The Year of the Runaways

by Sunjeev Sahota

  Mrs Manapadhay counselled against this – ‘Students can be cruel’ – but Randeep said his family relied on him and Mrs Manapadhay said very well. As long as he stayed away from Jaytha, he could remain until the weekend.

  It was a horrible week. He spent most of it in the library, avoiding everyone, entering his room only if Abhi was asleep. Word had spread. Students stared, some swore. One shoved him down the stairs.

  He arranged his suitcase and bags into a pile by the door, topping it all off with his ceramic goose lamp, and left for work. It was his final shift. Tomorrow, he’d board the first bus home. He wondered how he was going to explain everything to his mother. He wondered whether to try and contact Jaytha. He wondered if he shouldn’t just run away to Africa and start again.

  ‘What’s in Africa?’ Michael said.

  ‘Nothing. Exactly.’

  ‘Better to face things out, young man. At least then you can see who’s hurling the shit at you.’

  Randeep smiled for perhaps the first time that week. At the end of his shift, the night manager settled his wages and he walked out of the grey cement block with a small sense of being freed. The streetlights were still on. Maybe he could go to Delhi. Or Bombay. Or back to Bhubaneshwar like he’d always wanted?

  He turned into a wide passage that by day acted as a parking station for cyclists. The moon hung at the end of it. He felt edgy and walked quickly, but wasn’t even halfway when three figures slid into the lane, coming towards him. Hands in pockets, faces in shifting moon shadow. Their footsteps made no sound. His heart pumped. They’ll walk past, he told himself. Don’t be scared. But they weren’t talking to one another, and this frightened him. As they crossed, the one in the middle stared sidelong. He had an Om stud in his ear. It looked familiar. Randeep carried on, agitated. Then he knew: it was the boy who’d shoved him down the stairs. He looked over his shoulder. All three had stopped, turned.

  ‘Kaiso ho?’ the one with the ear stud asked.

  Randeep nodded. ‘I’m just going back to my room. I’m leaving in the morning.’

  They didn’t reply. He started walking again. He closed his eyes and said please God no, but no sooner had he opened them than he heard steps pounding behind him. He ran, shouting for help. At the end of the lane they tripped him up and covered his mouth with huge clothy hands. An Om-knuckled fist came driving down on his face and he heard himself groan, and then nothing.

  He felt thick-headed as he started to stir, as if a deep mist shrouded his brain. Voices, laughter, hands applied to his body. He heard, ‘Let’s see how much the high-caste fucker likes being shat on.’ He tried to speak, but clouded over again and the tiredness was too much.

  When he next came round, he was so very thirsty. He swallowed, with difficulty, and realized there was something stringy blocking his mouth. He tried flexing his jaw but it didn’t budge. He wondered what he was doing on his side. He tried to sit but couldn’t. His ankles. Who’d tied them? And his wrists. Crossed and bound behind his back. He was deep in a well. His head throbbed. They’d left him to die. He twisted his neck in wild panic: there was a light, not far. A thin beam of light. A doorway, it looked like. He was naked. No, not quite. They’d let him keep his underwear, but it felt funny, wetly padded. He rolled onto his back and – one, two, three – straightened right up. As he did so his forehead hit his knees and he felt something strange and flaky come off his skin. He bent his head to his shoulder and smelled and retched. The bile came up the walls of his throat and trickled down his chin. He began to cry. Slowly, he moved onto his knees, his bound ankles beneath him, and wriggled to the door. There were voices. His eyes widened in fear. It was them. He listened some more. It was a teacher, teaching. Someone who would help. He wriggled closer, right up to the door. A class. Students. He looked about him, his mouth still gagged. Projectors, folders, boxes of pens. He’d been locked up in the stationery cupboard. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have a choice. He banged his forehead to the door. Banging and banging. The teacher’s voice halted. Footsteps got louder. A key turned, the door opened – light! – and with a screeching mewl Randeep collapsed into the lecture hall.

  Avtar and Lakhpreet sat side by side in the waiting room. She paged through a dental magazine, of all things. He was set forward, elbows on thighs, one hand closed around the wrist of the other as if choking a small animal. He looked down at the frayed hems of his black trousers. At the candle-wax stain on his blazer that had refused to come out. Again he observed his reflection in the window and again he ran his palm over the slick side parting. The receptionist smiled into her keyboard.

