Free The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota Page B

count. He sat up on the roof, legs out in a wide V, and made equal piles of the notes.
    ‘Two more months,’ he said. ‘Maybe three.’
    ‘Shall we set a date, then?’
    He nodded. ‘I’ll speak to them.’
    Three days after Navratri, the rains came, blasting the red earth. Scooters began to lilt in the softened ground and dogs yelped under jeeps. Tochi rushed back from tying down the auto’s rain-covers and stood shivering wet in the doorway, watching the manic fall of water and the sewage running fast beneath his feet. He said tomorrow he was going to the city. He couldn’t wait.
    ‘So soon?’ his mother asked.
    ‘This is when we earn.’
    He was right. The first day back and he couldn’t go ten metres without some man waving his briefcase at him, a woman calling for him to please stop before her umbrella collapsed on her. People fought over him, proffering double, triple the fare. It was the same the next day, and the one after that, and he motored through the splashy streets while the single black wiper did its squeaky work. Each day he kept a lookout for the Maheshwar Sena, but all he’d seen were two men in orange standing under the dripping awning of a tractor repair shop, waiting for the rain to lessen. Radhika Madam said the weather had forced them off the streets, and, anyway, they’d not achieved anything with their so-called day of the pure. Thank God.
    ‘I could see them from our window. The whole time they spent getting drunk in their jeeps. Some revolution!’
    Tochi knew otherwise. He’d driven through the alleys leading off Gandhi Chowk and seen the burnt-out tanning yard. And he’d heard his passengers talking: it seemed that at least three men had been killed, and maybe even a child.

Palvinder and Susheel were wedded that winter in an open-air ceremony and travelled to Shimla for their honeymoon. Then, not a year married, Susheel called to say he was bringing Palvinder back for the birth of their first child. Tochi’s mother ordered that a new charpoy be bought – one in the double-weaved style – and placed this in the room they’d added to the rear of the house last summer.
    ‘Tochi must be doing well,’ Palvinder said when she arrived, testing out the bed. ‘And what’s this about using hair gel? You becoming a goondah now?’
    ‘Doesn’t she look different!’ Dalbir said.
    His mother said that of course she looked different. She was carrying a child inside her.
    Tochi thought Dalbir meant something else, though, something to do with not looking like a girl any more. Perhaps that was why for the first time ever he’d heard her using his name, to his face.
    Outside, a couple of kids were arguing with a passing dhol-player, pestering him for a go on his drum, and somewhere a man was selling hot peanuts and chai.
    ‘It’s nice to be home,’ Palvinder said, a hand on her belly. She gestured for Dalbir to come sit beside her, saying how tall he’d grown and that she’d heard he was back at school now. No time even to call his old sister?
    ‘I’m a busy man,’ he said.
    She laughed and held his face. ‘Have you started shaving?’
    Their mother came back and shooed the boys out. She wanted to speak to her daughter in private.
    All month Tochi stopped off by the buffalo on his way home because his mother insisted Palvinder have fresh milk every night. She refused to reheat what was left from the dawnlight milking Dalbir completed before school. One evening, during Navratri, as Tochi drove back with the milk, his mother met him halfway. The baby was coming, she said calmly, so he needed to go find Prakash Kaur from the next village and bring her here. Tochi passed her the bucket of milk and turned his auto around.
    At the gate to the neighbouring village, two women stood chatting, baskets of winter spinach on their heads. Tochi asked if Prakash Bibi was at home. They said she wasn’t, that she’d been doing seva at the city gurdwara all week. Tochi frowned. He’d been