The Year of the Runaways (50 page)

In a roundabout sort of way, she asked Karamjeet about it on the afternoon of his visit. He’d been talking about whether they still had time to visit Hemkund Sahib after the wedding, and asked if she’d seen the news on DD, about the pilgrims who’d died trying to climb there out of season.

‘Three of them. All young jawans. They thought they’d be fine.’

‘Obviously they thought they’d be fine,’ Narinder said.

‘Pardon?’

‘Why did they have to die?’

‘Because it was out of se—’

‘Why did God let them die? They were His people, coming to see Him.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I don’t think God killed them. He let them choose. They knew the risks.’

Her gaze dropped to the plain black leather of her shoes. If it pleases Him, she thought.

‘Narinder, is everything OK?’

She nodded, looked up. ‘I suppose it has to be.’

She didn’t know why she was being so difficult – perhaps she just wanted reassurance – but it was unfair to take it out on him. He’d been so nice, defending her to his parents, not once bringing up the subject of her time away.

‘I’m so glad to be marrying you, Narinder. I hope you’re looking forward to the wedding as much as I am.’

They were sitting at opposite ends of the long settee, bodies angled towards the centre of the room so they were never quite looking at each other. She could think of no reply and reached for the prissy white teapot and refilled their cups.

When Karamjeet got up to leave, Tejpal escorted him to the door. Narinder stayed in the room, collecting the tea things onto a silver-plated tray. She could hear them in the hall.

‘Thanks, Karamjeet. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how Dad would’ve coped if you’d broken it off.’

‘Stop apologizing. It feels like that’s all you’ve done for the last nine months. We all make mistakes.’

‘But she made a big one. Not many families would forgive and . . . Anyway, you’ve made it possible for Dad to show his face to the world again.’

She carried the tray to the kitchen, teacups rattling, and shut the door and stood with her back flat against it.

*

They’d been at the warehouse job for two weeks when, on the evening drive home, Avtar accused Jagdish of robbing them blind.

‘Less than one pound an hour you’re paying us.’ He took a crumpled blue paper from his rear pocket – a cash-and-carry invoice – and pointed to the calculations on the back of it. ‘I worked it out. Less than one pound an hour.’

‘I’m getting less and therefore you’re getting less. Simple economics.’

‘But I can’t live on this. I can’t pay back anything earning this.’ Bal would be calling soon. Perhaps as soon as next week. He didn’t know what he’d say to him. ‘I’m leaving. I’ll find better work.’

‘Arré, yaar . . .’ Sony said, as if Avtar was going too far.

‘Where do you think you’ll go without your papers?’ Jagdish said. ‘You should be thankful I provide a roof over your heads.’

‘You lock us in your shed.’

‘It’s an outhouse.’

The van stopped. They must have arrived. It was hard to tell from the back. As they filed into the shed, Avtar turned round. ‘I mean it. I want to go. Give me my passport.’ But Jagdish just laughed, as if Avtar had made a very pleasing joke, and locked the door.

Whenever a phone rang, he flinched. He prayed nothing was happening to his family. He needed to earn more. He needed to get out. Then, round the side of the cash-and-carry, in a grassy trough that had become a sump for several waste pipes, he found a pole, a short lilac metal one with flattened ends. It looked as if it might have once belonged on a girl’s bicycle. He put it in his bag, and, that night, hid it in the gap between his mattress and the wall.

A week passed while he waited for his chance. The evenings darkened and a stiff wind blew in through the bottom of the shed door. Avtar pulled out one of his jumpers, which lay on him sloppily, as if on a coathanger, which, he supposed, he was.

‘It’s starting to get cold at night,’ he said to Jagdish. They were on their way home. ‘We need a heater.’

‘Put some more clothes on.’ Then, perhaps feeling guilty: ‘Maybe I can get an extension lead.’

He told them there wasn’t any work tomorrow. They could have the day off. His treat.

‘Why?’ asked Avtar.

‘I’m busy. So you’ll have to stay in. You’ll get your food.’

‘Will we still get paid?’

He saw Jagdish staring at him via the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ll think about it.’

In the shed, Avtar pressed himself against the door, his stomach to the iron and arms raised, as if someone had a gun to his back. He wanted to know what was happening tomorrow, but all he could hear was a car running, indistinct laughter, maybe a football being kicked against a wall. He rejoined their card circle, squeezing in between Biju and Sony.

