Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘Savraj,’ Narinder said. The white chunni. ‘What’s happened?’

She couldn’t speak. Tears ran haltingly down her cheeks. Narinder looked to her father, who explained that the brother had died. He’d tried to make it across in a coach. Hiding in a gap cut into the ceiling. It seems they suffocated. Three of them.

‘They found the bodies in Russia,’ Savraj said. ‘They just dumped them in the snow.’

Narinder groped behind her for a table or chair to lean on. ‘That can’t be true.’ She spoke as if to herself.

‘I don’t know how we’re going to survive. Mamma’s on her own.’

Narinder saw her father nod at Tejpal, and perhaps Savraj did too because she suddenly tugged her coat about herself and said she should go. That she’d bothered them enough with her grief.

‘I just didn’t know what else to do. I’m sorry.’

Tejpal left the room briefly, returning with a small wad of notes which he passed to his father. He in turn pressed it into Savraj’s hand. ‘Take care of yourself, beiti.’

Savraj touched his feet, then tipped the money into her pocket and walked straight past Narinder and out of the door.

She couldn’t sleep and at first light she left the house and walked fast to the gurdwara. It was locked. She banged on the door and a sleepy-eyed granthi in white robes let her in. She raced up the steps, dragging her chunni on over her turban, and entered the darbar sahib, brought up short by the silence of it, as if she’d expected to find Kavi there. There was no one save for a second granthi, sitting with the holy book. Narinder fell to her knees and muttered prayers, rocking to and fro, speaking to Him.

When she returned home, her father called her into the front room. ‘It’s true. I made some phone calls and she’s not lying.’

It hadn’t occurred to her that Savraj might have been making it all up. She stood in the doorway, agitated, unsure where to put her face.

‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Baba Tarsem Singh said, coming to her. And the voicing of this possibility, that she could have averted this death, arrived as both relief and accusation, and Narinder slid down the doorframe and covered her face with her hands.

One night, a week later, her father came into her room and she felt his weight on the end of her bed, heard the slight rattle of his cane.

‘It wasn’t your fault, daughter. You couldn’t have known.’

‘But I did know. I knew they’d try something like this. And still I did nothing.’ She pressed her knees together to stop their shaking. Her bedside clock ticked gamely on.

‘You’re not sleeping. You’re not eating. Look how dark your eyes have become. From all this worry.’

‘I destroyed a family, Baba. My actions killed someone and I don’t know how I’ll ever forgive myself.’

‘God will forgive you. He knows your heart.’

‘But why did He let it happen? Is He teaching me a lesson?’

‘Narinder, we’ve spoken about this. We have to trust Him. I promise you it will all make sense in the end.’

She turned round. She needed to see his face. ‘Does it make sense that my mother died?’

He looked away, with clear difficulty ‘If it pleases Him.’

It was a frightening thought, that God might be pleased by their suffering.

In the morning, hoping it might help, she went to the gurdwara. There was a poster on the way in reminding the sangat to make time for next summer’s trip to Anandpur Sahib. When she’d volunteered last time she’d felt a great sense of goodness, that she was on the side of goodness. But real goodness, she now understood, wasn’t chopping vegetables in the canteen or distributing blankets. It was what her gurus had all done. It was putting yourself at risk for other people. It was doing the things that others wouldn’t do. It was sacrifice. And she’d never done that. The opposite was true. The one time she’d been tested, the one time someone had asked her to take a risk, to make a sacrifice, she’d walked away.

She stared ahead, mouth open, as if the granthi’s words were sliding right down her throat. Maybe it wasn’t such a ridiculous idea. Maybe she could do it. It seemed to be something that had been in the dark suspension of her mind ever since Kavi first asked her, but only last night had it poured over her brain, like a ramallah lain over the granth. It would be a risk, and that was the point. It wouldn’t help Kavi but it would help someone like him, someone who was struggling to survive. Maybe it would help her, too. Because how could she stand by and do nothing? Knowing what she now did? The wedding could wait. Karamjeet could wait. It was only for one year and then she’d come back and get married and life could carry on as expected. One year of her privileged life. One year. That’s all it was. As she thought these things, the guilt seemed to lift a little and for the first time in weeks she felt a smile come to her face, a smile in which could be seen a curl of excitement, in which the wedding was so happily, so boringly far away.

*

She was in Amritsar, showing the man her diary and indicating the number. She’d been coming here every day for the last week, at more or less the same time, and still the man asked if it was a UK call. He dialled the number from his side of the counter, and when the phone in the booth started to ring he pointed to the receiver. Baba Tarsem Singh was on the line.

Ringing home every day had been one of her father’s conditions. She’d said she needed to spend some time doing seva, to gather her strength before the wedding. Tejpal had been hard against it. Barely six months from the wedding. How would they explain it to Karamjeet’s parents? Baba Tarsem Singh talked him round and it was agreed that she could go for two weeks only and that, other than to call home every day, she wasn’t to leave the grounds of Anandpur Sahib. Narinder hadn’t set out to go against their wishes. The whole idea of marrying someone to help them come to England had begun to seem slightly mad; though that was before she pulled her white chunni from her suitcase and headed out to see Savraj’s mother. The gate was repeatedly padlocked and there was no sign of the animals. A woman on the neighbouring roof shouted that they’d gone. She didn’t know where. Maybe the city? They couldn’t pay the rent, you see. Did Narinder know the son had died trying to get to valeyat? Narinder tried to find a lawyer, but the closest the town had was a local man who dealt primarily with village disputes. He advised her to go to Amritsar, which was two hours away.

She told her father that, yes, she was still in Anandpur Sahib, then replaced the receiver on the prongs of the phone and paid the man. It was a five-minute walk up the Jallianwallah Bagh road to her lodgings inside the Golden Temple. Dusk was falling, and a passing cyclist switched on his flashing red headlight. She walked through the channel of water at the entrance to the temple and went in through the eastern gate. She loved the view from here, especially at this time of day, when the evening-red sun dipped behind the temple and the lake became a wet pasture of liquid gold, and the whole world seemed but a reflection of His glory. She’d prayed that morning, asking Him what to do, and had received direction. It was only for one year. She thought of three young boys lying dead in the Russian snow and knew she was doing the right thing.

‘There’s a good supply of lawyers near the furniture market, madam. In Hall Bazaar,’ the auto driver added, early the next morning.

The streets were already steamy with traffic and the bazaar was impossibly clogged. She’d walked and with some loose directions from the driver picked her way through the rickshaws and golguppe sellers, the scooters and carts and students on their way to college. Huge banners hung between rooftops, images of a bespectacled man who reminded Narinder of a distant uncle.