  ‘Stop that,’ Lakhpreet whispered.

  ‘It’s not used to being combed like this.’

  ‘Then you should’ve left it how it was.’

  ‘Are you even sure he’s coming?’

  ‘Oh? Do you have somewhere else to be?’

  He frowned, stood up.

  ‘Sit down. Don’t be nervous.’

  ‘I’m not!’ and he sat back down, nearly missing the chair.

  Another hour passed before the door opened and Vakeelji came forward, his big bearish arms outstretched.

  ‘Baby!’

  ‘Uncle!’ Lakhpreet said, rising.

  They touched the lawyer’s feet, and he showed them into his office, apologizing for the wait. There was a time when he could walk to the club and back and not be stopped by every two-bit Ramu in the book.

  ‘But those days seem to have passed. Now even the criminals think they have a case!’

  He moved around his impressive desk with its clever inlay, and his huge tan chair crackled to accommodate a fat man getting comfortable on hard leather. Avtar and Lakhpreet had to bring in their seats from the waiting room.

  ‘And how is my friend?’ Vakeelji asked.

  ‘Same, uncle. He still can’t leave his room.’

  ‘Well, tell him to hurry up and get better. We need to get our squash games back on. I’m starting to put on weight.’

  Lakhpreet gave a sad little smile and Vakeelji patted his desk, as if it were a proxy for her head.

  ‘Give it time. And I’m here, aren’t I? Jhub hum hain tho kya ghum hai? And a few more months and I’ll have clean-fine licked that brother of yours into shape and onto a plane straight for America.’

  Lakhpreet gestured towards Avtar, shifting in his chair, alert. ‘Uncle, you remember I spoke to you about . . . If there’s something you can do.’

  The lawyer gazed at him and for the first time seemed to acknowledge this other presence in his office.

  ‘It was at Lohri, uncle,’ Lakhpreet said. ‘You said he’d need to learn English.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘It’s all he’s done for the last six months.’

  ‘When I’m not working with my papa,’ Avtar said. He didn’t want the lawyer to expect too much. ‘But my younger brother helps me. He can speak it very well. And I went to an English medium school until plus two so I could speak it a bit already.’

  ‘I see. And where do you want to go? Where did you have in mind? The south of France? The Gold Coast? Monaco, perhaps?’

  ‘If that is where I can make the most money.’

  Vakeelji seemed to allow himself a tiny smile and reached for a drawer down beside his knees. He presented Avtar with various dog-eared papers and used his gold fountain pen to point out specific clauses, options, fees. It felt as if he was going through the lawyerly motions, for Lakhpreet’s sake; as if he’d taken one look at Avtar and decided this was a waste of his time. There are several visas you can opt for, he said, dully. Ultimately, it came down to the concept of risk and reward.

  ‘And what I can afford,’ Avtar said.

  ‘Naturally.’ The marriage route was usually the most expensive, but you could work legally and it more or less guaranteed full rights after one year. It could sometimes take some time to find the right girl. At the opposite end, holiday visas were cheaper, but you can’t work and you have to come back.
‘Many don’t, of course. But then many don’t find work either. So they starve in a shed at the bottom of some chacha’s garden.’ He could always get Avtar there illegally – there was a truck leaving UP only next week. Higher chance of getting caught on the way, but cheaper, and if you made it and found work you’d generally do well. If he were to get caught then the lawyer and agent fees, it went without saying, were non-refundable.

  ‘He’s not going illegally,’ Lakhpreet said. ‘They die on the way.’

  ‘There have been many sad incidents, yes.’

  ‘She mentioned a student visa,’ Avtar said, meaning Lakhpreet.

  ‘That is another option.’ He turned the piece of paper over and directed Avtar towards the relevant section. ‘Usually for one year but if you’re good the institution will keep you on. I had one boy who went to a college in Wisconsin. Eight years now and he’s a lecturer earning more than me. His whole family has moved there. American citizens all.’

  Avtar nodded cautiously, fearful of being drawn into such wishful dreaming.

