The Year of the Runaways

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘Next time you won’t be there.’

  ‘Arré, but she’s such a cutie, yaar.’

  They walked a little further on. Randeep was smiling. ‘She is cute, isn’t she? You know, that’s what my sister said, too. Lakhpreet said she’s “cute as a button”. That’s another one of their English phrases. Did you know it already? Cute. As. A. Button.’ But Avtar didn’t say anything, and Randeep, still smiling, didn’t notice.

  That night, sitting on his mattress in the room he shared with two others, Avtar studied the four small piles he’d made of his money. The first pile was for the monthly repayment on what he owed Bal. The second for the loan taken out against his father’s shawl shop. The third pile was meant to help his parents with their rent and bills and, lastly, a pile for his own expenses here in England. No savings pile. There’d never been a savings pile. No matter. Once the loans were paid off, then saving could begin. He started counting it all again when from across the room came a loud grunting snore and a turning-over. Instinctively Avtar crushed the notes together and hid them under his arms. He waited until he was sure the other two weren’t faking their sleep and then he separated the money into piles again. It was no good. Bal was coming up in his BMW next week and still there wasn’t enough. He took some notes from his parents’ pile and split it between the first two. Still he was short. He recounted how much he had set aside for himself and took half of this and distributed it evenly among the rest.

  The following day, on their way back from Leeds in the van, Gurpreet threw in his weekly contribution and passed the tin to Avtar. Avtar slipped in half of his normal share.

  ‘What’s this?’ Gurpreet said. ‘You cheating us, chootiya?’

  ‘I’m not eating for half the week. So I’ll pay half as well.’

  Gurpreet tutted in false sympathy. ‘And two jobs he works. Spending it all on whores?’

  ‘Your mother’s not that expensive,’ Avtar said, sighed. Gurpreet laughed and Avtar passed the tin on.

  4. AVTAR AND RANDEEP: TWO BOYS

  Avtar Nijjar, former student and now the youngest conductor employed by BUTA Travel, held on to the rubber loop above the door and leaned out of the bus.

  ‘Sidhu Bangla! Geetpur! Kalawar! Jheela! Choper!’

  He moved aside, arse against the windscreen, as elbows and legs clambered in. He kept one hand over his ticket machine and money bag. Thankfully, mercifully, it was the fifth and final round trip of the day. ‘That diversion’s not helping,’ he told Harbhajan. ‘Try Farid Chowk this time.’

  Harbhajan sighed and draped himself across the thin hoop of the steering wheel, his new flamingo-pink turban cocked against the windscreen. ‘Yaar, we should go somewhere. Goa, maybe. Imagine it. The beach. Some bhang, some money.’

  Passengers were still forcing themselves on board. Avtar started to count over their heads.

  ‘We’ll take this,’ Harbhajan said, patting the dashboard.

  They were full. Avtar slammed the door and some of the people shut out rushed to flag autos; others stood swearing at him through the glass. ‘Your papa let us take this bus? Jha, jha. You must be dreaming.’

  And sighing again Harbhajan pressed on the horn for an unnecessarily long beat and urged the bus forward.

  It was nearly dark when the last passengers disembarked at Harmandir Sahib and Harbhajan drove on to the shawl shop. Avtar passed him the ticket machine and the day’s takings and jumped down.

  ‘Just think about it,’ Harbhajan said. ‘Goa! The kudiyaan on the beach in their small-small clothes.’

  ‘See you later,’ Avtar said and slipped out of his old black shoes and bounded up into the shop. It was a single room lined floor to ceiling with wooden cubbyholes, and each hole held a neat stack of six shawls. At the back of the room his father sat cross-legged on a large fringed cushion. He had a customer with him, several cream and faintly damp-smelling Rajasthani shawls spread before her. Avtar began refolding and repackaging the many shawls that had been viewed and discarded during the day, separating them first by material and then by design and price. He rustled them back into clear plastic covers, stapled the covers secure, and returned the shawls to their cubbyholes. As he finished the customer stood up, puffing out her white-and-pink sari.

  ‘Madam, I have one more you will definitely like,’ his father called but she was already through the shop and summoning her rickshaw-wallah.

