Sunjeev Sahota's 'The Year of the Runaways'

Short-listed for the 2015 Booker prize, Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways is a novel that deserves all the praise heaped upon it. The setting is unique. Thirteen young Indian emigrants live in a house in Sheffield, England, all hoping to build new lives for themselves. We are given a taste of their daily travails, after which 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 in a private transport company, who has to face dire consequences due to his friendship with the deviant son of the company’s owner. And Randeep, who is preparing for the NIT (engineering) in India, and whose family is racked by the mental illness of his father. Avtar and Randeep have a connection, in that 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 and goes one scene after another. 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. No one is ever shown to be thinking this or that; Sahota’s characters are doing one thing after another, and their emotional variances have to be sensed from their outward interactions with each other. Some would claim that this approach is a constraint for the reader’s experience, but in Sahota’s hands it works remarkably, for 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, to know how strongly they feel at this moment and that, and we are thus forced to wonder, almost at every page, how broken the next mishap or misery leaves them, or how small luxuries, like finding a warm bed, make them feel. There are times when their apparent inertness itself becomes a thing of horror for the reader. Sahota delivers a sense of bottling up, an intensity that builds up as one proceeds with the novel.

For someone who restricts himself to outward action, Sahota is also thankfully very exact with descriptions and proves himself an acute observer on numerous occasions. Here is an example, of Tarlochan taking a bath in the open after having filled 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.’