese, I think.’

‘Once we got Maungdaw, we knew we were in with a chance. As long as those tunnels stayed true.’

‘The tunnels. Yes, the tunnels. You must admit the engineers were heroes, sir. The Indian Seventh Division put their lives on the line for your country. We studied it at school.’

‘Balwant was one of those engineers. Couldn’t have done it without him. Does he still like his Fairweather’s?’

Randeep paused. ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

‘I was in the second West Yorkshires myself.’

‘Brigadier Evans, sir!’

There was a croaky laugh on the line. ‘I saw him pelting out of the station in just his underpants once, waving a pistol. We were about to come under attack, you see. A great man.’

An hour passed and still they were on the phone and still Randeep had a heap of claims to vet before his shift ended. He said he had to go.

‘Oh, really? I was enjoying myself a fair bit.’ The old man did sound disappointed.

He waited a week before calling the man again. No one answered. He tried again the next night and it seemed to take the old man some time to remember him.

‘And happy birthday, sir. For yesterday. Happy belated birthday.’

Randeep explained that through his father’s former job he’d got access to the Historic War Archival Records Office and in there were details of Private Michael Sedgewick.

‘Like your date of birth, sir.’

‘I had no idea,’ Michael said, apparently awed by the notion that bits of him should exist in stacked-up files in Indian offices.

They spoke about the Burma campaign and then about themselves. The difference between their ages seemed to allow this type of conversation. He said he was a widower. Janice had been dead ten years. Her lungs gave up on her, you see. All those Park Drives. Their children now had their own families and mighty proud of them he was too. Philip was some sort of hospital orderly and Janet senior secretary to a big director type. He had four grandchildren. He was eighty-seven and lived alone. There was a mixture of pride and sadness in Michael’s voice which broke Randeep’s heart a little. He promised to call at least once every week, though no such promise was asked for, and on each call they’d speak for at least forty-five minutes, never more than an hour, because calls over an hour long were checked the next morning by the day supervisor. Michael appreciated this, Randeep could tell. He said how good of him it was to care about an old man on the other side of the world. He said he’d understand if Randeep wanted to stop these conversations and spend time with people his own age. Randeep wouldn’t hear of it.