The Year of the Runaways (3 page)

He paced himself and rolled out the dough-balls methodically. Four rolls up, turn it round, four rolls more, a pinch more flour, three more rolls on each side and then into the pan. He found himself whistling even as his upper arms filled with a rich, dull ache. There was movement around the house: radio alarms, the thrust of a tap. He quickened up and once the rotis were done and wrapped he dumped the frying pans in the sink for whoever would be on washing duty that night and replaced them on the hob with four large steel pans of water, full gas. He added tea bags, cloves, fennel and sugar and while all that boiled he gathered up the five flasks and dozen Tupperware boxes stacked on the windowsill. Each box bore a name written in felt-tip Panjabi. He found an extra box for his new room-mate, Tochi, and spooned in some potato sabzi from the fridge. As he carried a six-litre carton of milk to the hob, Gurpreet wandered in, the bib of his dungarees dangling half undone. He was pinning his turban into place.

‘All finished? Thought you might have needed some help again.’

Randeep flushed but concentrated on pouring the milk into the pans.

‘Clean the bucket after you wash, acha?’ Gurpreet went on, moving to the Tupperware boxes. ‘None of your servants here.’

He had cleaned it, he was sure he had, and his family had never had servants. He didn’t say anything. He just watched Gurpreet moving some of the sabzi from the other boxes, including Randeep’s, and adding it to his own. He wondered if he did this with everyone or only when it was Randeep on the roti shift.

‘Where’s your new friend from?’

Randeep said he didn’t know, that he went to sleep straight away.

‘His name?’

‘Tochi.’

‘Surname, fool.’

Randeep thought for a moment, shrugged. ‘Never said.’

‘Hmm. Strange.’

Randeep didn’t say a word, didn’t know what he was driving at, and stood silently waiting for the pans to come to the boil again. He had the twitchy sensation he was being stared at. Sure enough, Gurpreet was still there by the fridge, eyes fixed.

‘Bhaji?’ Randeep asked. Gurpreet grunted, seemed to snap out of it and left, then the hiss of the tea had Randeep leaping to turn off the gas.

Soon the house was a whirl of voices and feet and toilet flushes and calls to get out of bed. They filed down, rucksacks slung over sleepy shoulders, taking their lunchbox from the kitchen counter; next a rushed prayer at the joss stick and out into the cold morning dark in twos and threes, at ten-minute intervals. Randeep looked for Tochi but he must have gone ahead, so he paired up with Avtar as usual. Before he left the house he remembered to take up the pencil strung and taped to the wall and he scored a firm thick tick next to his name on the rota.

Overnight, the ground had toughened, compacted, and at the end of the morning they were still staking it out while Langra John – Limpy John – and three other white men went about in yellow JCBs.

‘Wish I had that job,’ Randeep said, closing his lunchbox. ‘Just driving about all day.’

Avtar clucked his tongue. ‘One day, my friend. Keep working hard and one day we’ll be the bosses.’

Randeep leaned back against the aluminium tunnel. He shut his eyes and must have nodded off for a while because the next thing he heard was the insistent sound of Gurpreet’s voice.

‘But you must have a pind. Was that in Calcutta too?’

Tochi was sitting against a low wall, the soles of his boots pressed together and knees thrown wide open.

‘I’m talking to you,’ Gurpreet said.

‘My pind’s not in Calcutta.’

‘Where, then?’

Tochi swigged from his water bottle and took his time screwing the top back on. He had a quiet voice. ‘Bihar.’

Gurpreet looked round at everyone as if to say, Didn’t I tell you? ‘So what are you?’

Avtar spoke up. ‘Arré, this is England, yaar. Leave him.’

‘Ask him his bhanchod name.’

Shaking his head, Avtar turned to Tochi. ‘What are you? Ramgarhia? Saini? Just shut him up.’

‘Ask him his bhanchod name, I said.’

Tochi made to get up, frost crackling underfoot. ‘Tarlochan Kumar.’

Randeep frowned a little but hoped no one saw it.

‘A bhanchod chamaar,’ Gurpreet said, laughing. ‘Even the bhanchod chamaars are coming to England.’

‘Who cares?’ Avtar said.

‘Only backward people care,’ Randeep said, but Gurpreet was still laughing away to himself and then John limped up and said they better get a move on.

‘Do you think he’s got a visa?’ Randeep asked, when they started up again.

Avtar looked at him. ‘When did you last meet a rich chamaar?’

‘His parents might have helped him.’

