Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘Mr Greatrix,’ Randeep said. ‘I’m happy to give you his details.’

Katie seemed pleased. ‘Where would you like to move to?’

‘There are some very nice areas to the south of the city. Near the Peak District National Park. Those are good areas for schools, too. After that we can start thinking about children.’

‘Wonderful. What would you like?’

‘A boy and a girl. I think mixed families are best.’ He glanced at Narinder, who really wasn’t saying very much.

Katie smiled, taking in her colleague in a slightly superior way. ‘You’re so clearly very happy together. I can’t tell you the number of times we meet couples — ’ the word spoken with emphasis — ‘who seem to be struggling to adjust.’

They asked Randeep some more questions about how he was getting on: did he use the support facilities available to new immigrants? Did he know where they were in town? What about the free language courses? Not that he needed them, of course, though there were the advanced classes which might prove useful.

‘There really is a lot of support for you out there. You’re not alone.’ Katie placed some leaflets on the table, then shut her briefcase and checked her wristwatch. ‘Not even an hour. One of our shortest visits.’

She looked to David, who seemed unsure about something. ‘Could I use your bathroom?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ Randeep said. ‘It’s that door just there.’

‘Sorry,’ Katie mouthed.

Randeep and Narinder smiled thinly, waited. The toilet flushed, which seemed like a slightly embarrassing thing for everyone to hear, and David came out looking just as unsure as when he went in. Randeep walked them to the top of the stairs. Narinder remained a few feet behind.

‘You haven’t taken your husband’s name?’ David said, looking at Narinder.

‘No.’ Then: ‘I didn’t want to.’

‘That’s a little unusual, wouldn’t you say? In your culture?’

Katie stepped forward. ‘So lovely to meet you both. We hope you have a wonderful future together. One of us will be in touch in a few months — it’s all routine, you know.’

The officers clomped down the stairs, she whispering something about regulation questions and the inappropriateness of his last remark, while he wearily held the door open for her. Randeep went to the window and watched them climb into their car, belt up.

‘They’ve gone,’ he said, as the car drove off. He turned round. ‘We did it.’

She’d insisted he leave that very afternoon, though he’d patently not wanted to. At first he said they should celebrate, that he’d noticed a new Indian restaurant on the way to the station. She was tired, she’d replied. She had things to do. The disappointment on his face was obvious, but she wasn’t going to indulge him. They settled for a celebratory ice cream. A van’s jingle sounded outside and before she could stop him he was out the door, returning with two flaked cornets. She ate hers sitting at the table, with him several feet away on the settee.

‘I’ve enjoyed living here,’ he said, in an exploratory tone.

She nodded carefully. She didn’t want him getting ideas.

‘It’s much nicer than the house.’

‘You mentioned friends, though. Avtar?’

‘It’s still much nicer here. I feel relaxed.’ He smiled at her.

‘It was always going to be a temporary arrangement. We did agree.’

‘I’ll pay more. I don’t mind.’

She said nothing for a while. Then: ‘What was all that about children? Schools?’

‘I wanted to sound convincing.’

‘You do know that this isn’t real, don’t you? This is only until the end of the year.’

‘Of course I do.’ There was a briskness to his voice. ‘I’m not stupid. I just thought we’d got on well these last two weeks.’

She took a deep breath. ‘I think you should go.’

He delayed further, taking his time to repack his suitcase, a palpable sadness in his slow movements. He tidied away the blanket, pillow and duvet and insisted he clean the bathroom, seeing as most of it was his mess. Then he shucked on his tracksuit top and picked up his case. She followed him to the door, feeling a guilty sense of relief. He handed her that month’s payment, smiling across at her.

‘Honestly, Randeep, you’ll be fine.’ She felt as if she was sending a lamb into a cesspit full of snakes. But she wasn’t going to budge. She wasn’t. And she closed her eyes and started counting to ten, and had got to six when she heard the front door shut behind him.

All her energy seemed to have leaked in the last few hours. Still, she did have things to do. That wasn’t a lie, she told herself, though the appeal to her honesty brought no comfort. Standing at the window, she saw a bus pass at the bottom of the hill, brake lights coming on, and thought she made out Randeep running to catch it. Randeep. A strange boy. Clearly, he was struggling with life in England. It was a mistake to have let him stay so long. She was certain he’d been in her room, too, on that thundery day. Her clothes had looked handled.

Sighing, she took Karamjeet’s letter from her bag. It had been tugging away under everything these past two weeks. Once, when Randeep had asked to see ‘the letter’ again, she’d stared at him, her pulse surging. He’d looked baffled, as if wondering what he’d done wrong. He’d meant the letter about the inspectors’ visit, of course.

She returned to her bedroom, Karamjeet’s threat still in her hand. She’d have to meet him, she knew that. Maybe he’d tell her parents anyway, once he knew the full story. The police, even. It was a chance she’d have to take. She opened her phone and for nearly half an hour tried to compose a coherent text. She gave up, threw the phone aside. She’d do it tomorrow. Her mind might be clearer then, after a night away from Randeep and his inspectors.

Narinder Kaur had been told the story so often she believed it must be her earliest memory: that she was four years old when she’d sprinted out of their Croydon semi and straight into the road. The car braked just in time. But the funny thing was that the car belonged to a reverend, on his way to open the church, and the reason Narinder had run out of the house in the first place was because her mother had said they needed to hurry, that God was waiting for them. In other words, God, sick of waiting, had come directly to Narinder. They’d been on their way to Panjab, to spend the entire summer in the service of their guru at Sri Anandpur Sahib, and on landing in India Narinder’s mother told the story to the other volunteers and they all ran their hands over the girl’s head and said she must be blessed and Waheguru really was watching over her.

It was Narinder’s first time in Panjab. Her mother came every summer and Narinder had always stayed behind with her father, her dadiji, and brother, but now she was four her mother said she was old enough to start understanding the importance of seva, of service.

They were given a bed inside the Anandpur temple complex, in a hostel less than a mile from the hundreds of marble steps that led to the Gurdwara Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib. The hostel was cold and the beds narrow and hard, and each morning Narinder woke with pink welts across her back. Her mother said she mustn’t complain, that they were very lucky to be so close to the Takht and that most volunteers had to find accommodation in the villages beyond the city’s five forts. Worse than the welts on her back was the heat. It was too hot to make a four-year-old climb all the way up to the Takht. Instead, each sunrise, Narinder was passed to an elderly woman, a pilgrim, who took her up in one of the rentable donkey carts that hung around the back of the gurdwara. Narinder would then wait in the shade at the top of the steps, watching her mother’s prayerful ascent. She watched how deeply her mother would bend to touch each step with the tips of her fingers, and how she’d touch those fingers to her forehead and mouth a silent Waheguru. Only then did she place her foot on the step and in this way move up. It was an amazing sight for the young Narinder waiting at the top: the giant white expanse of the steps triangulating away from her, and, alone in the centre of it, as true as bread, her mother in quiet standing prayer, her chunni pinned over her turban so it wouldn’t slip each time she bent down, her feet pressed together at the heels, as they should be. It took her nearly an hour in that crucifying heat to reach the shade at the top, yet to her daughter she didn’t seem made at all hot or bothered by the effort. Travelling to our guru is no great hardship, her mother would say, adding, winking, though it would be nice if he was a little more down to earth.