China Room
Page 17
‘I won’t be long,’ Mehar tells them, and steps into the wheat, continuing until she arrives at the head-high reeds. Her heart feels as vast as the moon that shines over the crops, so low she thinks that with a few more steps she could walk right through it. The stars are scattered across the sky. Scudding clouds. A ragged night. Listening carefully, she kneels and finds the jute bag she’s been adding clothes to, hers and his, for the last few days. She whips a drawstring from one of her salwars and ties the bag to her back, covering it with the trail of her chunni.
Now she tunnels forward, head low, parting the stems. She mouths a silent prayer and her step quickens and she bunches the hem of her tunic into a fist to stop it snagging. Stones press into her feet. Red pebbles. Brittle shells. Don’t think. Don’t. To the road. To the road and then to him, waiting for her on his horse. (Almost: he is crouched on top of the hut, scouting the fields for movement, for her movement. Below him, the horse sleeps, still and dreaming.) The grass shortens, her cover is gone, the moon casts wide its careless light and she registers a feeling of exposure, of coming up for air, but her quick feet trample the thought before she can do anything with it, and then her foot touches warm tar and her veil is sliding off her head and she runs up the road, halving the ground with her feet, climbing into the night, drinking it into her lungs. She heads left, panting, cutting a long and fast diagonal until she nears the neighbouring village. Slick cobbles flick by, the lanes edged with daisies, petals closed, as if shutting their eyes. She keeps to the sides, where the darkness is thickest, and at last she is crossing the track, through the final field of chest-deep grass, elbowing away the scratch and prickle and closing in on him, he who is suddenly aware of a river cutting through the field, breaking towards him, and he jumps down from the roof and races to meet her and pull her to the hut.
‘You were so long. It’ll be light soon.’
She seems not quite able to grant that she’s done it, made it, and as they prepare to set off she wonders if there’s something she ought to be telling him, something she’s missed perhaps, or something she saw in Mai’s attitude, in the ease with which she has escaped. It feels as if she is withholding a crucial detail, one she can’t quite let herself glimpse, a feeling she doesn’t want to, can’t bear to, interrogate. Her hand goes to her belly. She only wants to be away from here. Calmly, he takes the jute sack of clothes and ties it to the horse’s saddlebags.
‘We’ll cross the field and be out through the far gate.’
‘Mai’s waiting for me. I had to tell her I needed the field. We should avoid the outer road.’
‘We will, we will.’
‘And we should be quiet.’
‘Really? And I was hoping we might get my drum out.’
She smiles and he is unfolding his shawl when he asks about hers, and then gives her his own, which she wears like a cloak, across her head and face so only her eyes are visible. Ready, he helps her up on to the horse, feeling how light she is, surprised by it, so light that he overdoes it and hears her laugh, gripping the animal to stop herself from toppling over the other side. He swings himself up in front of her. Her slender arms are around his waist. Her heart thriving against his back. He thinks of their child, of the three of them, their three heartbeats.
‘I’m sad for my sisters. I hope they can forgive us.’
She feels his nod and then the jerk of his body as he instructs the horse on – the hooves clanging loud. A verse comes to Mehar, an old sad wedding lament: The stars have no pity, the mother’s helpless foal, the verandas sag with weeping, and girls leave their home.
‘Here,’ he says, passing back a hipflask. The rubber bung comes out with a pop and she lifts the flask to her mouth, but it is filled to the brim and the water spills down her chin and on to the horse, darkening its coat. She wipes her mouth dry and runs her fingers through the spillage, creating soft little furrows in the horse’s back. Delicate little furrows, she thinks, miniatures of the path they are describing.
There is a lulling quality to their movement through the grass: the high arching walk of the horse, its long grave head. With each step, they rise and fall against each other, a single butting wave. The animal’s black eyes seem to contain the night; perhaps the universe entire is in those two gleaming ovals guiding Mehar and Suraj through the old field. They see a large white mouse standing on its hind legs, gnawing excitedly at some secret thing. Nearby a snake lazily uncoils itself and powers off with a boastful whip of its tail, as if it knows the passing strangers are watching. There’s a further delight when the cloud cover reveals a moonlit pangolin, snouting away in the soil. It looks up at them, monitoring the lovers’ progress as nothing more than foreign scents in the familiar world of its night. All these animals, like spirits at the threshold of a new existence, and not for the first time Mehar imagines a tiny farm outside a small village yarded with a square of neem trees. One buffalo at first. Even that will be a stretch. But, in time, more animals, more children. Perhaps a larger plot of land. Nothing too much. They wouldn’t need much. She can make their charpoys. That much she’s learned. And her sewing is getting better. The wheat whispers and seeds carry on the surface of the air, falling where they will. Shadows menace and comfort in line with the shifting clouds. From somewhere behind comes the happy skreel of an owl and Mehar wonders if the owl got to the mouse before the snake did. Yes, her sewing is definitely getting better. She should start on mittens and hats, for it’ll be midwinter by the time he is born. She is certain it will be a he. The sky pulses on and matter goes about its impersonal business: planets collide, galaxies unravel, black holes the size of a dozen suns swirl with such phenomenal violence that the effect will be registered in millions of years and, yes, mittens first, and she lowers the flask from her lips and forces back in the bung.
