China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘For all the good she does,’ he sneered.

  ‘Will she back soon?’

  He shrugged. ‘You look healthier,’ he told me. ‘So it was dengue. Like I said.’

  I waited for her at a drinks stand opposite, until Prince spotted me and said he’d seen Radhika boarding the city bus. Perhaps he clocked the disappointment on my face because he called me over to where he was sitting with some friends and dealt me into their game of cards. They taught me how to play bhabhi, which was brand new to me then but a game I can still play.

  ‘He’s staying at that farm,’ Prince said, and the other boys nodded, because clearly this was not news to them. ‘In the locked room,’ he went on, darkly.

  However curious I was about life again, and especially about that room and Mehar, I knew Prince wasn’t the person to ask. I resolved quietly to broach it again with Tanbir when we next met. I stood up.

  ‘One more game?’ Prince suggested, but I said goodbye and started for home, which felt such a long way now that I’d missed seeing Radhika.

  * * *

  *

  The following morning, I was reading my book on the roof when I heard a bicycle clatter into the yard. I felt my heart lift – had someone told her I was looking for her? – but from the top of the stairs I saw that it was only Jai, my uncle, yanking up the cotton of his bottoms and climbing clumsily off. He waited for me to come all the way down before turning from the house and towards me.

  ‘It looks like new,’ he said. ‘So do you,’ he added.

  ‘I had help,’ I said, and he nodded, carefully, as if help wasn’t the word he’d use to describe what had been going on here.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve not been to see you. Things got busy at work and then Sona got a cough.’ The mention of a cough seemed to require a clearing of his own throat. ‘I confirmed your return flight.’ He passed me my inky plane tickets, which were stapled at one end like a raffle book. ‘A week today. I’m working but you can get an auto to the city coach stand and . . . Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ He kicked up the lever holding up his bike and swung back on to the saddle.

  When I tried to thank him, he said angrily, ‘I don’t think there’s any need for you to be entertaining that man in my house again. What a fine way you have of repaying my hospitality.’

  He left after that, and I couldn’t stop myself from walking out of the gate and along the dirt track, agitated, past the rear pen and towards Sunra, Tanbir’s village.

  Though I’d started leaving the farm more often, to talk to passers-by, to buy food in the market, it was the first time I’d gone this way. At the village gate I chose a lane that ran between two building sites and found myself at a choleric swamp, full of corrugated tin and a half-submerged plaster cast of a four-armed Shiva. Cows drank sadly on the far side, wasps hovered in torrid black clouds, and the stench of shit and gas rose off the stagnant water. I made my way round it, the cows lifting their big heads and eyeing my every step, and then turned down a long ribbon of a track, two brown grooves and a shaved line of yellowed grass running up the middle, like a landing strip for birds. I found that the track circled around the village, with flat-roofed houses to one side and a vast cornfield on my right. Since Tanbir wasn’t expecting me, I wasn’t in any hurry; I even enjoyed being lost for a while, and felt a stab of indignation when a voice called out to me from a nearby roof: ‘Come up, come up.’ The old man looked familiar, I thought, as I approached his house. It was a confined place, dark, with a dry gutter running along its empty doorway, and I had to duck all the way up the stairs.

  ‘I hear you’ve been playing cards.’ Now I knew him – it was Laxman, only topless, wearing a white sheet as a sarong, his chest creased like an accordion.

  ‘He’s a bit of a shark, your Prince.’

  ‘He didn’t get his visa. We’ll have to think of something else.’

  I said I was sorry. ‘It’s not easy these days.’

  ‘Not for some of us, no.’

  Humbled, I looked to the cornfield and asked if it was his. He laughed at the mere idea and said that, no, the parrot farm belonged to a family who’d long emigrated to Surrey, in Canada.

  ‘Are there parrots?’ I asked, looking to the sky, as if the birds might magically appear.