  Silently, together, they shook the sequins from the groundsheet and one by one thumbed out the ten joss sticks lit before the images of the ten gurus.

  ‘I’ll bring the scooter round,’ Avtar said.

  ‘You go. There’s still work to do.’ It was the eighth time this month he’d insisted on staying behind. Avtar had stopped asking why, but keep counting.

  ‘I’ll come back in a couple of hours, then.’

  ‘No, no. I’ll make my own way back.’

  ‘Papa – it’s too far to walk.’

  ‘I’ll get Mohan to drop me off. Stop worrying.’

  So Avtar took the small royal-blue tin with the day’s meagre earnings and clipped it to his jeans and rode home.

  The lift was still broken at Gardenia Villas. He returned outside and checked the four public toilets to the east of the building but none had toilet paper. He’d just have to come back down after dinner with some of his own.

  He vaulted up the stairs and made it halfway up the twelfth flight before stopping for breath. It was further than he’d ever got before. He leaned against the warm wall and reread Lakhpreet’s note, pouting, wondering what her ‘news’ would be. He didn’t like surprises.

  On the landing, Mr Lal, their neighbour, sat on a fishing chair outside his front door, smoking a pipe. He’d tied a wet American-flag towel around the smoke alarm, Avtar noticed.

  ‘Young Avtar! Kaise ho?’

  ‘Good, uncle. Thank you.’

  ‘Still working the buses, I see.’

  Avtar smiled flatly.

  ‘Well. Good for you.’

  He’d got used to the man’s way of boasting, and asked, as he knew he had to, ‘Have you heard from Monty recently?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ He blew out pipe smoke. ‘Lakhs he is earning. Lakhs. The way he’s going, he’ll have his own business in Toronto soon. And then we’ll join him.’

  The jealousy always got Avtar in the gut, though he tried not to let it show. ‘I hope so. God willing.’

  ‘Nothing to do with God. You just have to go where the money is.’

  Avtar’s mother was at the stove, struggling to spark up the hob. Navjoht, his brother, sat on the spongy two-seater, a comic open on his lap.

  ‘How can we be out of gas so soon?’ his mother said. She tucked the end of her pallu into her waist and blew across the hob, trying the clicker again. It didn’t catch. ‘Beita, can you go buy some before it closes?’

  ‘I only put some in yesterday,’ Avtar said.

  He stepped over the urine bucket with its large plastic lid and twisted the gas pipe further into the stove valve. It slipped loose again so he lifted the stove a metre to the right, closer to the gas cylinder. Then the flame caught.

  ‘It’s too far from the window,’ his mother said. ‘The room will be full of smoke.’

  ‘I can move it by the sofa.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ Navjoht said, pre-emptively.

  Their mother said she needed the rice so Navjoht stood, pen clamped in his mouth, and lifted the brown sofa cushion and took up the small sack and passed it across.

  Avtar gathered his pillow and rug from on top of the sofa and moved through the shower curtain they used to screen the main room from the balcony. He rolled out the padded rug, arranged the pillow, and lay with both knees pitched up to the sky, for the balcony was too short for him to lie at full stretch. Hands behind his head, he closed his arms around his ears so all he could see was the blue above, all else in the world blocked out. He stared hard at the sky until the familiar alchemy occurred and it felt as if the blue was lifting him a
way. He smiled and closed his eyes.

  When his father arrived, twilight had fallen and the bulb on the wall cast the balcony in bronze. Avtar hadn’t meant to fall asleep and turned on his side, drawing his knees to his chest. The shower curtain was thin enough to see through and Navjoht was clearing away his books so their father could take the sofa. The old man told the boy to carry on working but Navjoht said he’d ‘continue’ in their bedroom. Probably, on hearing their father, Navjoht had switched the comics for his schoolbooks.

  ‘Another English word?’ their father said, lowering into the cushions. He kept his hands on his knees and rested his back. ‘Smells delicious, Shanti,’ he managed, still breathing hard from the climb up.

  He was as white-haired and aged as his wife was youthful. Smells delicious. The flat looks nice. That colour suits you. Sometimes Avtar thought that each compliment contained an implicit apology for the twenty-year difference in their ages.

