The Year of the Runaways

by Sunjeev Sahota

  The Ganesh clock balanced between TV and wall said a little after eight when Avtar stole out of the flat and walked the three miles to the temple. She was waiting in the shadow of the main gate. Her salwaar kameez was blue, without embroidery or effect. Her hair she’d tied up and covered simply with a white chunni. For once, she wore neither make-up nor colour.

  ‘You nervous?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m impatient. Let’s do it.’

  They slipped off their shoes and sandals and stepped through the shallow water trough. Before them, the gold temple sat in its medieval lake, the black liquid surface glimmering with grand reflections distorted by the complications of light on water. The marble was warm under their feet, and damp.

  ‘We should wash first,’ he said.

  ‘Fine.’

  It was said with an edge of irritation. He knew she was only doing this because it was important to him, because he wanted them to make a promise before God.

  ‘So melodramatic!’ she’d said. ‘You don’t trust me.’

  ‘I just know what these Chandigarh goons are like. And I don’t want them anywhere near you.’ He took her in his arms. ‘I really do love you.’

  ‘And you? While I’m over there will you let anyone else near you?’

  ‘I’m only human,’ he’d said, and she’d blocked him in the ribs.

  He watched her cross towards the female bathing room on the steps of the lake, ducking to enter. He took off his shirt and rolled his trousers above his knees. He went down the steps and into the lake and when he was waist-deep he reached under for the chain and walked further out until the water reached his neck and he could taste the salt on his lips. He held his breath and bent forward until the water covered him completely and then he rose back up and said the first verse of the japji sahib. He went under again, and again, until he had completed all five verses and then he returned, hand over hand on the red chain, shivering as he reached for his shirt. It was late, and the japji was a morning prayer, but what they were doing felt like a new beginning.

  She emerged from the bathing room dressed, her face glistening sharp in the moonlight.

  ‘You ready?’ she called.

  A widow in a white kameez handed them a bowl of prasad. The bowl was made of overlapping palm leaves and they held it between them and carried it up the marble pier and to the temple in the centre of the lake. Two men knelt praying on either side of the doorway. Avtar and Lakhpreet bowed their heads and said a small prayer before stepping over the threshold. The Guru Granth Sahib lay open on its bed of gold and glass. Avtar’s trousers still dripped water. He placed the offering at the granth’s feet and they folded onto their knees and touched their foreheads to the ground. Then they went slowly round the chamber and bowed their heads three more times, on each side of the granth. They left by the same door through which they’d entered, walked back down the marble pier, around the lake, and out of the large open gates.

  ‘Did you make the promise?’ Avtar asked.

  ‘I said I would and I did.’

  ‘But you’re sure? I’ll understand if you want to change your mind.’

  She looked at him, her smooth forehead suddenly constricting. ‘Will you? Will you really? And what was the point of this if we’re just going to change our minds?’

  ‘I don’t want to force you.’

  ‘Uff, janum, you forget I want to marry you. Even with your romantic delusions. I just don’t think we needed to go through all this drama first.’

  He nodded and, absurdly, thanked her.

  She gave a little laugh. ‘So next year, after I finish my plus two, we’ll come back here and get married?’

  ‘I don’t think my family could afford it here.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be here.’

  They walked to Jalianwala Bagh Road and kissed for several minutes behind the gates to the museum, tongues thick, hips fighting. Then Avtar called over an idling auto-rickshaw. ‘PCO me when you arrive, acha?’

  ‘Try and come every month,’ she said and climbed into the ripped seats of the auto. She was looking away. He put his hand on her cheek and turned her face towards him. Her white chunni had fallen off her head and her eyes were brimming. He went round and gave the driver her address.

  *

  It was four in the morning and the peppermint-roofed government car was waiting outside. The truck with their furniture had gone on ahead. Randeep tried the bathroom door again.

  ‘Daddy, are you OK? Please just tell us if you’re all right. We’re getting worried.’

  Behind Randeep, his mother said, ‘Remind him of all the people I had to beg for this chance at a new life.’

  The handle turned, the door swung in and Randeep’s father stood there looking over their heads, his whole face quivering. He spread one hand along the frame and took a slow step forward. He stopped, looked down.

  ‘I can’t do this, Paramveer. I’m so sorry, dear.’