  ‘Of course, most of our boys enrol on day one and start work on day two. Usually in one of those takeaway houses. And then they go into hiding. They don’t think about the long view. Only concerned with what they can earn now.’

  ‘It’s hard not to be, uncle. When you’ve got a hungry family back home.’

  At the end of the discussion Vakeelji walked them into the waiting room, where the receptionist quickly minimized her screen. The student visa form was secure in Avtar’s hand, his hand pressed against his thigh. He kept rubbing his thumb along the edge of the folded paper. He thanked the lawyer, who was busy talking to Lakhpreet.

  ‘Tell bhabhi I’ve not forgotten. I’m hoping for a suitable girl later this month. He’s not getting off that easily, the rogue.’

  ‘Thank you, uncle,’ Lakhpreet said, and with the most girlish of movements tipped up onto her toes and left an elegant kiss on the lawyer’s cheek.

  The money the lawyer was asking: Avtar didn’t know how he’d ever earn that much, even if they did remortgage the shop. And Navjoht’s school fees were coming up. And the rent and bills. He reached a window in the stairwell, traffic glowing below. Nothing in their lives was working and the city lay there roaring its indifference. What a world.

  Trudging up the final steps, he had to flatten himself against the wall so two men carrying a large TV could pass by. Avtar’s neighbour, Mr Lal, stood at the top.

  ‘I’ll call my son. I’m sure there’s been a mistake,’ he said, voice quivering.

  The men looked up from their squatting position. It was a big TV. ‘Tell him to cough up or we’ll be back for the rest.’

  Avtar ventured up a few steps. ‘Is everything all right, uncle?’

  Mr Lal frowned, probably annoyed that Avtar had witnessed this, wondering who else in the building would find out. ‘Fine,’ he said, snapped, and disappeared into his flat.

  During the evening, Avtar sat with his family around the small fold-out table, eating the plain rice and wet potatoes his mother had prepared. It was a pitiful meal.

  ‘The lady with the red bangles came again,’ his father said. ‘I think soon she’ll be placing a sizeable order. Didn’t you think so?’

  Afterwards, his father lay on the settee and Navjoht opened the English newspaper they bought at half price from a man who passed by the shop each evening. Avtar stepped through the shower curtain and onto the warm concrete of the balcony. He crossed his arms on the railing, his knee nosing familiarly into the fretwork. It was a greasy airless night. Crickets scratched in the hot spaces and leaves from the amrood tree hung drily by his face. He could hear Mr and Mrs Lal arguing next door. He reached up and closed his hand around a gnarled branch, right where branch met trunk, and ripped at it and ripped at it until all that was left was the white wound.

  His mother called him to take the empty gas cylinder to Karthik’s, and to make sure he got a fair price this time.

  ‘Tell Navjoht.’

  ‘He’s emptying the bucket.’

  Avtar pushed off the balcony, throwing the branch aside, and lifted the gas cylinder to his shoulder. When he got back, his brother still wasn’t there.

  ‘Downstairs. Teaching. Earning.’

  ‘I thought I was his only student.’

  ‘You were his first,’ his mother said.

  He told them he’d been to see a lawyer. A good one. An honest one who said he’d help. He explained about the student visa and when his father asked how much Avtar told him a figure that was less than half of what the lawyer had said.

  His father looked concerned. ‘We’ll sell the shop.’

  Avtar laughed. It was typical, reassuring even, of his father to go straight for the big and obvious answer. ‘We could just take out a loan against it. And I’ll start paying that back as soon as I find work over there.’

  ‘A loan. Yes. So we can keep the shop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you think they will lend us that much?’

  ‘I think so, Papa. I’ll find out.’

  ‘Yes. Find out.’

  ‘Do you have to go? Can you not find work here?’ It was his mother, speaking from the kitchen, her back to them.

  ‘It’s been over six months, Mamma. And I’ll be back in a year. Maybe two. And then you can get me married and I can try again for work here. But at least we’ll have money.’

  ‘And Navjoht will be working by then,’ his father said.

  ‘How will you pay his college fees if you’re paying for this loan-shoan?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll do two jobs. Maybe he’ll have to wait a year. But at least there’s a chance it can work. There’s nothing for me if I stay here.’

