Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

*

Lakhpreet called early one morning, so early it was dark outside. He was still half asleep and her voice sounded creamy in his ear, gently stirring his dreams away. I wish you were here beside me, he said, murmured, so I could hold you, touch you. .

‘Randeep’s in trouble,’ she said.

Frowning, Avtar sat up, wiping a crust of sleep from his eyes. She’d always had a leaning towards the dramatic interruption. ‘What trouble?’

‘I don’t know, but he called yesterday and he sounded so down. I’ve never heard him like that. I’m really worried, janum. Have you spoken to him?’

‘Once or twice. Briefly. He’s just homesick.’

‘Maybe. Do you know the men he’s living with? What are they like?’

Avtar said he hadn’t a clue.

‘You just let him go? On his own? Without knowing anything about. . anything?’

‘I’ve got my own worries,’ he said, a little peeved. ‘And he’s not a kid.’

‘He is though, in some ways. .’ She trailed off.

‘Jaan, is there something else?’

‘No, no. I just. . I guess Daddy being how he is, is making me more worried.’

‘Randeep’s not like your father.’

‘I know, I know. But can’t you just keep an eye on him? Stay in touch? Just keep making sure he’s all right?’

Days passed, a week, and he still hadn’t called Randeep. He was putting it off. He didn’t want to discover that the boy really was in trouble. In which case, Avtar would have to do something. Wouldn’t he? He was thinking of this, folding clothes into his suitcase, when Cheemaji knocked. It had taken Avtar a while to get used to this — people knocking — and he still wasn’t sure whether to get up and open the door or tell them to come in from where he was sitting. On this occasion, Cheemaji walked right in. He was excited. He still had the cordless in his hand.

‘That was the factory-wallah. From that clothes factory we went to last week. He has a job.’

They drove down to Southall, past kebab joints and sari shops and curry houses and travel agents promising the cheapest fares to Amritsar through Air Turkmenistan. The factory was towards the old gasworks, and a dark-skinned, full-lipped man in a green safari shirt came into the loading bay to greet them. He wore a gold watch, too.

‘Avtar, you remember Mr Golwarasena?’

For half an hour it was very slowly and very tediously explained to Avtar that the job was 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., six days a week, with two thirty-minute breaks to be taken in turn by all the workers on the line. He would be paid at the standard level for the twenty-two hours per month his visa permitted him to work, with the rest of his hours paid at the reduced level. The fauji level, they called it. The contract, of course, would itemize the standard hours only.

‘The job has many angles,’ Mr Golwarasena went on in his strangely accented English. ‘From patternation to executive stitching to industrial storage.’ And he proceeded to detail exactly what the duties in each of those angles entailed.

‘And the pay?’ Dr Cheema asked, sounding exhausted already.

Mr Golwarasena’s eyes became heavy-lidded, as if talk of money was beneath him. He gave the figures. Avtar tried not to let his delight show. It sounded like an obscene amount to earn.

On the drive back, Avtar asked why they hadn’t just accepted the job. Instead they’d invited Mr Golwarasena over for dinner that night.

‘Because he’s the type who’s impressed by a big house and shiny things. So we ask him to dinner, give him a few whiskies, he becomes a friend, and then he offers you more money. Good plan or what?’

The plan was never executed. As Avtar was pulling his best shirt out of the suitcase and wondering if it would be rude to ask for use of the iron, his phone rang.

‘Randeep! You’ve called on a great day!’

‘Bhaji? Is that you? I have good news.’

And Randeep launched into something about how they could now work together because someone had broken their foot and all he had to do was come up tomorrow and even accommodation was included and it’d be great and he couldn’t wait for Avtar bhaji to join him because he was lonely and had no friends but it was all going to be all right now because he was going to come up too.

‘There’s a job? Working with you?’

‘Yes, yes. So what time will you come? I’ll meet you at the station.’

Avtar made Randeep go through it all again, slowly, calmly, explaining what the job was, the pay, how long-term.

‘Very long-term. Vinny bhaji is always thinking of new projects.’ The silence on the phone grew. ‘Is something the matter? You will come, won’t you?’

Avtar said he needed to think and that he’d call Randeep later — and what a horrible feeling it was, hearing the disappointment in the boy’s voice as he came off the phone. Really, the choice should have been easy. The job here, in Southall, was better all round — better pay, better accommodation, better hours. He’d have to get a second job in this Sheffield place to come close to earning as much. And yet there was no choice. Lakhpreet was right. Something had sounded wrong, and because Randeep was her brother, and younger than him, weaker than him, and because they’d come across together and stayed with Randeep’s aunt that first month — all this seemed to have conferred on Avtar an irritating and exaggerated sense of responsibility towards the boy. He smiled ruefully. Funny how God offers you everything you’ve asked for, only to force you to turn it away. He sat a few minutes in the silence of the room, then went downstairs to tell Cheemaji that the dinner wouldn’t be necessary.

Behind Avtar, the yellow cranes did their noisy browsing: giant birds biting up great mouthfuls of earth, only to jerk their heads to the side and spit it all out. The racket was such that Langra John limped up with a box of noise-cancelling earphones, and Avtar had one set circled loosely around his neck. He was hunched over his college folder, going through handouts forwarded on by Cheemaji. Most of them were stamped ‘College of North-West London’; underneath that, ‘Preparing You For Your Future’. Around him the lunchtime talk was of the latest raids.

‘Three last week,’ Rishi said, his foot recently out of plaster. ‘Two in Wolverhampton, one in Luton.’

‘See,’ Gurpreet said. ‘It’s always down there. Nothing for us to worry about.’

At this, several of them cringed and said a waheguru and threw some soil over their shoulders.

‘My fuffer — the one who works in customs — he says they’ve even started checking the marriage ones. He said one brother was sent back because when they visited he couldn’t speak English and his gori visa-wife couldn’t speak Panjabi.’

‘Arré, janaab, those pindu types are stupid. They give the rest of us a bad name. It’s like they want to get caught.’

Randeep reattached the lid onto his lunchbox in a series of tiny clicks. ‘How much time do they give before they visit?’

Langra John shouted at them to get back on it and so Avtar packed his folder away and re-secured the leather harness around his waist. He’d been paired with Gurpreet and together they had to climb the scaffolding and score off the lock-points between the planned executive rooms on floors ten through to fifteen. They were both complicatedly belted up and tethered to a double-chain rope that ran around the hotel perimeter, and the platform was wide enough to walk side by side. The ladders connecting the floors didn’t sway once in the wind and drizzle. Despite all that, they’d only made it up one floor and were walking round with their spirit levels and pencils when Gurpreet stopped and folded onto his knees.