‘At least he might pay us,’ Biju said.

‘He won’t,’ Avtar said. ‘He’s just saying that so we’re still here when he comes back.’

‘Where would we go?’ Sony asked, chuckling drily, and he accidentally flipped a card over while dealing and had to gather them all up and shuffle again.

The door opening woke them all up. Sudden, unfriendly light. Avtar wanted only to remain in his dream, but he could smell popcorn, fresh, and yawned and removed his arm from his eyes. It was a woman. He sat up – they all did. He’d seen her sometimes at the kitchen window, a scrunchie in her hair. Today, her hair was down and wet and pulled forward over one shoulder. She looked like she was from India, an impression given by her make-up, perhaps: a thickly applied bright pink to go with her salwaar kameez. She was holding a red beach bucket and placed this on the wood floor. A steel plate covered the top, to which she added a foil-wrapped bundle.

‘Dhal-roti,’ she said, simply, kindly. ‘I’ll collect it later.’

‘Eating out of a bucket?’ Avtar said, disgusted.

‘It’s what Papaji said.’

‘Tell your father-in-law we’re not his pets.’

‘Won’t the dhal be cold by lunchtime?’ Biju asked. ‘I don’t think I can eat cold dhal.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wish I could reheat it.’

‘Why can’t you reheat it?’ Avtar asked.

She looked worried, as if she’d said too much already, and backed out of the shed and turned the key. They heard her soft tread on the grass.

‘Did she look dressed up to you?’ Avtar asked. ‘Like they were going to a wedding? What day is it?’

‘Friday,’ Biju said.

‘Sunday,’ Sony corrected him.

‘They’ll be gone all day,’ Avtar said.

‘Did she smell of popcorn to anyone?’ Biju said, trying to find an opening into the roti bundle.

Avtar listened at the door, until he heard voices hurrying each other on and car doors shutting. Then, nothing.

‘They’ve gone.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Sony asked, sceptical.

He took the pole from the side of his mattress and drove it into the gap above the doorjamb.

‘You’ll ruin it for the rest of us,’ Sony said.

‘Just let him go,’ Biju said. ‘More work for us.’

Avtar yanked the pole out and drove it back in, until finally it stuck, slipping far enough through to act as a lever. He left it hanging there, half out of the door, while he recovered. Then he secured his feet and pushed hard against it. He could feel himself grimacing – ‘You look like you’re having the world’s biggest shit,’ Biju said – and at times it seemed as if the pole might snap, but then, and without the explosion of noise Avtar had prepared himself for, the lock retracted and the door clattered open. He stumbled to the ground, it had happened so unexpectedly.

‘It’s open,’ he said, turning round, as if anticipating applause.

He went back for his rucksack, then down the garden, the pole reassuring in his hand.

The drive was empty and when he pressed his forehead to the window he could see no one inside. The kitchen door held a glass panel which he smashed with the pole, snaking in his arm to reach the lock. As soon as he stepped inside, a siren sounded, a careening wail of blue noise. Desperately Avtar rifled through some post on the counter, hoping to find his papers there. Nothing.

Sony and Biju and the others came hurtling past with their bags.

‘You fucking bhanchod cunt!’ Sony said.

He wanted to look upstairs, in Jagdish’s bedroom. He was sure his passport would be there. But the siren. It was blaring murderously. He picked up the pole – ‘Fingerprints,’ his mind said – and ran. He ran round the corner of the house and up the drive. There were fields far off to the left and Sony seemed to be making for them, Biju many metres behind. Avtar went right, sprinting towards the main road.

*

Halfway up the stairs, Narinder heard her phone. It never rang these days. Maybe it was Randeep. She scrambled across the landing and into her room, finding the thing on her dressing table. She didn’t know the number. She answered anyway.
Hello? Randeep?

‘Hello. Is that Narinder Kaur?’

He sounded familiar. ‘Yes. Hello. I’m Narinder Kaur.’

‘Oh good. It’s David Mangold here. From the immigration office. Remember me?’

He said they were due their second and final insp— meeting.
Meeting,
he repeated. But the office hadn’t received a reply to either of their letters over the last month.

