The Year of the Runaways (33 page)

‘Ji.’

‘That is excellent. I’ll ask the readers to get straight on it.’

‘I’d like to do the reading, please,’ Narinder said. ‘All of it.’

‘On your own?’

‘If you will allow it.’

For three days and three nights she read the guru granth sahib from beginning to end, pausing only to sip water from a steel glass a pilgrim kept topped up at her side. Word got round that Bibi Jeet Kaur’s daughter was in town, doing this, and many came to watch her read. They said she really was her mother’s daughter.

At the end of it, Narinder was exhausted and slept for much of the next day in her room at the hostel. Then she started to volunteer at the gurdwara, mostly in the langar hall, sometimes in the darbar sahib, once in the villages. Every day, she worked from dawn until the evening, when she’d have a simple meal of roti-dhal and water. Before bed she visited one of the smallest gurdwaras in the town, Sisganj Sahib. It was her favourite place. During the day it filled with devotees, because, as the gold plaque put it, this was where Guru Tegh Bahadur’s head was cremated, after he was decapitated by the Mughals for refusing to convert to Islam. In the evenings, however, the devotees dwindled to a weeping few, and Narinder could sit by the window and listen to the evening rehraas prayers while, outside, the river lapped onward.

One evening, a shadow appeared on the carpet. Narinder looked round. It was a woman, at the open window. She had an elongated, V-shaped face, with severe rings of black around close-set eyes. Her salwaar kameez was an old-fashioned, over-washed thing, most of its sequins missing, though the fancy way she wore her chunni made Narinder think she’d spent some time looking in the mirror before leaving the house. The woman brought her hands together and said sat sri akal.

‘Sat sri akal,’ Narinder replied, hands together too.

‘Are you the one from England?’

Narinder said she was.

‘I heard you read through the speakers. You do it very well.’

‘Thank you.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen, biji.’

‘Do you live in London?’

‘Ji.’

It seemed the woman was working up to ask something of Narinder. It wouldn’t be unusual. She remembered people all the time asking for her mother’s help. To send a message to a relative in England. To arrange a UK–India gurdwara tour. But now the granthi of the gurdwara appeared and told the woman to leave.

‘You have no right!’ the woman said. ‘I can speak to whoever I like.’

‘We don’t want troublemakers here.’ He took her by the elbow and forced her on her way.

‘Call yourselves God’s people!’ she said.

Narinder didn’t see the woman again for the rest of the trip and by the time she’d returned to England had forgotten about the encounter.

*

All year she longed for the summer, when she could return to Anandpur Sahib and to the bustle of India. The intervening months were dull, made long with winter. Breakfast was in silence – there was no TV – and then Tejpal would go up to his room while Narinder stayed down to read the granth with her father. They walked to the gurdwara for lunch and so that, later, Narinder could take her turn on the harmonium. The evenings were given to prayer and after dinner she washed the plates and asked if she might go to bed. Her father would smile at her from his armchair, looking up from his book, and wish her a good night. One evening that winter she remained in the doorway.

‘Baba, might I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘There was a poster in the gurdwara. About teaching Panjabi to some of the children after school. Do you think I might ask about it?’

‘I don’t think so, beiti. Do you need money?’

‘No, Baba.’

‘And in one or two years you’ll be married – these are things you can discuss with your husband.’

‘As you say, Baba. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, daughter.’

In her room, she allowed herself to feel disappointed, though she knew he must be right. To make herself feel better, she put on one of her CDs. It was a shabad – hymns were all they had – but anything would have filled her mind with musical delight. As she sometimes did, she started floating around the room, slowly, describing little circles every few steps, and when Tejpal banged on her door telling her to keep it down, she simply ignored him until he went away.

*

In the summer, the gurdwara committee sent her out into the villages with some of the other Anandpur Sahib volunteers. She handed out clothes and kitchen utensils and blankets, and international offerings with labels that read:
Kindly donated by Mr and Mrs Prashant Singh, Portland, Oregon,
or
To our fellow Sikh brothers and sisters from attendees of Sri Singh Sabha Gurdwara, Darlington, UK.