  Mrs Sanghera unpinned her black shawl and arranged it around her husband’s shoulders. ‘You’re not going to be very warm in just that vest, are you?’

  She took his hand in her own, an unfamiliar intimacy that forced Randeep to look away.

  ‘We’re all here with you. The car’s waiting right outside the compound. Shall we go together? One step at a time?’

  He moved into the hall, head fixed straight at his feet.

  ‘That’s it. And I’m sorry for raising my voice.’

  ‘I deserve it. What kind of a man am I?’

  She looked over her shoulder and told Randeep to make sure the last two Italian suitcases were packed and that his sisters were ready. ‘I’ll lock up.’

  Randeep took the lift down, grabbing his college satchel from where it lay propped against the door. The night was clear and the compound gardens chippered with insects. Beyond the gate, the driver rested his hip against the door of the jeep, smoking a beedi. The suitcases were strapped to the roof and folded into the back were the twins, Ekam and Raji. He threw in his satchel and asked where Baby was.

  He found her sitting on a child’s swing in a rubber-decked corner of the gardens. He peered over the iron railings and clinked his kara twice against the bars.

  ‘You ready?’

  ‘How’s Daddy?’

  ‘He’s coming. Mamma’s with him.’

  She took a deep, galvanizing breath, as if about to meet her maker, and glided through the gardens, the gates and down to the jeep. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her wear a salwaar kameez. Girls, he thought. Making a drama out of a simple move.

  The doors to the apartment block opened and Mrs Sanghera led her husband out, holding both his hands and walking backwards, as if he were blindfolded. At the jeep, Randeep opened the door and could only watch sadly as his father scrambled inside. Mrs Sanghera told Baby to pass her father his beads.

  ‘Baby?’ And then, louder, ‘Lakhpreet?’

  ‘Sorry, Mamma?’

  ‘The beads.’

  The driver flicked his beedi high and away, and Randeep watched the wire of orange light trace itself on the air. He got in the front and moved to roll down the window, then stopped, not sure how his father would react. The driver started the engine and asked sahib if they were ready. When his father didn’t reply, Randeep quickly said they were. An owl hooted.

  ‘Isn’t that meant to be good luck?’ Randeep asked brightly, into a general and moody silence.

  Avtar gave up cleaning his bus’s windows – he seemed to be applying more dirt than he was removing – and whistled his way round the cells of parked buses towards the glass office at the back. The light was dingier here, brownish, and though it struggled to penetrate the smeary windows of the office, it did look as if that was Nirmalji sitting at his desk today. Avtar rolled down his sleeves and applied a hand to his chest – yes, his shirt was done up; yes, there was a pen in his pocket. He knocked on the open door.

  ‘Salaam, sahib.’

  Nirmalji’s head rose from his
rota book and he didn’t quite smile. In this pose of stillness he looked like his son: bearded, turbaned and small-eyed, full of neck and face, though with more gold rings on his hands than Harbhajan wore. Sreenath, another conductor, had packaged his neat Brahmin body onto the side bench. He was an eighty-plus bald gummy gossip who’d worked here longer than anyone else. A white tikka stippled with grains of rice seemed a more or less permanent feature of his forehead. Nirmalji spoke.

  ‘Son, I need you to be here next Sunday. The Chabba route.’

  ‘OK, sahib.’

  ‘I said that farm boy would not last long,’ Sreenath said. ‘These pindu-logh never do.’

  Avtar sat beside Sreenath and while the old man shared his gutter tales – ‘They say he was seen leaving her room . . .’ – Avtar mentally cancelled his trip to see Lakhpreet next Sunday. It had been the same last month. He wasn’t sure when they’d ever see each other again.

  A roar sounded, startling Avtar onto his feet, and Harbhajan powered towards them on a red-and-chrome motorbike, popping the air with glints of light on metal. He snatched off his sunglasses, beaming as he walked to the office, calling for Avtar to come see, come see. He made it to the door before spying his father.

  ‘How come you’re here?’ Harbhajan said. There was a note of fear in his voice.

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘I was buying my new bike.’

  ‘What nonsense is this?’

  Harbhajan indicated to Avtar that they should get going.

  ‘You will take it back,’ Nirmalji said.

  ‘I’m not taking it back.’