‘Janaab, don’t go asking him about his parents. He’s probably an orphan.’

That evening Gurpreet knocked on their bedroom door and said he and a few of the others were going out, so Randeep and Tochi would have to help with the milk run. ‘You’ve got Tesco.’

‘Where are you going?’ Randeep asked and Gurpreet made a fist and pumped it down by his crotch.

‘And stop buying those bhanchod cloves and whatnot. We don’t have money to waste, little prince.’

Randeep waited until he heard him on the stairs, out of earshot. ‘He’s that ugly he has to pay for it.’

Tochi was threading his belt around himself. The swish of it sliced the air. ‘You’ll have to do it yourself.’

‘I can’t carry all that milk. Do you know how far it is? Can’t you help me?’

‘Join one of the others.’

‘But we can’t all go to the same place. The gora gets suspicious.’

Tochi said nothing.

‘I respect you, bhaji,’ Randeep said. ‘Can’t you help me?’

On Ecclesall Road the roadworks still hadn’t finished and the street was all headlights and banked-up snow. Randeep pulled his woolly hat lower over his ears and marched through. Tarlochan only had on his jeans and a shirt which kept belling in the wind. His jeans had no pockets, as if they’d been torn, and his hands looked raw-white with cold, like the claws of some sea creature.

‘Next time I will insist you borrow my gloves,’ Randeep said. ‘You can have them. I have two pairs.’

As they passed the turn-off for the Botanical Gardens, Randeep pointed. ‘That’s where Avtar bhaji’s second job is. Through the gardens and carry on straight.’

‘Whose garden is it?’

‘No one’s. Everyone’s. Maybe the government’s. But they’re pretty. I always think it’s like we have the city, then the gardens, then the countryside.’ He nodded towards the hills, made smoothly charcoal by the night. ‘Shall we go there one day? To the countryside?’

‘How many apneh work with your friend?’

Privately, Randeep felt ‘apneh’ was perhaps a little too far, given their background. ‘A few, but no one else from the house. You looking for a second job too?’

He didn’t say anything. Instead he turned sharp left down a road, his head bent low. Randeep yelled his name, then ran to catch up.

‘Police,’ Tochi said, still walking.

Randeep turned round and saw the blue lights revolving by. ‘No visa, then.’

‘I guess not.’

‘How did you get here? Ship or truck?’

‘On your mother’s cunt.’

Randeep stared glumly into a dark coffee-shop window. It didn’t seem to matter how hard he tried.

‘Sorry,’ Tochi said. He looked annoyed with himself.

‘I’m on a marriage visa.’ Randeep expected a reaction but got none. ‘I got married,’ he went on, aware he was starting to blather. ‘To a girl. She came over to Panjab. From London. But she’s here now. In Sheffield, I mean.’

‘So why not live with her?’

‘She’s Sikhni. But I’m not that bothered, if I’m honest with you, bhaji. I’m going to take some clothes over soon but that’s it. It’s just one year, get my stamp, pay her the money, get the divorce, then bring my parents and sisters over. It’s all agreed with Narinderji.’ And he wished he’d not said her name. He felt like he’d revealed something of himself.

They bought milk, flour, bread, potatoes and toilet roll and went back to the house. Others were returning with their milk and shopping too, and it all got piled into the fridge, done for another week.

*

Randeep took a step back from the door and looked up to the window. The light was on. He rang the doorbell again and this time heard feet on the stairs and Narinderji appeared on the other side of the thick glass – ‘I’m coming, I’m coming’ – and let him in.

‘Sorry I was in the middle of my paat.’

‘I didn’t realize,’ Randeep said, following her up to the flat.

With each step his suitcase hit the side of his leg, and, as he entered, the gurbani was still playing. She hadn’t changed anything much. It was all very plain. The single plain brown leather settee. A plain tablecloth. The bulb was still without its shade. Only the blackout curtains looked new. A pressure cooker was whistling on the stove, and the whole worktop was a rich green pasture of herbs. In the corner, between the window and her bedroom door, she’d created a shrine: some kind of wooden plinth swathed in a gold-tasselled ramallah, and on top of this both a brass kandha and a picture each of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind. In front of the plinth, on a cushion, her gutka lay open, bound in orange cloth, and beside that a stereo player. The gurbani began to fade out and the CD clicked mournfully off. Randeep set his case by the settee.

‘How have you been?’

‘I’m getting used to it.’ Her hands were clasped loosely over her long black cardigan.

