Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘I’ve put a lot at stake too.’

‘Yes. I’m certain you have. And I’m very thankful for all you’re doing. I’m sorry if that isn’t clear. We won’t use the photos.’

The silence seemed calculated, forcing her to relent.

‘Most are fine to use,’ she said, and he nodded and retrieved the album.

‘I only hope we’ve got enough. I’m hearing rumours of raids.’

There was a sort of frozen alarm in her face which thawed to incomprehension. ‘You think this place will be raided? By who?’

‘It’s just people at work talking. And there are always rumours. But it’s better to be prepared. Maybe I should come and live here?’ he said, testing the water a little.

The shock of the suggestion seemed to force her mouth to open.

‘I was not being serious.’

‘It’s too small. And the weather,’ she said, randomly.

‘I understand completely,’ he said, layering smiles over his disappointment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so warm in a house, with food smelling as good as that on the cooker.

She made to walk him to the door.

‘Shall I help you with this first? It’s not fair to leave you to pack it all away.’ Delay tactics. She said she’d do it later. That it wasn’t a problem. Reluctantly, Randeep followed her down the stairs. As she opened the door he took the notes out of his pocket and handed them to her.

‘Another month,’ she said. ‘The year will be over before we know it.’

‘Yes!’ he replied, shaking his head, as if amazed how quickly the time was passing, when really it seemed to him that each new week took on the span of an entire age.

After he’d gone, she collapsed onto the armrest of the settee, face hidden. This was too hard. This was too much to give. What had she got herself into? She lifted her head out of her arm and was met with the images of her gurus. They spoke to her, reminding her that she always knew it was going to be hard, that doing the right thing is never the easy choice, but to remember that Waheguru is her ship and He would bear her safely across. She felt Him beside her, and felt her resolve return, as if the blood was pumping more thickly through her body.

She fetched from the drawer the map she’d picked up from the station and zoned in on her street. The surrounding areas didn’t sound like places she wanted to visit: Rawmarsh, Pitsmoor, Crosspool. Burngreave. Killamarsh. They sounded so angry, these northern places, like they wanted to do you harm.

Across the city, Randeep lay on his mattress. Everyone had eaten early and gone to sleep, tired out from a whole muddy week of shovelling up and levelling out cement. No one had even mentioned his second visit to the wife. He replayed their conversation and was more or less pleased with how it had gone. They seemed to understand each other and if the year carried on like that everything would be fine. He was hopeful of that. He heard the downstairs door go and the kitchen beads jangling. Probably Avtar would stay in the kitchen for an hour, eating, studying, counting how much money he had, or didn’t have. Randeep wouldn’t join him. The last few times he had gone downstairs he’d got the impression he was only getting in the way.

Rain pattered against the glass. He turned his head towards Tochi. Yesterday, Tochi had moved his mattress out from under the window and turned it at a right angle, so he and Randeep now lay parallel to each other, the door at their feet. Randeep guessed it was so he could sleep facing the wall. His boots were crossed at the ankles and were the only part of him that poked out from under the blanket. Randeep’s blanket. Which he’d not even been thanked for.

‘Bhaji, are you awake?’

Nothing.

‘Bhaji?’

‘What?’

Randeep didn’t know what. He hadn’t had a conversation planned. ‘I can’t sleep.’ Then, a minute or so later, ‘This is strange, isn’t it?’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘I mean, when you were a kid, did you ever think you’d be working in Sheffield, in England, and living in a house like this? I’d never even heard of Sheffield.’ There was silence and Randeep asked, ‘Do you still have people back home?’

Tochi didn’t reply. The rain seemed to be plashing harder and Randeep drew his blanket up around his neck.

‘Bhaji?’

‘What?’

‘I like hearing the rain outside.’

A pause, and then Tochi: ‘Me too.’

Tarlochan Kumar was bent double under the last huge sack of fodder. He shook it into the buffalo trough and moved away as the animals nosed hungrily forward. He was seventeen; it was his fourth year in Panjab, his third with this family. He’d miss the place.

He crouched by the pump at the side of his hut and washed his arms, soaping off the grass and sweat. Then he changed into a clean white kurta pyjama he’d that morning left to dry on a branch. As he made his way to the big house, the sunset streaked the horizon.

The solid iron double gate was closed and its blue rivets still hot to touch. Inside, in the courtyard, his sahib sat cross-legged on his menjha, speaking to a local usurer. The sahib’s wife was napping beside him, her head flopped back over the love seat, and on the floor their daughter crushed herbs in a small ceramic mortar. Once the usurer was dismissed, Tochi knocked on the metal gate and was invited in.

‘How many times?’ the sahib said. ‘Treat this place like your home.’ He was in a good mood, which was something.

‘Sorry, sahib,’ Tochi said.

He noticed the wife half open her eyes and tap her foot twice against her daughter’s back. The girl lifted her chunni up over her head, screening her face from Tochi.

‘I have to go home, sahib. My papa is not well. I got a call yesterday.’

His sahib uncrossed his legs so just his toes touched the floor. The taut hairy ropes of the menjha had striped deep red marks over his feet. He watched them fade. ‘It’s the height of the season. You could not have picked a worse time.’

‘I know.’

‘Why are you chamaars so unreliable?’

Tochi said nothing.

‘How ill is he? Will he not get better?’

‘Both his arms are gone.’

The wife clucked her tongue in sympathy and muttered a waheguru.

‘What colours God shows us,’ his sahib said. ‘You understand I’ll have to get someone else. I can’t keep your job for you.’

‘I know.’

Tochi nodded, turned to leave.

‘Don’t forget your food,’ the memsahib said.

He thanked her and picked up the thali of leftovers on his way out.

The next day, his sahib was waiting outside the big gate, wages in hand. Tochi accepted the wad and bent to touch the man’s feet.

He walked the two hours to Jalandhar, his belongings in a brown rice-sack slung across his shoulder. At the depot the buses were parked up in their rows, the iron grilles blurring into each other in the mellowing dark. He found his bus, but the conductor sitting on the roof ground out his beedi and said they wouldn’t be leaving until it was full, nine o’clock, at least, so he should pass his luggage up to guarantee his place. Tochi kept his bag with him and went and sat in the station’s chai-samosa dhaba. He ordered some tea and made a cradle of his arms on the table, nestling his head down and closing his eyes.

It was past noon before the conductor blew his whistle. As they laboured out of the compound, the passengers were rocked from side to side and the man sitting next to Tochi clanged the tiny cymbals tied to his wrists and whispered a prayer under his breath. He was a young man, in a cheap white cotton shirt and faded black trousers. A burgundy folder lay across his lap. He was going for an interview, he said. To be a ground clerk. Tochi nodded as if he knew what that was and told the man he was going home because his father had lost both his arms. Grimacing, the man clanged his cymbals and didn’t speak again, as though he didn’t want Tochi’s bad luck to rub off on him.