I am some way into Sunjeev Sahota’s second novel — The Year of the Runaways. Short-listed for the 2015 Booker Prize, I find that the novel deserves all the praise it has received. There are 13 young Indian emigrants living in a house at Sheffield, England, who hope to build new lives for themselves. We are given a taste of their daily travails, and then we delve into the back stories of three of them.
Tarlochan — the auto driver from Bihar whose eventual journey to England is one of the most harrowing ones I’ve read in literature. Avtar Nijjar — a bus conductor at a private transport company who has to face dire consequences due to his friendship with the company owner’s deviant son. And Randeep — who is preparing for NIT (engineering) in India, and whose family is racked by his father’s mental illness.
Avtar and Randeep have a connection. Avtar was having an affair with Randeep’s sister Lakhpreet. Randeep now has a visa-wife in Narinder, a woman who lives on the other side of town.
The novel is cinematic, going scene by scene. This is to say that, like in cinema, only the outward action is narrated; Sahota does not easily approach the inner lives of his characters. His characters do one thing after another and their emotional variances are sensed from their interactions with each other. Some would say this approach is a constraint for the reader’s experience, but in Sahota’s hands, it works remarkably as it is the very trick that transfers some of the characters’ helplessness to the reader as well. We as readers are denied access to these characters’ emotions, thus forced to wonder at almost every page how broken the next mishap or misery affects them or how small luxuries, like finding a warm bed, make them feel. There are times when their apparent inertness becomes a thing of horror for the reader. Sahota delivers a sense of bottling up, an intensity that builds up as one proceeds reading.
For someone who restricts himself to outward action, Sahota is also thankfully very good with exact descriptions and manages to convey his sharp observation on numerous occasions. Here is an excerpt of Tarlochan taking a bath in the open after filling a bucket of water from the village pump: “He bathed in front of the entrance to their shack, using his old dhoti first as a screen and then as a towel. He used the same water to wash the mud from his sandals.”
It’s amazing to imagine a British writer showing a dhoti ‘as a screen and then as a towel’ when many Indian writers fail to deliver a similar observation on page.
The writer’s first novel Neon Noon is now available online
Twitter: @tanujsolanki