‘I trust everything continues to go well for you and your husband?’

‘There’s another meeting?’ she asked, closing her bedroom door.

‘Routine, of course. So we can cross you off our list, so to speak. Are you still in the same place? I can easily pop over again. Some time next week, say?’

She held on to her dressing table. She sat down. ‘Could I ask my husband to call you?’

‘I took the liberty of contacting your landlord and he said you left quite unexpectedly. Apparently, the front door sustained some damage. It all sounded very dramatic.’

Narinder hunted madly through her mind for something to say.

‘I’m sure it was nothing to do with you.’

‘No,’ she said, glad of the out.

‘As I thought. So, next week, then?’

Her hand went to her throat. Her mouth felt dry. ‘I’ll get my husband to call you.’

‘Is he not there?’

‘He’s working.’

‘Do you have a work number?’

She winced. ‘No, sorry.’

‘And you are?’

‘Pardon?’ He knew who she was.

‘And you are where, if you’re no longer at the flat?’

‘I’m at home,’ she said carefully.

‘Right.’ She heard his voice change. ‘You do know that, under the terms of the visa, you’re required to notify us of any amendment to your personal details?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

‘I’m sure it won’t. I’ll just take down your new address and we can update our systems. Fire away.’

She didn’t know what to say. She felt herself being ground down.

‘Ms Kaur?’ he said, with deep insincerity.

‘Yes. My husband will call you and he’ll explain.’

A pause, as if he was thinking things through. She waited for him to say he was sending the police round this very minute.

‘Right you are. But do make it soon. According to our database the second inspection needs to take place by the end of this month. Otherwise the wheels start turning and warnings get automatically dispatched and things can get a bit messy.’

She nodded. She just wanted to get off the phone. ‘Yes. Yes. That’s fine. Thank you. Thank you.’

All afternoon she tried to get hold of Randeep. She even dialled Vakeel Sahib’s office in India, but they hadn’t heard from him either.

The evening meal was small, quiet. Occasionally, Baba Tarsem Singh and Tejpal exchanged a few words. She wasn’t listening. She said she was going to her room and would be down to wash up later.

‘But you’ve hardly eaten,’ her father said.

‘I’ll have it,’ and Tejpal stretched for Narinder’s plate.

She started up the stairs, fretfully, a sick feeling in her stomach.

‘Wedding nerves,’ she heard Tejpal say.

She took the suitcase from where it stood against her dressing table and opened the drawers built into the side of her bed. She put her clothes in the suitcase, zipped it up, and put the suitcase in the drawer and shut it. Still kneeling on the carpet, she placed her cheek on the cold duvet and hoped her father might one day forgive her.

She wrote a letter and propped it against her pillow and moved to the door. She listened: they sounded asleep. She closed her hand around the doorknob, finger by finger, and twisted her wrist to the left. It swung open without noise, and she picked up her suitcase and stepped onto the landing. The darkness was total, until her eyes adapted and shapes appeared: the shallow, square well at the top of the stairs; the ceramic bluebirds in the window, silently aghast. Tejpal’s door was closed, but her father’s was open. She could hear him breathing, deep and long, and in her mind’s eye she could see him too, lying, as ever, on the right-hand side of the bed, his birdlike hands locked gently over his stomach. He looked so vulnerable. She picked up her suitcase and returned to her room. She couldn’t do it to him again, not like this. She felt too old to be running away.

Two days later, Tejpal went out and said he wouldn’t be back until the evening. Her father was in the front room, napping. A plate of carrots, chopped in half and then into sticks, lay on the table before him.

‘Baba?’ she said.

‘Hm?’ he said, not opening his eyes.

She waited and he lifted his face to her.

‘Ki?’

‘Baba, I need to talk to you.’

She sat on the other settee, at a right angle to him, and said she’d received a phone call, a few days ago now, which meant she had to go back to Sheffield. People would get into trouble if she didn’t. Would he please give his permission for her to go?

He looked down at the gutka in his lap, and several long moments passed before he picked the book up and set it on the table, beside the carrots. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘With the police.’ Her eyes were on the carpet a few feet in front of her. She felt too embarrassed to look at him.

‘Why can’t you tell me what it is? Maybe we can help.’