Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

She could not shift from her mind the image of him locked against the girl, the look of pleasure on the girl’s face. She went to bed feeling wretched. She wasn’t jealous. Either of the girl or of what they were doing. She’d never so much as touched a boy — she’d never so much as seen two people kissing, with her own eyes — and she had no intention to start. It was more that she felt inadequate. She felt like a child. No. She felt that the world made her feel like a child. Because she had no conception, let alone experience, of the thing that it thought was the most adult act of all. She moved onto her back and placed a hand under the blanket, on her abdomen. All evening, a warm glow had been spreading out from her stomach and down towards her thighs. She slid her hand beneath her navel, then further down, and clenched her buttocks and pressed them hard into the mattress. The metal springs resisted. From below she heard this year’s room-mate lift her head, then, perhaps a full minute later, put it back down.

Narinder collected her ironing from the dhobi. The ironing board at their hostel had gone missing a few days earlier.

‘I hear you’re leaving soon,’ the dhobi said.

Narinder said she was.

‘Arré, then why so glum? There’s always next year.’

Narinder paid the man and made her way back through the bazaar. It was true. She did feel glum and she wasn’t sure exactly why. She forced her clothes into the overstuffed suitcase and with renewed determination zipped it closed. Because this moping was ridiculous. She was twenty-one, for God’s sake.

She was on kitchen duty that afternoon, chopping coriander mainly, when she saw him through the doorway. He was taking off his shoes, tying a ramaal around his head. Surely he wouldn’t dare come and talk to her. In front of all these people. But that was exactly what he seemed to be doing, smiling with each step. Narinder tried to concentrate on her chopping.

‘I’d like to give my sister a message.’

She looked up, wrong-footed. ‘Oh. Of course. I’d be happy to.’ She waited for him to go on.

‘It’s a private message. Can I talk to you later?’

She frowned, resumed chopping. ‘I’m sorry. I’m leaving soon. No time.’

A silence, then he said, ‘I’ll be outside after rehraas. I’ll see you there.’

‘I said I don’t—’ But he’d moved away already.

He was waiting for her at the bottom of the marble steps, his back to the gurdwara. His cuffs were folded to midway up his forearms, thumbs hooked into his rear jeans pockets. Narinder’s sandals clacked loud on the marble, louder still in her ears. He turned round and waited for her to complete the descent.

‘Shall I take those?’ he asked.

She gave him a couple of the blankets from the stack in her hands. ‘If anyone asks, we’re talking about tomorrow’s donations.’

‘You’ve thought of everything.’

‘I’m busy, bhaji,’ she said combatively. ‘Please tell me the message and I promise to deliver it as soon as I return.’

For a long time he looked off to the side, where a handful of boys were getting caught up in the sunset. Still looking away, he said, ‘Mamma doesn’t have cancer.’

Narinder blinked, confused, but then thought she understood and her arms loosened across her chest, her hardness dissolving. ‘But that’s the best news! Oh Waheguru! How long have you known? Does Savraj know? I have to call her!’

Kavi raised his hand, speaking over her in a clear voice: ‘She never had cancer. We thought she did but they got it wrong. There’s nothing wrong with her.’

Time halted. Narinder didn’t move.

‘I think when Savi first borrowed money from you, she wasn’t lying. But then they wanted to keep you thinking she had it.’

‘Your mother and sister.’

‘So you’d help us.’

‘Help you?’

‘Help me get a visa.’

Visa. Cancer. Lies. It all floated around Narinder’s head, dots she wasn’t able to connect. Kavi made an impatient noise.

‘I was meant to get you to like me so you’d agree to being my visa-wife. So I could come to England and earn enough to pay for the cancer treatment.’

‘But there was no cancer.’

He shook his head again impatiently, as if he needed to get beyond this. ‘But after meeting you in the garden that time I told Mamma I wasn’t going to do it that way.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Because you have a girlfriend,’ Narinder supplied, not really thinking straight.

‘What? Oh — ’ he made a swatting motion with his hand — ‘she’s just one of the chamaars. She gets passed round. I’d never treat one of our own girls like that,’ he added, apparently keen that she understood this fact about him.

She said she had to go. She wanted to get away from him. From him and his cruel, lying family.

‘Wait.’

She ignored him.

‘Please.’

The desperation in his voice stalled her. He came closer. She could smell his aftershave, like old leather.

‘I’m an honest man, believe it or not, so I wanted to ask you honestly. Not through deceit. Savi said you’re a very caring girl, so if you could see it in your heart to help us I’d be forever in your debt.’

‘Help you how?’ she said, her voice rising until she could hear the pain in it.

She saw him swallow. ‘We’ve saved and sold enough to cover the visa permit. Of course, when I start working in England I’d pay you every month. I promise you that.’

‘You want me to marry you?’ The question came as a shriek.

His finger leapt to his lips. ‘It would only be for one year. You’d be free again after.’

Narinder said she was going. He blocked her off.

‘Let me go. You’re being crazy.’

‘We can’t make anything of ourselves here. Land rents keep going up. Rates are going down. Nothing’s growing. It’s impossible. I’d be forever in your debt.’

She believed him. She was sure she did. But before she could allow herself to be even halfway persuaded, she looked away, away from him and his aftershave. Darkness had fallen in the sudden way that happened here in summer. She said he could keep the blankets, seeing as she’d not left them with any last time.

She couldn’t go to India the following year; she had to stay at home and meet potential suitors. There was another one coming tonight. From Surrey, Narinder thought, as she stepped into the bath and under the shower.

It would be the fifth family so far this year. Three had been rejected for not being sufficiently gursikh, and the one family who had seemed suitable was discovered to have an older daughter who’d married out of caste. The boy’s parents hadn’t mentioned it during the initial meeting, and it only came out when Tejpal asked some relatives in India to dig into the family’s background.

Narinder turned the shower off and pulled her long rope of hair, as thick as her wrist, forward over her shoulder, wringing the water out. She hoped this match would be suitable, if only for Baba’s sake. Tongues would start to wag if they kept turning boys away. She dressed in a simple chocolate salwaar kameez and chose her saffron turban from the cupboard. When she was halfway down the stairs, Tejpal said they were here, parking up. Narinder returned to her room and sat on the bed, waiting to be called. She’d spent hours here these past few months while prospective families were entertained downstairs. It gave her time to think. She was certain there were women out there who’d view her with pity, women who’d implore her to live her own life and thought all marriages of this design were the product of some sinister family pressure. She wondered what that meant: living your own life, as if your life was a thing closed unto itself. Did these women not understand that duty, that obligation, could be a form of love? That the pressure she felt was the pressure of her love? It might not be their kind of romantic love, but maybe it was all the purer for that. Sometimes she wanted to ask these women to imagine some manure on the side of the road, with all their friends and family circled around it. Now imagine leading your parents to the manure and burying their faces deep in it, in front of all of their friends and all of their family. She wondered how many of them would actually do that, in the drive to live their own life. There was an uncle when Narinder was young who’d cut a razor blade across his wrists because his daughter had run off with a Muslim boy. That, obviously, was an extreme case. Most parents whose daughters had strayed lived with their aura of shame, and everyone else gave them a wide berth, as if they really did stink of shit.