  ‘Talk sense. The old fart who originally bought it simply had a massive nose.’ Laxman shrugged, as if to say such was the stupidity of man. ‘He’s long dead but the name’s always stuck. See that hut way over there? I actually thought that’s where you were going. The Lovers’ Hut.’

  He was gesturing over my shoulder. I looked and in the distance I saw a small shack of yellow brick.

  ‘Why’s it called that?’

  He hesitated. ‘I wouldn’t want to speak out of turn about your ancestor.’

  ‘Mehar Kaur? Can you tell me something about her? I’d like to know.’

  ‘It’s just old rumour,’ he said. ‘She strayed with a brother. He went away and left her behind.’ Carefully, he folded away a towel drying on the wall. ‘Who knows, though, really?’

  ‘He left her?’

  ‘So they say. Hit the road and never came back. Though I also heard he died and their mother buried his ashes under a peepal tree.’ He grinned gummily. ‘The tales we tell!’

  ‘And she was locked in that room?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said again. ‘Who’s here to tell her story?’

  I nodded silently, wondering how much of this was true, or if that was even the right question, but nevertheless feeling a kind of despair for this woman, my great-grandmother, whom I’d never known.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what brings you to our small village? A little sleepy for you, no?’

  I looked at him. ‘Where does the teacher live? Tanbirji?’

  He walked me over to the other side of his roof and described a long diagonal over the houses, all the way to a vast black Airtel satellite dish. ‘See the red building next to it? That’s your aunt’s old house. The teacher lives in the lane behind.’

  He said it would be easiest for me to just hop from house to house, keeping the dish in view, so I did, charting a wayward path over the roofs, jumping, climbing, ducking under washing lines, treading warily across old bridges arching over cobbled lanes. I asked permission from the few people I encountered, but no one seemed to care. When I reached the satellite dish, it looked so out of place that I imagined its face scanning the skies for some sign of its real home.

  My aunt’s old house looked like it hadn’t been lived in for years: the window fogged, door sealed. I moved to the edge of the flat roof, looking for signs of Tanbir. It took me a little while to locate his scooter, which was parked inside his house, directly behind my aunt’s. They would have grown up together. My mind started to race. My uncle’s words that first night: a neighbour from her own village. I thought of Tanbir’s repeated questions about her; of the time I’d seen her at the bank, her pain. Is he with her, the teacher?

  Swallowing, I leaned out for a wider view into his courtyard, where there was a small square table with many books piled on it. And there it was, on one of the three chairs, Radhika’s scarf, with the fish-scale pattern. My gaze dropped to the lane below, to the gunny sack hanging over Tanbir’s doorway and, poking out of the sack, the wheel of Radhika’s bike. I felt grief, confusion too at how blind I’d been. Tears threatened, though they remained as a heavy sensation behind my eyes. But then the gunny sack was held aside, Radhika stepped out, and feeling I’d been caught spying, I turned away and ran back across the roofs.

  * * *

  *

  Afterwards, I hoped she’d come by so I could explain, but she didn’t, and suddenly I only had a few days left. Desperate to do something, I went to the bazaar one morning to buy books – her idea – when the barber called out to me: ‘Jai’s nephew!’

  I looked over the road, but it was the
customer who spoke, through the face foam. ‘Your doctor-lady’s looking for you.’

  Apprehensively, I stopped off at the surgery, where Radhika was folding an Anglepoise lamp into a box full of grey textbooks. Tanbir’s scooter was outside, but I couldn’t see him.

  Her face softened as she set down the lamp. She took a step and placed her arms around me, holding me close. I put my arms around her, too, but uncertainly, my hands barely brushing her shirt, as though the feelings borne by that embrace were extraordinarily fragile.

  ‘You’re leaving now?’ I said.

  ‘They need me back sooner. Staff shortage,’ she added, returning to her boxes. ‘You should see old man Duggal. Jumping for joy.’

  ‘But – now?’

  She sighed. ‘I’m leaving.’

