Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways

‘When can you go back?’ his father said, slurred. ‘You need to go back and work.’

‘We need a man in the house,’ his mother answered. ‘I can’t even get a proper rate for the milk any more.’

Dalbir stepped under the doorway — he still didn’t need to duck — and slid down the wall opposite his brother, copying his pose: crouched on his backside, knees pitched up and arms draped loosely over the top. Palms cupped. And then Palvinder, their sister, arrived, her salwaar covered in cuttings from the crops she was helping pull up. She touched Tochi’s forearm as she passed and joined her mother in the corner of the room, and both women started blowing into the cave of the mud oven in an effort to get the cooking-fire going.

The dhal was thin and barely covered the shallow plate, the potatoes few. Tochi tore his second roti in two and threw half across to his brother. His sister passed round glasses of hot tea, the side of each glass stamped with a cartoon mouse. Tochi blew across the rim of his glass, while his mother and sister used the ends of their chunnis as gloves. Afterwards they rolled out the wicker mats and Dalbir went and lay beside his father. Palvinder shook her mat out by the back wall, furthest from the door, and Tochi was to sleep across the entranceway, in case of intruders. His mother pulled her chunni over her head, hiding her face, and said she was going to check on Devi Bai down the lane, because her son was off looking for work and the daughter-in-law wasn’t behaving as a daughter-in-law should. Tochi listened to the starry rustle of her clothes as she stepped away.

‘What d’you have?’ his father asked. His eyes seemed redder through the dark.

‘Is there none left?’

‘Did you not save any?’

‘I sent it all to you.’

His father sighed and turned his face to the wall. Tochi stood and went outside, jumping the fat river of sewage that ran in front of their home. The night sky shone so bright it made silver splashes in the drains. He could hear drills somewhere. He heard his mother returning, too, coming through the night like a nearhand ghost. She stopped beside him. She looked older than he remembered. The hair thinner. Still that overbite which had passed on to her daughter but not her sons.

‘I’ll look for work tomorrow.’

‘We need you in the field. We’re running out of time.’

Tochi kicked his heel into the muddy lane, making a divot. ‘I’ll still look.’

‘They’ve refused Palvinder’s hand,’ his mother said.

He nodded and, arm outstretched, reached for his mother, and she held his hand and rested her small head lightly inside it.

He’d slept with his head on his wrist, and now his wrist ached, but he didn’t move. He just lay there with eyes open. He could see his father naked to the waist and Palvinder squatting beside him, washing him with the tin bucket and strawberry soap. He was all torso, the stumps of his arms skinned over. Skinned over and shrunk and wrinkled like meat. Tochi closed his eyes, then opened them again. His mother held out a glass of tea and a salted paratha. He sat up and ate.

‘Where’s chotu?’

‘Working,’ his mother said.

‘He’s early.’

‘It’s because you’re here,’ Palvinder said, looking at him over her shoulder, still soaping their father. ‘I usually have to drag him up by his ankles.’

It was just past seven and children were heading off to the village school, hands looped around the straps of their dusty backpacks. Tochi made for Babuji’s house. No doubt the old man was aware of his return — someone would have informed him soon enough — but Tochi wanted to pay his respects in person. To thank him for organizing his father’s treatment and to assure him that this quarter’s rent would be on time. But Babuji had gone to Calcutta on some business for one, maybe two months, and Tochi was told by the servant to return then.

He walked to the field, bending to enter the concrete hut. His scythe was still hanging from the rusty hook by the motor switch, as if it had not moved in the last four years. He took it up, along with three rough brown sacks, and stepped back out into the green-and-blue morning. Dalbir was many yards down a row of cut wheat, the crops lined neatly behind him. He’d already done two rows, nearly three. He’d set off too fast. He’d learn. Tochi reached up for a tree branch and brought his scythe down upon it. The branch fell cleanly across his feet. He tied his white dhoti up between his thighs and headed off, away from his brother.

He went at his own pace, a regular hacking once on each side of the root before twisting the whole thing out with a sharp turn of his wrist. It was only around mid morning, when he squatted to start on his eighth row, that his thighs began with that familiar ache. His brother was slowing. Each time Tochi looked back from under his armpit, Dalbir seemed to be moving with heavier feet, flicking the sweat from his brow, breathing harder. By noon Tochi had finished his half, and even filled the brown sacks and carried them to the hut. Dalbir still had at least one-quarter of his to go. Tochi took up his scythe and started at the other end, and a little over an hour later they finished together.

‘I could’ve done it on my own,’ Dalbir said.

‘Never said you couldn’t,’ Tochi said, and he picked up three steel buckets, two in one hand and one in the other, and made for the path, to where the buffalo were tied to their trees.

‘Already?’ Dalbir called after him, panting.

‘Already.’

They measured the milk into metal canisters and carried them home for their mother and sister to sell around the village. Done for the day, Tochi found a clean white shirt and brown trousers and went down to the village pump to fill a bucket with water. He bathed in front of the entrance to their shack, using his old dhoti first as a screen and then a towel. He used the same water to wash the mud from his sandals.

The next village, Jannat, was about two miles away and he was there under the half hour. A hunched old woman with a blue hydrangea in her hair squatted beside the entrance arch, a wicker basket of almonds and cherries displayed before her. It was a village even tinier than his own, boasting just one road and ten, maybe twelve, huts. But the fields looked rich, Tochi thought; they still needed tilling. He passed under the arch and carried on towards the house with the big red metal gates, knocking once. A male servant materialized on the balcony. He asked Tochi his name, then told him to wait a few steps from the gate. Madam didn’t like them getting too close to the house.

Nearly an hour later, the gate yawned open and the landowner stepped nervously outside. Tochi got up from where he’d been crouched in the roadside shade and waited for the man to beckon him forward. He was tall, elderly, his olive-green robes rippling over a full round belly. He asked Tochi what his business was. Was he causing trouble with someone from this village?

‘No, sahib.’

‘Because I hear there is a lot of trouble about.’

‘My family live in peace, sahib.’

‘I won’t stand for any trouble, you understand? Keep your goonda-giri away from my village.’

‘Yes, sahib.’

The man slapped at the back of his neck. A midge, maybe. ‘It is the elections. Every time. They send people mad.’

Tochi said nothing. He wasn’t expected to have a view on such things. A donkey came clip-clopping up the road behind him. The landowner walked down the slight incline to his gate and raised his hand to stop the tangawallah. He spoke to the man on the cart — something about a land dispute between two local brothers — and then climbed aboard. He told Tochi he’d be back in a little while. Tochi nodded and went back to wait in the shade of the roadside tree.