The Year Of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. Picador India
I used to pass the British High Commission building in New
Delhi on my way to work, twice every day for three years, and see the long and winding queues,
little clumps of stragglers sometimes squatting on the patch of grass in
impromptu picnics necessitated by the long wait. I`d register the desperate
desire to head for `the jookay` but what happened to these men and women once
they got there? What happened to those who didn`t get their visas? That I
didn’t expend much thought on.
Well, Sunjeev Sahota told me, in painfully clear detail what
happens to a lot of these people and others who enter Britain through entirely illegal routes. He
involved me in the fate of a clutch of these Indians trying to fashion a --- mostly
pitiful --- life for themselves in harsh, alien surrounds, trying to ignore the
fact that they are not wanted there. He got me invested in the survival of a
quartet of these Indians, trying not to mind
too much that their efforts usually met with incremental, not resounding, failure,
their desperation wrapping them in a smothering embrace.
The story in this book, which takes 468 pages to unfold at a
measured pace, rests at that dark intersection between its characters` timorous
hopes and aspirations, and the dreadful reality.
There is Tochi, Randeep and Avtar, and there is Randeep`s
`wife` Narinder. One is a chamaar who is fleeing communal riots which consumed
his family; one has wed a stranger for citizenship; one has sold his kidney for
the money to come out here, and the woman is a strange and complex creature who
thinks she is doing her duty by her gods and by those who deserve a good turn.
Below the radar is where they all want to exist, hugging their small pleasures
to themselves, coping stoically with the not so small miseries that beset them.
But of course, life doesn’t let them stay in their hidey-holes.
``This life,`` says a character. ``It makes everything a
competition. A fight. For work, for money. There`s no peace. Ever.`` It is a
world where people approach through the smoky lilac air, where a woman
unbothers her sari, where buses rasps up hills, where you walk through loveless
parts of town, where you hear the snicker of cockroaches, where planes take off
climbing their ramp of air, where Harinderjeets-turned-Sonyas turn a trick for
a living; where you go through life your nostrils doing the opposite of
flaring. Where people go to bed though the day is still yellow, felled by the
sheer effort it takes to go on existing.
And as the story came to its inevitable end, I realised just
why I had put off picking up this wonderfully written book for so long (it released
last summer). And I realised I was glad I finally sat down to reading it. In
conclusion, I have to use that oft-used term: a must-read. That`s what Sahota`s
book is.