Narinder made a little niqab of her chunni and gripped it in the corner of her mouth. It might just keep the dust from her eyes. Then she shook the metal bolt on the gate and stepped back, holding the blankets out. A lock wrenched and squeaked and the gate pulled open, and a tall, dark woman with a large gold hoop in her nose stood gazing down on her.

‘Waheguru ji ka khalsa, waheguru ji ke fateh. Please take a blanket for the cold nights.’

The woman stretched her elegant neck towards the woolly stack, then her eyes shifted all at once back up to the girl.

Narinder pressed the blankets forward once more. ‘Please. May God keep his hand on you and your family always.’

‘The valetheni’s come to do her annual pilgrimage. Her donations to the poor.’

Maybe it was the voice – snippy, too ready to retaliate – but like balls rolling into place Narinder realized that this was the same woman who’d come to the window. Last summer. The one who’d been forced away.

‘You needed help,’ Narinder said, without thinking.

The woman rested her hip against the gate. ‘You people don’t help. You pity. That’s what your gursikhi is. Go on, get away. We don’t need your blankets here. I’d rather freeze.’

The gate closed with a reverberating clang and Narinder stood there in the stony alley still holding her blankets. Something was wrong. She could sense it. This woman did need help. She knocked and, again, heard the shuffle and scrape of slippers crossing the courtyard. The woman was muttering even as she reopened the gate: ‘They don’t let you live, they don’t let you die . . . What is it now? I told you we don’t need your blankets. Give them to your God. He can use them to warm that cold heart a little.’

‘Please, massiji. If you tell me what the problem is maybe I can help.’

The woman stayed silent, staring.

‘Please. Our gurus said we have to help one another.’

Inside, the weedy little courtyard was covered in trapezoid shadows cast by the trough, at which an old emaciated buffalo nosed mildly. Here and there were peaky slops of dark-green buffalo shit, and these Narinder worked hard to avoid as she tried to keep up. She was shown to a sticky leather settee in a dark, airless room.

‘The electricity,’ the woman said, both index fingers pointing to the sky. ‘It is gone.’

Narinder placed the blankets on her tidy lap and her hands on top of the blankets. Her silver kara dug uncomfortably into her wrist. The woman crouched on the stone floor, knees flaring out indecently.

‘You want to help?’

Narinder nodded. ‘Please.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty, with the guru’s grace.’

‘The same age my daughter was when she left here.’

Narinder lay on her bunk that night unable to sleep. In the bed underneath was a young sikhni from Fresno and her quiet sighs swept the room. The moon hung tiny in the far window. Narinder turned back to the ceiling. Everything was so peaceful, the night so heavy-lidded, that she half thought she had only to lie there as still as she could and she’d catch herself in the act of thinking. That she’d be able to observe herself thinking. It was something she’d often tried to do, and in some unexplainable but vital way it was an impulse linked to the idea that if she flicked her pupils quickly enough she’d be able to glimpse the side of her face, the part that was otherwise only visible to her when looked at in the mirror. Childish habits, for the child in her.

She’d left the woman’s home promising to do her best and, God willing, find her daughter and tell her to contact her family. Narinder imagined the girl wandering lost in England. Asking for help and no one listening, no one caring. Strangely, sleepily, this feeling of loss opened out into a further memory. They’d been sitting together at the back of the Croydon gurdwara, Narinder playing with her mother’s green rosary, when Bibi Jeet Kaur smiled and said that if she were to die now, by her twenty-first year Narinder wouldn’t even be able to recall what her mother had looked like. Lying on her bunk, sadness washed over Narinder in a single large wave, for her mother had been right. Already her face was becoming nothing more than a warm smile surrounded by a faraway blur.

She told her father about the encounter with the woman and the missing daughter in England. He was at the dining table, going through his pension statements, and light from the standard lamp made his beard glow red.

He listened to Narinder without interrupting, then returned to his work. ‘It’s a police matter, beiti. Let’s not get involved.’

‘Ji,’ Narinder said, nodding. She looked down, looked up. ‘I’m sorry, Baba, but does she not need our help?’

‘I agree she needs help. She should go to the police.’ He looked across, smiled. ‘You can’t take on all the world’s troubles. I’ll say an ardaas for them both tomorrow. Theek?’

