“He said it's not work that makes us leave home and come here. It's love. Love for our families.” Randeep turned to Avtar. “Do you think that's true?”I feel like I've read a lot of books set in India, but so far as I can recall, The Year of the Runaways is the first that focuses on the Sikh community of the Punjab region and it provides a familiar-but-different reading vibe; a totally worthwhile learning experience for me. With both a not-quite-epic reach and a grinding attention to the minutiae of daily life, however, I don't think this is a perfect novel, but even so, I found the learning valuable. How therefore to rate?
“I think he's a sentimental creep. We come here for the same reason our people do anything. Duty. We're doing our duty. And it's shit.”
In the beginning, we meet three young men recently arrived in England from India, and in between scenes of the back-breaking construction work they're paid under-the-table for and the squalid living conditions in their flop house, there are long sections devoted to each one's back story. Randeep's father was a government official who provided well for his family, but when his mental illness and Randeep's own losses of self-control threaten to shame them, Randeep allowed the family lawyer to arrange a sham visa-marriage to get him to England and his shot at the good life. Avtar was a hard worker from a middle class family in India, but when he lost his job through no fault of his own and couldn't find another, his father took out a mortgage against his shop to send Avtar to England on a student visa; an expensive proposition arranged through corrupt officials so that Avtar could illegally work and save enough to get married. Tochi, being a chamar (untouchable), worked the hardest of all in India, and when an inter-caste uprising wiped out all he had, Tochi saved until he had the money to be smuggled into England, hoping for a better life. We eventually also meet Narinder – a very devout young Sikh woman who was born in England to Indian parents – and learn her reasons for becoming Randeep's visa-wife. Author Sunjeev Sahota's descriptions of life in both the Punjab and behind-the-curtain England were rich and evocative and did much to improve my understanding of the illegal immigrant experience; and what a terrible experience it is.
Life in the Punjab is hard enough – with widespread unemployment and corruption, even those who are willing to work very hard find it nearly impossible to get by. Everyone knows someone who escaped to the west, and as young men eye the widescreen TVs that their neighbours' dutiful sons send back from Toronto or Sydney, the fantasy of finding their way to the foreign gold mines prove irresistible. Despite families who beg them not to go, these young men are willing to go into debt to loan sharks, sell organs, lie, cheat and sneak; anything to get to the west. And at first it seems like the right decision:
Avtar allowed himself a little optimism. The trains had come when the electronic signs said they would. The guard hadn't expected money to point him in the right direction. Cars were only driven on roads and only in nice long columns. Even the air was a clear and uniform blue. All the signs of a well-run country. A fair country. A country that helps its people. A country that might even help him.But what the three young men we meet learn soon enough is that bending (or breaking) the rules to enter England put them outside that country's help. It turns out the west's streets aren't paved with gold and the only people who will hire Sikhs without papers are other Sikhs – people who retain all the corruption (and prejudices) of the old country and are happy to pay a starving wage to their desperate countrymen. And that's when they can even get work.
Along the way we meet others in the British Sikh community: young people who were born in England but strictly follow the old ways (like Narinder's family); young people born in England who are total yobs and refuse to eat Mummy's dahl; older people who were born in England and glamourise the old country, like Dr. Cheema: a college lecturer and president of the Indian social club at his school. Despite being well off and assimilated, and having never even made a trip to the Punjab, Cheema laments his disconnection to “home”:
Something happened a few years ago that made it clear to me that I'm only ever going to be a guest in this country. That it didn't matter how many garden parties I threw for my neighbours, this would never be my real home. It's important that a man has a sense of a real home. A sense of his own ending.And so we eventually follow the four young people – the runaways – through the four seasons of a year and watch as they fail and succeed in their interpretations of duty. It was interesting to me that with the debate over illegal immigrants having such a high profile right now, these aren't Donald Trump's hordes of Mexicans or the presumed terrorists attempting to blend in with legitimate Syrian refugees; the three men simply want a shot at gainful employment and are willing to work very hard, but as illegals, they are used and discarded by a system that must know of and tolerate their mistreatment (can a hotel really be built with totally under-the-table wages? Can municipal sewer work?). The young woman Narinder is motivated by religious duty, and even as her interpretation of that changes, she understands that duty of some sort will always be the driving force in her life:
So this was what it felt like to be torn in two. It was amazing to think that she'd always had it wrong, imagining that they were the weak ones, the ones who took their chance. No. The weakest are those who stay put and call it sacrifice, call it not having a choice. Because, really, there was always a choice, and she – one of the cowards, she realised – was making hers now.All of this plot is the epic, but page-by-page, The Year of the Runaways is a detailed description of daily life, with constant references to what everyone is wearing and eating and doing in the moment. Without any familiarity with Sikh culture, I was often lost in trying imagine what different items of apparel looked like or what different religious rituals entailed, and I'd usually just skip over untranslatable (to me) phrases like, “it poured over her brain, like a ramallah lain over the granth”. Okie dokie. While much of this felt authentic and rich, it didn't really add to my knowledge since I wasn't going to be looking up foreign words on every other page. In the end, there was nothing particularly literary about the language of this book, but I can't say that I didn't learn anything – and that is always worthwhile to me.
There is an epilogue at the end of The Year of the Runaways, set ten years after the title year. It was interesting to see where everyone ends up and it gave me much to think about regarding the sacrifices these four runaways made and whether their suffering – in the name of duty – was even worth it. I'm not surprised that this title made it to the shortlist of the Man Booker Prize nominees (for the subject matter if not exactly the execution) and I'm going to give it four stars to reflect its place amongst the long list.
Man Booker Longlist 2015:
Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family
Anne Enright - The Green Road
Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings
Laila Lalami - The Moor's Account
Tom McCarthy - Satin Island
Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen
Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations
Marilynne Robinso - Lila
Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter
Sunjeev Sahota - The Year of the Runaways
Anna Smaill - The Chimes
Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread
Hanya Yanagihara - A Little Life
I was really pleased that A Brief History of Seven Killings took the prize; even more pleased that it didn't go to A Little Life as seemed inevitable.
