The Time No One Keeps

This is the kind of book that divides Indians and Brits with Indian bloodlines, not to mention the Brits themselves who would label the book ‘political’. From an English viewpoint, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways is a political book because it is about Indians scrabbling for a foothold in an alien world where they have no choices. From the Indian side it evokes a superior ‘been there done that’ attitude since the readers are mainly the ones who have elected to stay behind or who travel in and out of the country with legitimate visas and service apartments at their disposal. Millions of Indians would not call Sahota’s book exotic because furtive grapplings in the side lanes of Amritsar and exploding auto-rickshaws during communal riots are the stuff our headlines, and many of their lives, are made of.

Poverty is not the only reason for migration—there are untenable social situations as well, when neighbours fall out with neighbours and love and shame forces the move.

Sahota chooses to write mainly about his Sikh community, though he throws in Tochi, a Chamar of Bihari provenance, to add a different kind of experience to the group of Avtar, Randeep and Narinder. However, the odd one out really is Narinder, a petite, pretty sardarni who is here after having emb­arked on a visa marriage out of sheer, uncharacteristic compassion. Uncharacteristic because in the world we know, visa marriages are bonds tied by cold cash, another kind of dowry if you will.

Narinder feels a sense of responsibility to those in the challenged country she left behind her and that prevents her from being one of crowd. It also is possibly the reason why she is drawn to Tarlochan, the one who made his way to England through the convoluted byways of France and Russia as migrants classically do and where some of Narinder’s family members were left dead in the snow.

The background is Sheffield—that industrial town in the English countryside where the new migrants are looking for jobs that they legally have no right to. If the English system isn’t complicated enough with rules and racism, there are issues dividing old UK hands and new migrants, which may consist of caste and region, not to mention divisions between goras and desis. And not all the issues are big, some are small and selfish. Who, for example, can eat Indian food cooked by the reluctant host’s wife in Sheffield, who can settle in a tenancy and who cannot and, of course, who can get an illegal job and what has to be forked out in return for a favour.

Whatever the relationships between the group when they arrive, it only becomes more and more tangled as the book progresses. Migration is not the smooth move forward that many of them had hoped for when they travelled to this brave new world. Indians, as we know, are in no particular danger of being the most selfless of beings. Especially when one or the other has the upper hand. The past fri­endship between Randeep and Avtar acquires a new edginess in the new environment—though Avtar still can­not confess his secret love affair to his friend. Tochi finds the place even more unbearable than being a Chamar in India.

The Year of the Runaways speaks of a world that screams injustice in its lack of freedom and legislation. Despite being an advanced country, the labour laws can be got around just as villages and alleyways too can be dodged through. Sahota evokes a deep sympathy for the migrants, so much so that one wonders how they manage to live, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of past and present, feet in two countries, yet unable to belong to either.

For those of us who know the two worlds, one way or the other, the real­ity is harsh to go through—Avtar struggling through the sewers, for example, in his desperation to survive. It is, for the most part, an Indian world—the only white person is Michael, encountered on a telephone line across the seas, who is friendly, but unable to make an open display of it. Sahota’s power is that of grim, vivid description that piles up, shocking the British Isles perhaps, but making us shake our heads and say, ‘We always knew it!’