  I tried to thank her in a roundabout, clumsy way, unable once again to say the things I wanted, though perhaps also learning that we don’t always need to, and then Tanbir entered, acknowledging me with a nod. He handed Radhika a bottle of water.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said softly, and he nodded again.

  Were they in love? Did he ask her to stay? Did she want him to leave with her? I never knew.

  Radhika looked down at her hands, made some tiny adjustments to the way her skirt was draped over her knees, and then raised her face and smiled at me. She lifted the cardboard box.

  ‘Can I carry that for you?’ Tanbir asked, though he took no step towards her, and wasn’t meeting her eye.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s not heavy.’

  * * *

  *

  I’d leave, too, before the end of the week, but not before my aunt Kuku surprised me by turning up at the farm to say goodbye. I was pegging out my final load of washing, I remember; my suitcase lay open behind me.

  ‘So I hear she’s gone, your doctor-friend.’ She looked pleased, but in a brittle way.

  ‘Her work finished,’ I said.

  ‘No more parties for you, then. For you and her and that teacher.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘I expect you were both sad to see her go?’

  I put my empty basket by the entrance to my room and turned to face her properly. There was something formidable in the way she was bracing herself, this woman who’d not been permitted to marry the boy from her village, who had instead been forced into a loveless marriage with my uncle while Tanbir carried on affairs with whomever he wanted. He had moved on and out of love with her. She had never been allowed the means to do the same.

  ‘I was sad,’ I told Kuku. ‘I don’t know about the teacher.’

  ‘I’m sure they were all over each other. Dogs in heat.’

  A hot breeze sent up some courtyard dust and I wondered if falling out of love was different to letting go of the pain. I made a decision: I wanted to protect us both. ‘I’d be surprised,’ I said.

  ‘No?’ She paused, then asked quickly, ‘Were they not close?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge, no.’

  I don’t know whether she believed me. I don’t think she did; possibly she also resented my attempt to spare her.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said, looking across to my room. ‘Do you ever think of my great-grandmother? Do you know anything about her?’

  She looked at the room, too, though all she said was, ‘I knew the hut.’

  Up on the roof, I watched her heading back towards home, pushing away the track, away from Sunra with every step. The giant new statue of Krishna loomed above her. He was playing a flute, after all, just as Radhika had wanted, and in that moment, with all that sky in front of me, I glimpsed a future and was overcome by a sudden feeling that things would be different from here on in, that I would never use again, that I would go to London, make friends, have lovers and forge a life of my own choosing. Now, twenty years on, I smile to think of him, to remember the eighteen-year-old who didn’t appreciate how things resurface, who couldn’t know that he would relapse twice, recover twice, that the underlying hurt does not go away and can only be paid attention to. When the taxi bleats its horn and he zips his suitcase and stands it on the ground, there is the poignancy of farewell in the air, and it is perhaps this that makes him feel he is being watched as he leaves the room and crosses the courtyard. He even turns round at the gate and half-expects to see someone standing at the window. There is no one there, of course, just an offcut of red bunting, blown in from somewhere and floating free along the roof.

  40

  On the day of their flight, Suraj arrives at the stud farm and the horse he chooses matches exactly his ideal. It is a full-tilt mahogany beast, with a noble white kite along the broad length of its face and hot breath streaming from its nostrils. He runs his hand repeatedly over the dip in the animal’s back, and says something into the pink folds of its ear. Turning round, he whistles across to the owner.

  ‘We’re having problems with roamers around our wells. Am I okay to do a quick raid around our fields tonight? I’ll have it back to you in the morning.’

  The man, stout and with thick, tussocky sideburns, his moss-green tunic straining over his gut, walks with such short steps that Suraj figures his back must be hurting. ‘This one?’ he pants, arriving at his side after what feels like a month.

  ‘He’s perfect.’

  ‘Sure you can handle him?’

  ‘Two okay?’

  ‘Make it ten.’