At the field’s edge there is a long swinging wooden gate kept to with a loop of grey rope. Suraj dismounts, feet flattening the mud, and tramps over, lifting the rope away and pulling the gate wide open as if he were dragging a cow across the field. He looks over to Mehar, into her eyes, which are radiant, soft, but suddenly baffled and afraid and he’s about to ask what the matter is when he’s tackled to the ground and held there by two men with rifles across their backs. He can’t think, tries to scream, but they kick mud into his face, then drag him up on to his feet so all the breath is knocked out of him. Blinking, spitting, he sees wagging lights, torchbearers emerging through the trees, the flames fierce in the coming dawn. The crowd swells and gathers and the men are still at his arms, their nails in his pits.
A woman – Harbans, he thinks, by her gait – helps Mehar off the horse and holds her face. He sees Mai there, too, and then his brothers. But the first to speak is Tegh Singh, the man with the Italian moustache, his beard thickened to little tufts sprouting over his cheeks. Not five years older than Suraj and still with a lot to prove.
‘He’s ours?’
Mai steps forward and in a clear voice says, ‘You can take him.’
Suraj twists violently, but is punched back. Spits of rain appear in the breeze and creep under Mehar’s shawl, which is his shawl and full of his smell. She feels the drops cluster on her upper lip, feels them and lets them lie there, under his shawl, untouched and unbroken.
‘And what about this sister,’ Tegh Singh says. ‘His wife?’
‘Mine,’ says Jeet, coming forward, leaving his bicycle on the ground. He avoids looking at Suraj. ‘When we learned that he was trying to run tonight, I sent her to talk to him. I thought he might listen to her. I didn’t imagine he’d try to take her with him.’
Tegh Singh looks doubtful. ‘True?’ he asks Suraj, and the two men holding him draw his arms back tighter, and tighter still, until the boy speaks.
‘I want to speak to my brother,’ Suraj says, seething.
Tegh Singh turns to Mehar: ‘Was he taking you by force, sister? Or were you willing?’
Wh
at can she say? Her eyes seek out Suraj, but he is resolutely not looking at her, and in that deliberate avoiding of her gaze she already senses his withdrawal, and in his withdrawal, her stupidity.
‘You wouldn’t be the first woman to change husbands,’ Tegh Singh says.
‘Don’t shame me,’ Jeet says, a threatening edge to his voice. ‘I’ve given you a man. Take him.’ Then, more to Suraj: ‘If he dies then it’ll be an honourable death. I promise him that.’
Tegh Singh approaches – ‘Absconding! Taking a woman by force!’ – and then he leans in so close that Suraj can feel his breath and the pores in his nose appear to crawl. He speaks in a voice low and intimate. ‘I hope she was worth it, because they’ve got you by the balls.’
‘Mai!’ Suraj says, straining to look past the young leader.
‘You’ve said enough,’ she tells Singh. Then, glaring at Suraj, ensuring he recalls it: ‘These things happen.’
* * *
*
A week later, against a sky so pristine it hurts her eyes, Mehar will be inside the china room, watching Jeet snap away the black lacquered slats and replace them with iron bars. He will give no reason for doing this and Mehar will not ask. She will silently follow him grout the ledge with quicklime, measure and saw the bars, and then she will count the bars going up, one by one, hammering into the mortar, sealing her in.
She will not know that earlier that same day Jeet had visited Suraj inside his cell and passed him a copy of the holy gutka. ‘I hear you leave for Delhi tomorrow. I’ll say a prayer for you tonight.’
‘If I survive, shall I come back?’ Suraj asked him.
‘I wouldn’t advise it. But it’s still your soil.’
‘Is it still my child?’
‘That’s for you to think carefully about,’ Jeet replied, and Suraj snorted, said that one way or another he’d be free, and told his brother to leave him.
From this point, as is their habit, the years will spool on. Harbans will have girls followed at last by a boy, and a new husband will take Gurleen to a suburb by the city, where she’ll bully the maid and never speak of her first marriage. She will not return for Mai’s funeral, by which time Mehar’s eldest child will be married and with a young daughter of his own, a daughter who at sixteen is engaged to a quiet boy in England, where together they’ll build a life for themselves and for me. There is richness to come, but for Mehar the farm is forever haunted by Suraj’s absence. Is he alive or not? Nearby or not? Jeet, thinking it for the best, will tell Mehar nothing of his visit to Suraj in his cell, nor of his brother’s words, not when he holds her hand and she recoils from his touch, and not when, after several decades and six children (his brother’s, five more), he is suffering a miserably slow death and she continues to withhold her affection. For the rest of her life he lets her believe about his brother whatever it is she needs to believe. Such are the burdens of victory. But for now . . .
The day has blued lightly over and birdsong thrills the air. The revolutionaries depart, pulling Suraj with them, and as she watches them go Mai nods once, to herself, and then glances at Gurleen, who looks sharply away, battling tears. The crowd disbands, muttering, and Mehar sees Jeet staring at her, his eyes unreadable, and then he gazes down, at the churned mud. He doesn’t move until Mohan squeezes his shoulder and says they should get back too. They are all leaving – how can they be leaving? thinks Mehar, feeling unsteady, and she reaches for Harbans. There, there, Harbans says, it’s all over, let’s say no more, and cradling Mehar’s head against her bosom, she leads her through the gate and out, so that behind them all that remains is the horse, marvellously oblivious, chewing its damp grass at the edge of a farmer’s field.
About the Author
Sunjeev Sahota is the author of Ours Are the Streets and The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature. In 2013, he was named one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists of the decade. He lives in Sheffield, England, with his family.
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