  Later, after the small collapsible table had been folded and stowed under the sofa and the dishes washed, and after Avtar had been downstairs and back to empty the urine bucket and use the toilet proper, his parents retired to their room and Navjoht rolled out his sleeping mat with something of a waiter’s flourish. Avtar returned to his own rug on the balcony. Through the rusting white fretwork he stared out at the spread of the city. Above him, the amrood tree dangled its branch and he propped onto his elbow and broke off the fruit. Bitter. Still maybe a month too early. He threw it over the top and into the dark.

  When he thought his brother had fallen far enough asleep, Avtar rose to a crouch, then slowly onto the balls of his feet. He watched him breathing, curled up in a moonbeam, and took one step into the room. When he let go of the curtain behind him, the dark shadow closed across Navjoht like a cupboard shutting. He stepped over him and toed the urine bucket to one side so he could get at the door. Then he retracted the lock with infinitesimal slowness and slid into the mottled light of the corridor and down the thirteen flights of concrete steps and out into the night.

  He waited in the dead-end alley beside the bankrupt Bismillah cement factory. Shards of slate littered the ground. He heard voices, low tearful singing, and a band of semi-naked pilgrims filed past with wispy-haired chests, ribcages pressing out. They played their tiny cymbals and chimtas and did not once look towards Avtar in the alley, as if they’d been dismissed from the temple in howling disgrace. Above, smog dimmed the starscape, the pale-grey heights punctured only by the red dot of a plane blinking itself away.

  She arrived, nervous and beautiful. Her frock, red-blue with elasticated ribbing beneath her breasts, showed her collarbones, flaring out. Around her throat she’d tied a silk scarf. She wore these kinds of dresses more often these days. He wasn’t sure how he felt about them but he didn’t comment. She hung by his side until he circled an arm around her waist. She stalled and looked over her shoulder and then yielded.

  A year ago he could never have thought of himself as the person he was now, someone consumed with this girl and her body. He’d been aware of girls, for sure, but he’d never associated with them. His friend circle both at school and in the one year of college he’d completed had only ever consisted of boys: like-minded, serious boys, into cricket and their studies. Not the type who spoke much about girls, let alone sex; sex, as far as Avtar was concerned, was not something boys from respectable families got themselves involved in. Respectable. That was the word Avtar had used – or its formal urdu variant ‘shareef’ – when she’d stopped him in the college grounds one day.

  ‘I’ve not seen you in class,’ she’d said, as if they were already good chums.

  He’d recognized her. Lakhpreet Sanghera, from his combined studies class, the only class open to everyone. Her family had lived for a short while in the same block of flats as his, but in the larger ground-floor apartments that had their own bathrooms. She was maybe three years younger than him.

  ‘I’ve left. I came to pick up my leaver’s certificate.’ He indicated the cardboard folder in his hand. ‘You need it to get the coupons.’ He doubted she knew which coupons he meant. She didn’t look like the type of girl whose family needed state help. Wasn’t her father something in government?

  ‘Oh. That’s a shame. I liked looking at you in class.’

  He felt his face stiffen, his embarrassment fuelling a sudden anger towards her. ‘Miss, I’m from a shareef family. Please don’t trouble me again.’

  Later that evening, lying on his balcony, he wished he’d not been so rude. He thought of her large black eyes and her glossy lips and cinched turquoise tunic. He thought he’d lost her, but the very next day the PCO man said he had a phone call.

  ‘I never said you weren’t shareef.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . Miss,’ he added, regretting it even as the word left his mouth. She laughed.

  One month later they had sex in the bell tower of the cement factory. He held her tight against him, rubbing her bottom, her thighs, her long brown back. He loved how hot and flushed her skin felt against his, how perfectly her nipples pressed into his mouth. His own desire surprised him, but her need came as a shock, and when he lay on his back, spent, she moved on top, craving it once more.

  That was months ago, and now they jumped the gate round the back of the factory and snuck up the stairs. He cleared some space among the discarded timber and spread his jacket on the ground. Behind them the tower’s big iron bell hung godly and silent. In front, a few miles away, the Golden Temple shone, a tiny intimate lantern. It was a cool September night.