‘Ji. It’s just that I thought I could maybe—’

‘Narinder? We’re not getting involved, acha?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, Baba.’

She regressed into the daily shuffling between the house and the gurdwara, to reading and tidying and heating up meals, to working at the langar hall and awaiting her turn on the harmonium. If a verse was unfamiliar, she brought the songsheets home and stood them on her dressing table, against the wall. She practised by imagining keys on the wood, eyes slightly scrunched in application, whispering the words. Time seemed to vanish and her father had to shout to get her attention.

‘Ji?’ she said, moving onto the landing and stretching over the banister.

‘I said I’m going to the bank. I’ll be back before lunch.’ She heard the door shut. She paused. She was still leaning over the banister. The house was silent. She returned to her dressing table and took the piece of paper from the drawer. It was the number of the agent in Ludhiana who’d arranged the missing girl’s transit. She went down to the hallway and dialled the number. The agent answered and very happily gave Narinder ‘full, all disclosure’ details of the fabric factory the girl was headed to on reaching England. Encouraged by how easy that was, Narinder called the factory. Another man answered – gruff voice, thick Indian accent – and said he had no sister-fucking idea who she was talking about and to leave him the fuck alone. Shocked, Narinder put the phone down, her hand shaking on the receiver. She looked over her shoulder, though she knew the house was empty.

In August, Baba Tarsem Singh said he’d arranged for her to perform the kirtan during the gurdwara’s morning service.

‘It must get very boring for you to spend so much time in the house with me.’

‘I’m not bored, Baba. I love you.’

‘You’re a kind daughter. Nevertheless, it will do you good.’

She loved these services, with their accompanying birdsong, and afterwards she had at least four hours before her father arrived to escort her back home. Usually she did some sort of seva, but one morning she buttoned up her duffel coat and caught the train to Newham and waited outside the factory boss’s office. She was a girl to whom waiting came easily and when the man showed up he didn’t seem able to turn her away. He pored through his battered tea-stained register and said that the girl had left some months ago. He did, however, have the girl’s telephone number. Did Narinder want that? The next day, she called the number from the payphone in the gurdwara and it was several minutes before the old lady understood that this wasn’t her granddaughter Anastasia calling. It transpired that she had had an Indian girl staying in her basement – ‘lovely-looking thing she were, too’ – but not any more.

‘Said she was going to Poplar. God knows why.’

Narinder smiled into the phone at that.

It was almost September before she had sufficient opportunity to attend the Sri Guru Go bind gurdwara nearest to Poplar. The granthi, a snowy-bearded man with a wooden cane, sighed disappointedly and confirmed that it had been brought to his attention that they had a handful of daughters living illegally in the area, who needed the community’s help. It was rumoured they lived in some sheds backing onto one of the alleys. He gave Narinder the address and, in the name of their gurus, asked her to help these sisters of hers.

‘Third one along, pehnji. Look for the rubbers,’ a brown girl with severely straightened hair directed, and at last Narinder walked up the alley, sidestepping the used, teaty condoms, the thrown-out sofas and TVs. She wasn’t sure which of the wooden gates to knock on first and then, sooner than expected, found herself at the alley’s end, facing a concrete wall sprayed with rude green graffiti. She frowned at herself. Be brave. Guruji is with you. She firm-stepped it to the first gate but hadn’t even knocked when it was hauled open and a frightening Indian woman loomed above her. Chapped pink lipstick and emerald eyeshadow. Orange-henna hair frizzing back like an afro. All on a thick, angry face with a pronounced chin-wobble.

‘What the fuck you spying up and down for?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m looking for Savraj.’ Then, more confidently: ‘I have a message from her mother.’

The woman shifted her weight onto her other foot. ‘What message?’

‘Does Savraj live here?’

‘I said what message?’

‘Her mother’s worried. She hasn’t heard from her daughter in months. I promised I’d try to find her and see how she is. If she needs any help.’

‘We all need help, sister,’ the woman said, laughed. With some effort she turned herself around and padded up a wispy little path barely visible in all the overgrowth. ‘She’s in her room, I think.’