1.2
The streets were hardly inviting, but it was better than being in there. The air carried the whiff of diesel as it always did at this time of day, every residential street now a tributary for the evening’s rush hour. Now and then, Satya overtook queues of cars as they stopped and started, glad to have the freedom of her feet. Freedom of sorts, she admonished herself, for her pretty shoes, remnants of better times, were not designed for running in and the narrow straps had scored lines across her skin, her toes already scuffed by the pavement. It felt like she had run half a mile before the ache beneath her ribs and painful feet drew her to a halt, though that now seemed unlikely, taking stock of the familiar terraced houses she should have left far behind. As she slowed to a meander, the stabbing sensation in her shins now unbearable, the acid in her chest slicing through her, gasping for air, a solitary thought belatedly occurred to her: she had no idea where she was going, for this exodus had been entirely unplanned.
Perhaps she would visit her grandfather, she thought, limping across the street, leaving behind those large semi-detached houses, mostly painted a chalky white, which with their elegant bay windows, red-tiled roofs, and ever so tidy front gardens offered her a sense of reassurance. The old red-brick terraces on the other side had always been a fearsome habitat, whose tenants had seemed to sneer at her intimidatingly on her daily trudge to the bus stop last term. They viewed her as a posh and overweening snob, she imagined, and she reciprocated, writing them off as layabouts and dole queue scroungers. Wandering on past News and Booze, the hairdressers, and the chip shop, she crossed over again in front of Robin Reliant Man’s house, marvelling as everyone always did at that bright blue fibreglass wreck abandoned on the road outside.
Soon she would cut down the grove and right across the quadrant: she always took this route beneath those magnificent trees, the emerald green of their leaves just starting to turn. From there, the building site, the ground scraped bare to its orange clay to make way for the sheltered housing that would soon replace the old prefabs half a mile away; for now, it was her shortcut to her unofficial pathway across the cemetery. Every time she passed by the thousands of orderly graves set in perfect rows, she wondered of the view from above; did Waheguru gaze down and see Braille script set upon the earth, recording the tales of a town forever? Sometimes she read the names etched into the weathered stone, but this evening she hurried on: around the allotments, across the playing fields, back across the avenue, the island between its lanes like a countryside forest. Yes, it was a long walk she began to concede as it started to bore her. By bus, but for the evening’s traffic jams, it would have taken her twenty minutes and she might have been there by now, enjoying the cup of tea he used to offer her every day after school. Still, stubbornness drove the soles of her feet onwards. She needed this time to clear her head and forget everything, she tried to persuade herself, only for another inner voice to rebuke her caustically: ‘Stupid girl, stupid girl.’
Casting her mind just three days back in time, Satya wondered now how she had let her new reality change her so completely. When she arose on the second day of term, that reassuring conversation with her father still fresh in her mind, she had tried so desperately to put the horrors of the day before behind her. Yes, she had been determined to give her new school a chance. She had convinced herself to be optimistic and to make a go of it. If she did not try, she had told herself, she would never achieve anything. So be positive, positive, she had reminded herself, over and over again, hoping that it might sink in like her French vocabulary the previous year. Today was a new day, she had whispered within. Today would be different, she had insisted.
By the end of the first lesson of the morning, however, Satya had already concluded that today would be exactly the same as yesterday. Though she had imagined she was in the company of A-level students, it felt more like the last day of term at primary school. Their teacher could not be heard, let alone control his class, as he seemed to recede away into the wall, subdued by the raucous tumult. All Satya learnt then were seven new expletives and the sensation of saliva-ridden tissue on her skin, fired from the barrel of a biro from the back of the room.
By the end of the second lesson of the morning, even the faintest trace of hope had diminished completely. Though only marginally commanding authority, this teacher had spent what remained of the lesson introducing concepts that Satya was sure she had mastered three years earlier. By the middle of the second lesson after morning break, as a group of boys brawled on the floor and their teacher appeared to have a nervous breakdown, Satya had been overtaken by that irreversible despondency, its suffocating strain overwhelming her. So it was that when the bell rang at the end of the lesson then, she did not hurry towards the canteen, although she was hungry, but in the other direction, out through the school gates, taking flight.