  He said nothing when she told him her father had won the promotion and they were leaving next month. She leaned forward and locked arms around her knees, each hand holding the other hand’s wrist. Her hair screened her face from him.

  ‘Your hair looks different.’

  ‘I used a hair press.’

  He said, ‘Chandigarh’s not far.’

  ‘Four hours ten minutes by bus.’

  He smiled, she did too, and they went inside the tower and started to take off their clothes.

  *

  The morning after he received his month’s wages, Avtar buttoned up his uniform and left the flat by 6.30 so he’d have time to call at the collector’s house and settle the rent. Then he waited at the bus stand for Harbhajan to come by, sipping the malati water his mother mixed for his winter cough. They completed two circuits before taking lunch at the Roti Dhal Stop, and where previously Avtar had always ordered two keema naans he’d now taken to ordering one, and a plain one at that. It was one of the ways he was saving money in advance for the bus trips to Chandigarh.

  ‘What’s her name?’ Harbhajan asked. ‘Otherwise why so glum, yaar?’

  Avtar gave him a disapproving look and told him to finish up or they’d be late.

  ‘I always knew you had a secret chokri hidden away.’ A little later Harbhajan said, ‘Let’s do something. Let’s hit the clubs in Delhi.’

  ‘A few weeks ago you were lost on Goa.’

  Harbhajan mopped up the last of the dhal and stuffed it into his mouth. He downed the glass of water in one and sat back and prepared to burp, but when the burp didn’t come he sank a little further in his seat and looked around, disappointed. At the next table a businessman was on his mobile, facing the slightly absurd poster of a gun-slinging pelican. A second phone lingered by his elbow at the edge of the table; Harbhajan palmed it and slipped it into his own shirt pocket. Avtar glared, eyes wide, watching his friend put on his large brown sunglasses and calmly pay the cafe owner on his way out. Avtar waited until they were back on the bus and away before asking what the bhanchod hell did he think he was doing?

  ‘He already had one, na?’

  He plucked the phone from Harbhajan’s pocket. ‘You could buy ten of these if you wanted.’

  ‘Where’s the fun in that?’

  Avtar looked at him. ‘So who did you steal those sunglasses from?’ he asked, and Harbhajan smiled through his thick, neat beard.

&nbs
p; At home, his mother was flitting through some sort of pamphlet. Her hair bun hung loose down her nape, the strands around her forehead white with flour. Avtar closed the front door.

  ‘Prove the cosine rule,’ she said tiredly.

  Navjoht fell back against the settee, as if exhausted. He was still in his school uniform. ‘Too easy again. Ask me something hard, na?’

  She handed him the booklet, saying she hadn’t realized what the time was. Rising, she lifted the sofa cushion and carried the bag of rice to the stove.

  ‘Papa?’ she asked.

  ‘Working late again,’ Avtar said.

  ‘Will you test me, bhaji? Please?’

  ‘Later, na.’

  Navjoht shut his book and, sulking, went off to his parents’ room.

  ‘Why are you late? Get the table.’

  Avtar dropped to his knees – ‘We have to go all the way to Chogawan now’ – and pulled the table out from under the sofa. ‘That kentiwallah’s gone to Dubai.’

  Pointedly, his mother said nothing.

  ‘Mr Lal says Monty’s earning thousands every month.’

  ‘Mr Lal has a slick tongue. And why are they still living next door, then? Using a bucket for their soo-soo?’

  ‘He said there’s money in Toronto.’

  ‘Avtar, we’ve spoken about this. Roti’s roti no matter where you eat it.’

  He moved to the balcony shower curtain, where his shadow loomed gigantically. His mother was still talking.

  ‘I saw Mrs Sanghera last week and even they are moving. Tomorrow. To Chandigarh.’

  It was Avtar’s turn to remain silent. She added jeera to the pan and increased the flame.

  ‘You remember them? They used to live ten, twelve floors down. They moved to that new compound by Verka last year.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘A son and three daughters. The eldest girl is pretty.’ A pause. ‘Lakhpreet. A little immature, maybe, but no matter. Girls grow up after marriage.’

  Avtar looked across to his mother, chopping onions. So she knew.

  ‘I think your papa and I will go to bed early tonight.’