Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘Ask him his bhanchod name.’

Shaking his head, Avtar turned to Tochi. ‘What are you? Ramgarhia? Saini? Just shut him up.’

‘Ask him his bhanchod name, I said.’

Tochi made to get up, frost crackling underfoot. ‘Tarlochan Kumar.’

Randeep frowned a little but hoped no one saw it.

‘A bhanchod chamaar,’ Gurpreet said, laughing. ‘Even the bhanchod chamaars are coming to England.’

‘Who cares?’ Avtar said.

‘Only backward people care,’ Randeep said, but Gurpreet was still laughing away to himself and then John limped up and said they better get a move on.

‘Do you think he’s got a visa?’ Randeep asked, when they started up again.

Avtar looked at him. ‘When did you last meet a rich chamaar?’

‘His parents might have helped him.’

‘Janaab, don’t go asking him about his parents. He’s probably an orphan.’

That evening Gurpreet knocked on their bedroom door and said he and a few of the others were going out, so Randeep and Tochi would have to help with the milk run. ‘You’ve got Tesco.’

‘Where are you going?’ Randeep asked and Gurpreet made a fist and pumped it down by his crotch.

‘And stop buying those bhanchod cloves and whatnot. We don’t have money to waste, little prince.’

Randeep waited until he heard him on the stairs, out of earshot. ‘He’s that ugly he has to pay for it.’

Tochi was threading his belt around himself. The swish of it sliced the air. ‘You’ll have to do it yourself.’

‘I can’t carry all that milk. Do you know how far it is? Can’t you help me?’

‘Join one of the others.’

‘But we can’t all go to the same place. The gora gets suspicious.’

Tochi said nothing.

‘I respect you, bhaji,’ Randeep said. ‘Can’t you help me?’

On Ecclesall Road the roadworks still hadn’t finished and the street was all headlights and banked-up snow. Randeep pulled his woolly hat lower over his ears and marched through. Tarlochan only had on his jeans and a shirt which kept belling in the wind. His jeans had no pockets, as if they’d been torn, and his hands looked raw-white with cold, like the claws of some sea creature.

‘Next time I will insist you borrow my gloves,’ Randeep said. ‘You can have them. I have two pairs.’

As they passed the turn-off for the Botanical Gardens, Randeep pointed. ‘That’s where Avtar bhaji’s second job is. Through the gardens and carry on straight.’

‘Whose garden is it?’

‘No one’s. Everyone’s. Maybe the government’s. But they’re pretty. I always think it’s like we have the city, then the gardens, then the countryside.’ He nodded towards the hills, made smoothly charcoal by the night. ‘Shall we go there one day? To the countryside?’

‘How many apneh work with your friend?’

Privately, Randeep felt ‘apneh’ was perhaps a little too far, given their background. ‘A few, but no one else from the house. You looking for a second job too?’

He didn’t say anything. Instead he turned sharp left down a road, his head bent low. Randeep yelled his name, then ran to catch up.

‘Police,’ Tochi said, still walking.

Randeep turned round and saw the blue lights revolving by. ‘No visa, then.’

‘I guess not.’

‘How did you get here? Ship or truck?’

‘On your mother’s cunt.’

Randeep stared glumly into a dark coffee-shop window. It didn’t seem to matter how hard he tried.

‘Sorry,’ Tochi said. He looked annoyed with himself.

‘I’m on a marriage visa.’ Randeep expected a reaction but got none. ‘I got married,’ he went on, aware he was starting to blather. ‘To a girl. She came over to Panjab. From London. But she’s here now. In Sheffield, I mean.’

‘So why not live with her?’

‘She’s Sikhni. But I’m not that bothered, if I’m honest with you, bhaji. I’m going to take some clothes over soon but that’s it. It’s just one year, get my stamp, pay her the money, get the divorce, then bring my parents and sisters over. It’s all agreed with Narinderji.’ And he wished he’d not said her name. He felt like he’d revealed something of himself.

They bought milk, flour, bread, potatoes and toilet roll and went back to the house. Others were returning with their milk and shopping too, and it all got piled into the fridge, done for another week.

*

Randeep took a step back from the door and looked up to the window. The light was on. He rang the doorbell again and this time heard feet on the stairs and Narinderji appeared on the other side of the thick glass — ‘I’m coming, I’m coming’ — and let him in.

‘Sorry I was in the middle of my paat.’

‘I didn’t realize,’ Randeep said, following her up to the flat.

With each step his suitcase hit the side of his leg, and, as he entered, the gurbani was still playing. She hadn’t changed anything much. It was all very plain. The single plain brown leather settee. A plain tablecloth. The bulb was still without its shade. Only the blackout curtains looked new. A pressure cooker was whistling on the stove, and the whole worktop was a rich green pasture of herbs. In the corner, between the window and her bedroom door, she’d created a shrine: some kind of wooden plinth swathed in a gold-tasselled ramallah, and on top of this both a brass kandha and a picture each of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind. In front of the plinth, on a cushion, her gutka lay open, bound in orange cloth, and beside that a stereo player. The gurbani began to fade out and the CD clicked mournfully off. Randeep set his case by the settee.

‘How have you been?’

‘I’m getting used to it.’ Her hands were clasped loosely over her long black cardigan.

‘You are getting to know your way around?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘At least the weather is getting a smidgen better now. I thought the snow would never stop.’

She gave a tiny smile but said nothing. Randeep wondered if she just wanted him to hurry up and leave again. He knelt before his case and thumbed the silver dials until the thing snapped open.

‘Well, as I said on the phone, I’ve brought some clothes and things for you to keep here.’

He draped a pair of matching shirts across the creased rump of the settee, along with some black trousers and starched blue jeans, all still on their bent wire hangers. He took a white carrier bag tied in a knot at the top and left this on the table. ‘Shaving cream, aftershave, that kind of thing. And also some underwear,’ he added in the casual manner he’d practised on the way down. Then he reached back into his suitcase and handed her a slim red felt album. ‘And these are the photographs I think we — you — should hang up.’

He watched her palming through the pages. The first few were taken on their wedding day, in a gurdwara outside his city of Chandigarh. The later ones showed them enjoying themselves, laughing in a Florentine garden, choosing gifts at a market. ‘They look believable to me,’ she said.

‘Vakeelji sorted it all out. He said sometimes they ask to see where we went on holiday.’ He sidestepped saying ‘honeymoon’. ‘There are dates on the back.’

‘Are there stamps on our passports?’

‘It’s all taken care of.’

Suddenly, her nose wrinkled and she held the album face-out towards him: the two of them posing in a busy restaurant, his arm around her waist.

‘Vakeelji said there have to be signs of — intimacy.’ He’d looked past her as he’d uttered the word.

‘I don’t care what Vakeelji said.’ She shut the album and dropped it onto the settee. ‘This isn’t what I agreed to.’

He felt himself getting riled, as if discarding the photos in some way reflected her feelings towards him. ‘Look, can’t we just do what Vakeelji said? I’m the one with everything to lose here.’