  ‘Ten!’ But this is no time to haggle. The horse will be his. He takes another three coins from his breast pocket and hands them over. ‘Daylight robbery,’ he says, unable to resist.

  ‘There’s millet and brown seed,’ the owner says, indicating the saddlebags lumped either side of the horse. ‘Freshly ground. I don’t want him fed any old shit.’

  ‘You’ve nothing to worry about, uncle. I’ll take better than better care of him.’

  As he takes the reins and leads the horse away, Suraj noses the animal’s soft brown bristles. ‘Fly fast for me, won’t you?’ he murmurs. The owner, hands on his waist, is still watching when they arrive at the field’s edge. ‘You must be his fucking lover,’ Suraj mutters, as he mounts and feels an instant wave of power, of command, and urges the horse into a trot.

  * * *

  *

  Once at the hut, Suraj jumps off, and steers the animal round to the back, away from Sunra’s village gate. He kisses its coat and the horse lowers its head into its short shadow and starts to graze.

  He moves to the doorway; the brown satchel is inside, full of his earnings. The shoe-seller had even tipped generously, overjoyed with his finished sign. He has enough now to set them up with a room until he can find work. Surely even in Lahore they’ll need sign painters? Suraj looks over to the horse, who turns shyly towards a fresh patch of grass, and then he lifts his gaze to the more distant village beyond. His Kala Sanghian. He has thought about heading to the farm for a final look at the place, but has decided that is sentimental, and that what he wants more than anything is never to see any of it again. Not the barn, not the shit, not those flat roofs and bell-ringing temples, not the white cupola of the single gurdwara. They will make a new life in Lahore, he and Mehar. He gains clarity in this moment, as he stands at the doorway waiting for nightfall, wondering if she’ll come. On the cusp of leaving, he is shaken to realise that he doesn’t want to do any of this without her, that he is, and much more than he’d allowed for, helplessly in love.

  * * *

  *

  Hours later, the middle of the night, and Mehar hears the gate being unlocked. She sits up at the window to see Jeet cycling away. Trouble at the wells again, perhaps. Swinging her feet round, she presses them into her wooden slippers. She is not as nervous as she had expected to be: her fear seems to have dried up, hardened into a more forceful thing, some instrument of coercion pushing her on. At least they are the best slippers, she thinks. The least splintered
. Likely to survive a long journey. Not often she gets to wear them, these best ones. And they fit. Maybe she is nervous after all. Holding her breath, she wraps the shawl around herself and stands up.

  ‘Who is it?’

  She isn’t immediately sure whether that’s Harbans or Gurleen. ‘Me. Go back to sleep. It’s not morning yet.’

  ‘You need to soo-soo?’ It is Harbans, and Mehar hears concern in her voice, and then the sound of her sitting up.

  ‘I’ll be quick. Stay.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. With all this trouble about?’

  Mehar doesn’t insist, doesn’t want to raise suspicions, and they make it all the way to the water pump before Mai steps out from under the porch and asks them where they think they’re going.

  ‘To make use of the field,’ Mehar says, determining to now go via the road, that she can’t risk Mai catching her doubling back on to the track.

  ‘Both of you? It’s not a night for walks.’

  ‘But it’s so dark,’ Harbans says.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to lose you both, then, would I? Harbans, you go back to sleep. I’ll wait here for her.’

  Harbans looks puzzled, reluctant to obey, until Mehar says, ‘Don’t worry,’ and touches her arm in a warm gesture she hopes Harbans might later recall. When they ask who was the last to see Mehar, it will be Harbans who answers. This thought came to Mehar as they left their room, and it’s one that pleases her. Harbans has always been the kindest of the women.

  In a wave of feeling, Mehar takes off her wedding shawl, which Harbans had loved at first sight, and passes it to her. ‘I thought it’d be colder,’ she says, by way of explanation. Then Mehar glances at Mai, but the older woman doesn’t speak. Perhaps she is standing too far away to see.