  ‘There’s us,’ his mother said, turning sharply. Her sari had snagged on a nail in the counter and strained almost indecently across her body. ‘There’s your family.’

  Avtar was silent. She turned back round and after a while her hand hovered over the two small mangoes ripening on the window-sill, wondering which to choose for a dessert.

  He didn’t know how he was going to earn the rest of the money. Each morning for two weeks he dressed in his blazer, shirt and trousers and took the bus round the city. He tried the same places he’d tried several times already this year – the rubber factory, the software firm, the rickshaw hiring company. The manager of Parvati Jewellery Emporium didn’t even wait for Avtar to speak.

  ‘Same as last time, yaara. Nothing.’

  ‘But I can speak English now, sir. You said if I could speak English.’

  ‘Sorry,’ and the man went back to arranging his female busts.

  The evenings he devoted to whatever new list of English phrases his brother had drawn up. Where can I locate the train station? The weather today is very fine. Might I interest you in a cup of tea? He’d lie on the balcony, list in hand, the stars encouraging while at his side a white candle burned steadily down to its little hot pocket of wax.

  *

  He was coming back from the mandi, blazer hooked over his shoulder, when Navjoht ran to meet him.

  ‘They’re being kicked out!’ he exclaimed. ‘Uncle and Aunty.’

  A truck was parked outside Gardenia Villas, piled high with a florid sofa, a French-looking dining table, several cabinets, beds. A whole flatful of stuff. There were police, too, to oversee the exchange. Beyond the truck, the neighbours had gathered, Avtar’s parents among them.

  ‘What will they do?’ Navjoht asked.

  Mrs Lal was weeping onto the shoulder of her husband, who was, in turn, stroking her head.

  ‘Their son. He wasn’t earning much, after all.’

  A man got out of the truck – the same man Avtar had seen removing the television – and clicked his fingers. Mr Lal handed over the keys. Then he took up the suitcase by his feet and led his wife away from the building. No one knew where they were going, though six months later the gaswallah would say he’d seen poor Mr and Mrs Lal rattling a can outside
Harminder Sahib. For now, the old couple passed by Avtar and he reached out and touched Mr Lal’s shoulder, but it was a faint touch, not enough to detain anyone.

  *

  He had to press the buzzer twice before the chowkidar appeared, yawning. He flicked his eyebrows at Avtar: what did he want?

  ‘I’m here to see Harbhajan Sahib. I’m his friend.’

  ‘What friend? Harbhajan Sahib has many, many friends. Friends who use his car. Friends who take his money. Which one are you?’

  ‘Is Nirmalji here?’

  The man spat at the ground. So, no one was in. He wouldn’t have dared spit like that otherwise. Avtar asked when they’d be home but the chowkidar laughed and told him to go and piss on someone else’s doorstep. He headed back down the avenue. Perhaps if he went straight to the bus depot Nirmalji would be there. A woman called to him. She held a watering can and wore a tatty brown sari. A maid. She stood on the other side of her gate and asked what Avtar knew of Nirmalji’s situation. More specifically, his son’s. Probably her madam had tasked her with finding out details, and probably each detail earned her a few extra rupees.

  ‘About what?’ Avtar asked.

  ‘The shor-tamasha all night.’ It seemed an ambulance had been called at about four in the morning and the son carried out on a stretcher. ‘You should have seen the poor mother. I hear they’ve gone to that private one. Do you know?’

  He whistled for a rickshaw, bribed the deskman with twenty rupees and followed his directions past the children’s ward and up the thin stairwell. At the top, through a square window in the door, he saw Harbhajan. He looked asleep. A red drip sprouted from his hand and connected to the stand by his bed. The stand had four wheels, Avtar noticed. Beside Harbhajan was Nirmalji, wearing a face that expressed nothing more than stately forbearance.

  It must have been five months since he’d last met his friend. That time, after another week of empty searching, he’d asked Harbhajan to speak to Nirmalji about giving him his old job back. Harbhajan had blankly refused, saying he wasn’t going to do anything that involved asking a favour from his father. Angry, Avtar ignored all of Harbhajan’s calls in the weeks that followed, and then the calls dwindled to the occasional message, and, later, Harbhajan stopped contacting him altogether.