  This seemed to be how they always spoke to each other: a stiff, reproachful back-and-forth. Nirmalji walked out.

  ‘Family members must get paid more than the rest of us,’ Sreenath observed.

  ‘Oh, fuck off, you old fool,’ Harbhajan flashed and walked off too. Avtar heard the door of their bus being yanked open, then slamming shut.

  Sreenath chuckled and started attacking his teeth with a toothpick. ‘Robbing his own father.’ He tutted. ‘I feel very sorry for Nirmalji. Don’t you?’

  Avtar told the old man about the diversions he’d seen that morning around Circular Road and to take the Gobindgarh junction instead. If he was still doing that route.

  Harbhajan didn’t say much on the road that week. He didn’t acknowledge the other bus drivers as they passed and responded only with a tight nod to the uncles and bibis who asked after his mother and father. During breaks between routes, he bought his meal from the Roti Dhal Stop and took it outside, alone. Avtar ate his food inside the restaurant, under the half-hearted whirr of a wire-mesh fan. He knew his friend’s sunken moods well enough and was waiting for the flare of madness that always followed them, like blood spreading through water.

  They were finishing up one evening, Avtar counting and rubber-banding the takings, when Harbhajan held down the horn and an excessively violent sound erupted into the twilight. Avtar jumped, coins fell, and a man cycling home wobbled off his bike. Harbhajan flopped back, laughing. Avtar bent to retrieve the coins from under the seats.

  ‘Yaar, we’re going to a party next week. Friday night. Be ready.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ Avtar said.

  ‘You’re really not,’ and he clicked his fingers for the money. Avtar had no choice other than to hand it over, but as the lumpy mustard-coloured bag passed between them he felt uneasy.

  ‘Make sure you give it all to your father, acha? It’s my neck on the line if you don’t.’

  ‘Of course. What else am I going to do with it?’

  No more was mentioned about the party, but after work on the appointed day Harbhajan arrived at the flat, bending to touch Avtar’s mother’s feet.

  ‘Ah, what a good boy. Aaja – come in.’

  ‘Next time, aunty. We’re late.’ Avtar drew the shower curtain aside and was coming through from the balcony as Harbhajan said, lied, ‘It’s my birthday. We thought we’d go for a burger-cola. Is that OK?’

  They drove straight out of the city on Harbhajan’s new motorbike. The engine was fierce and Avtar gripped the metal handle behind him, feeling the warm air sear past, taking determined hold of his hair. For a minute he feared they were heading into Pakistan, but Harbhajan swerved east at the roundabout.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Avtar called.

  ‘You’ll see!’

  He’d expected him to turn off the GT Road at Kapurthala – Harbhajan had been seeing a girl there – but he carried straight on and some ninety minutes after leaving Avtar’s flat they slowed into the flashy nightlife of Jalandhar. Toes on the ground, Harbhajan nosed the bike through the crowds and parked it among others at a leaning rack. Above them, Rainak Bazaar spun in neon revolutions, the k dimmed out.

  Avtar stalled Harbhajan with a hand to the shoulder. ‘What’s the place called?’

  ‘1771.’

  ‘Blue?’

  Harbhajan grinned and carried on.

  The lane seemed to strip on for miles. Then, without warning, Harbhajan stopped and said he thought he’d missed it. He turned on his heel and saw the jeweller’s he’d apparently been looking for.

  ‘It wasn’t shuttered up last time.’

  They snuck along the trickle of an alley down the side of the shop and at the end of this, several wider lanes branched into view. No light seemed to enter them.

  ‘Do you think it’s this way?’ Harbhajan said.

  ‘Yaar, I don’t think—’

  His friend walked off and, exasperated, Avtar followed.

  The window of the bar was black, with 1771 gold-stamped across in a cheap diagonal. The long downstrokes of the 7s morphed into a woman’s fishnetted legs. At the door, a man in a white kurta was talking sweetly into his phone of how glad he was they were getting married soon. Harbhajan clicked his fingers and showed the man some sort of card or ticket which allowed them up the stairs and through double doors with large porthole windows.

  At first it seemed that there weren’t many people present – Avtar counted only three women and a man at the bar. The place felt strange and he realized there was no music, only sibilant conversations and smoky laughter, and these he traced to the unlit corners of the room, where women sat with the men who’d picked them up.