‘You are getting to know your way around?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘At least the weather is getting a smidgen better now. I thought the snow would never stop.’

She gave a tiny smile but said nothing. Randeep wondered if she just wanted him to hurry up and leave again. He knelt before his case and thumbed the silver dials until the thing snapped open.

‘Well, as I said on the phone, I’ve brought some clothes and things for you to keep here.’

He draped a pair of matching shirts across the creased rump of the settee, along with some black trousers and starched blue jeans, all still on their bent wire hangers. He took a white carrier bag tied in a knot at the top and left this on the table. ‘Shaving cream, aftershave, that kind of thing. And also some underwear,’ he added in the casual manner he’d practised on the way down. Then he reached back into his suitcase and handed her a slim red felt album. ‘And these are the photographs I think we – you – should hang up.’

He watched her palming through the pages. The first few were taken on their wedding day, in a gurdwara outside his city of Chandigarh. The later ones showed them enjoying themselves, laughing in a Florentine garden, choosing gifts at a market. ‘They look believable to me,’ she said.

‘Vakeelji sorted it all out. He said sometimes they ask to see where we went on holiday.’ He sidestepped saying ‘honeymoon’. ‘There are dates on the back.’

‘Are there stamps on our passports?’

‘It’s all taken care of.’

Suddenly, her nose wrinkled and she held the album face-out towards him: the two of them posing in a busy restaurant, his arm around her waist.

‘Vakeelji said there have to be signs of – intimacy.’ He’d looked past her as he’d uttered the word.

‘I don’t care what Vakeelji said.’ She shut the album and dropped it onto the settee. ‘This isn’t what I agreed to.’

He felt himself getting riled, as if discarding the photos in some way reflected her feelings towards him. ‘Look, can’t we just do what Vakeelji said? I’m the one with everything to lose here.’

‘I’ve put a lot at stake too.’

‘Yes. I’m certain you have. And I’m very thankful for all you’re doing. I’m sorry if that isn’t clear. We won’t use the photos.’

The silence seemed calculated, forcing her to relent.

‘Most are fine to use,’ she said, and he nodded and retrieved the album.

‘I only hope we’ve got enough. I’m hearing rumours of raids.’

There was a sort of frozen alarm in her face which thawed to incomprehension. ‘You think this place will be raided? By who?’

‘It’s just people at work talking. And there are always rumours. But it’s better to be prepared. Maybe I should come and live here?’ he said, testing the water a little.

The shock of the suggestion seemed to force her mouth to open.

‘I was not being serious.’

‘It’s too small. And the weather,’ she said, randomly.

‘I understand completely,’ he said, layering smiles over his disappointment. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so warm in a house, with food smelling as good as that on the cooker.

She made to walk him to the door.

‘Shall I help you with this first? It’s not fair to leave you to pack it all away.’ Delay tactics. She said she’d do it later. That it wasn’t a problem. Reluctantly, Randeep followed her down the stairs. As she opened the door he took the notes out of his pocket and handed them to her.

‘Another month,’ she said. ‘The year will be over before we know it.’

‘Yes!’ he replied, shaking his head, as if amazed how quickly the time was passing, when really it seemed to him that each new week took on the span of an entire age.

After he’d gone, she collapsed onto the armrest of the settee, face hidden. This was too hard. This was too much to give. What had she got herself into? She lifted her head out of her arm and was met with the images of her gurus. They spoke to her, reminding her that she always knew it was going to be hard, that doing the right thing is never the easy choice, but to remember that Waheguru is her ship and He would bear her safely across. She felt Him beside her, and felt her resolve return, as if the blood was pumping more thickly through her body.

She fetched from the drawer the map she’d picked up from the station and zoned in on her street. The surrounding areas didn’t sound like places she wanted to visit: Rawmarsh, Pitsmoor, Crosspool. Burngreave. Killamarsh. They sounded so angry, these northern places, like they wanted to do you harm.

Across the city, Randeep lay on his mattress. Everyone had eaten early and gone to sleep, tired out from a whole muddy week of shovelling up and levelling out cement. No one had even mentioned his second visit to the wife. He replayed their conversation and was more or less pleased with how it had gone. They seemed to understand each other and if the year carried on like that everything would be fine. He was hopeful of that. He heard the downstairs door go and the kitchen beads jangling. Probably Avtar would stay in the kitchen for an hour, eating, studying, counting how much money he had, or didn’t have. Randeep wouldn’t join him. The last few times he had gone downstairs he’d got the impression he was only getting in the way.