  The man at the bar slid off his stool and with each step his smile widened and his arms opened out, as if feet and hands and mouth were all connected by some complicated puppetry. His wide-collared orange shirt looked crisp in the dim light, and his eyes were jittery green.

  ‘Driver sahib! I had a bet you would still come.’ He looked to one of the dark corners of the room, where a pair of slender female calves were closing around a leg wrapped in its tube of denim. ‘Rustom, you owe me. Our turbaned master has, after all, come.’ No response came from that quarter. ‘He’s busy,’ the man laughed.

  ‘This is my friend Avtar. Avtar, this is Venkatesh.’

  Avtar said hi, but Venkatesh just kept smiling at Harbhajan. ‘What would you like to drink, friend? Anything you want. Anything.’

  There was a slight rounding out of Harbhajan’s shoulders as he said, ‘You know what I want. Get it me.’

  Venkatesh beamed, as if he’d expected to have to work harder than this. ‘As you wish, huzoor. They are all upstairs.’

  ‘I’ll be ten minutes, yaar,’ Harbhajan said, eyes fixed on a door at the back of the room. ‘Will you wait for me?’

  ‘What’s upst—?’

  Venkatesh said that of course Avtar would wait and, in fact, Sonya would look after him, won’t you, baby? With that, Harbhajan strode for the door, Venkatesh rushing on behind like a little meerkat, and somehow Avtar was left standing in the centre of the floor, alone.

  He moved to the end of the bar, away from the girls, and sat with arms folded on the gleaming black of the counter, his legs right-angled around a corner. He looked at his watch and decided to give it twenty minutes. Then he’d go and drag him out. It was drugs, obviously. The stupid idiot had got
himself sick on drugs.

  Twenty minutes came and went and then a further ten, and now again Avtar checked his watch. Another five, he decided. He sat there tapping his thumbnails together, pinching back the cuticles. One of the girls eased smoothly onto the stool beside him. She placed her glamorous purse carefully on the bar and just as carefully crossed her legs and put both hands on her knees, below where her red skirt stopped. She had big curls and pink lipstick that made her already sullen face look even more so.

  ‘I’ll have a Mumbai Sling.’

  ‘I’ve no money.’

  ‘Why did you come here with no money?’

  ‘Why did you?’

  She unclipped and unzipped her purse and held up a plastic card. ‘What will you have?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Does my money offend you?’

  ‘Not your money. How you earn it.’

  ‘Good. So what will you have? I have orders to look after you.’

  He said nothing, then asked, ‘Is Sonya your real name?’

  ‘Harinderjeet.’

  ‘A good name. A strong name.’

  He could see her face in the bar’s surface, frowning as she returned the card to her purse. ‘Is Sonya not a nice name?’

  He felt her leaning in.

  ‘A sexy name?’

  He flinched away. She laughed.

  ‘Are you a pindu farm boy? Because they’re usually the disgusted ones. Either they rush on their clothes and run out or they stand there telling me how ashamed I make them feel, how if I was their sister they’d definitely beat me . . . Strange boys.’

  ‘If you were my sister I’d feel ashamed, too. But only a coward would hit a woman.’

  ‘Ah, so you are a pindu.’

  ‘I’m just an honest and hard-working Indian.’

  She sighed, as if bored. ‘You say that as if you’re the only one.’

  He looked at his watch, then around the room again. Nothing had changed. ‘Who’s up there?’

  She shrugged. ‘Could be anyone. Maybe even your sister.’

  He slid off the stool and went round the bar and through the door. A short flight of lavishly carpeted stairs brought him to a second entrance beyond which he could hear the undefined mangle of music and chatter. The guard dozed in his chair so Avtar shouldered through the surprisingly heavy door and into what looked like a slapdash gambling den. There were flimsy card tables covered in threadbare green, and matka stands and shoot-’em-up video games and a tribe of college-looking boys intent on the money machines. He could hear other accents – UK, American – brought here by their desi cousins in a bid to impress. He saw Venkatesh first, slumped against the jukebox, head lolling low. He looked asleep. Avtar shook his shoulder hard, and slowly, as if it were a giant weight, Venkatesh rolled up his head. His eyes had lost their shimmer and as he slewed his head from side to side, gibbering, he looked amused to have found Avtar standing there.