Now here she was again, fleeing unplanned, running away by accident. With every step now, a reprimand from within. First: ‘Oh why am I so stupid?’ Then: ‘You idiot, Satya.’ Finally: ‘You fool, you fool, you fool.’ On and on, as the fading light of the setting sun washed the last colour from the evening sky, the streetlights flickering on one by one. Eventually, her concealed reproach made way for a poignant alibi to justify her sudden descent on the old man. By the time she turned into his street, fifty minutes after her departure from home, she thought that she had formulated exactly what she would say to her dadaji when he opened his door to her and invited her inside. She longed now for a biscuit and a cup of tea, though she hoped he would offer her more, her pangs of hunger now compounded by that nervous dizziness induced by her dash from home.
‘Oh why?’ she cried as she reached his garden gate, noticing his curtains already drawn upstairs, just a slither of light peeking through, the rest of the house all dark. ‘Why me?’
Satya knew that her grandfather often took to bed this early to read for a while and then drift to sleep, especially if he had had a busy day, but she felt too faint now to leave him in peace. Unhooking the latch, she pushed the gate open and wandered along the red-tiled path nearly consumed by the sea of blue and pink lobelia. ‘I’m sorry for disturbing you,’ she muttered to herself, ‘but I’ll collapse right now if I don’t.’ Easier said than done. As she stood on the doorstep now, raising her finger for the bell, an invisible force field knocked her backwards, preventing her from penetrating its imperceptible ramparts. ‘No,’ she grumbled, utterly defeated, and she dropped instead onto that cold makeshift seat beneath her, knocking her head sideways against the wall over and over.
She remained there until eight o’clock, stilling herself until her hunger subsided. It would be another hour until the night had completely overtaken the day, but the sky was already a murky blue obscured by the shifting clouds. Briefly, she considered breaking through the wooden fence across the road, to stroll for a while in her old school grounds, reasoning that if caught and accused of trespassing, her defence could be her profound yearning for the way things were.
Peeping past the tall narrow slats, recollections of that glorious institution, all red brick, sandstone and leaded glass, were soon supplanted in her mind by the macabre concrete boxes that had taken their place. Confronted with all those squalid grey structures, the decaying mosaic cladding, the cracked blue plastic panels pinned beneath every window, the broken paving, and fractured concrete, and potholed playground, puddles everywhere, and the flowerbeds filled with weeds and woody rose bushes, and crisp packets and broken bottles—confronted by all that, she had somehow known all that was to come. When the bullying and harassment had started only a few minutes later, she was hardly surprised; the deterioration of the school estate, she concluded, was merely an analogy for the rot pervading the minds of all she encountered.
Momentarily, a timid voice from deep within petitioned her: return, return, return. No, but that would only make her forlorn heartache worse, she wept, overtaken by her melancholy gloom. ‘No,’ she said, remembering an impassioned denunciation of the school’s spooky goths one Monday morning three years ago, ‘I won’t haunt them tonight.’
Still afraid of home, Satya rose once more to wander on under the streetlights’ inescapable fluorescent glow. She had no destination in mind: she would simply follow her legs, she decided, her thoughts somehow absent, floating far above her, detached from her body. ‘Nirbhau, Nirvair,’ she muttered abruptly, reaching for something ethereal, longing for some kind of faith. Briefly, she laughed at herself, only to dismiss her inner scorn as cynicism not befitting a moment as profound as this. ‘Nirbhau, Nirvair,’ she offered again, then again and again as if time would pass more quickly with each repetition.
Unconsciously, her legs had carried her northwards, back on herself, as if hypnotised to follow her instinctive spirit. Perhaps her destination was inevitable, but she was still surprised to find herself back there. For a moment, there was a sense of optimistic euphoria that soared within like the kick of sugar after sleep, hitting as soon as she turned into the neglected street she knew now so intimately. Here, her green sanctuary, forever calling her back. But that high was short-lived, fear quick to follow.
In the darkness, the indistinct shapes of young men oscillating back and forth between the garden wall massive and the raucous moped crew caused her to falter back, alarmed. The orange glow of their cigarettes faintly illuminated their faces, pale blobs encircled by grey hoods, the air scented with fetid sweat and a musty smoke, evocative of those unwanted gifts deposited in the garden by the neighbours’ feline friends. That vulgar stench alone should have convinced her to go no further, to turn back and walk away, but instead, she crossed the road and carried on, thinking that if she remained calm, they would not bother her, like barking dogs or honeybees. The darkness or their cider, she thought, might veil her, granting her safe passage unharassed.
‘What the…’ she thought she heard one of them yowl as she passed the wall sitters.
The racist cuss that followed seemed all too real, slicing through her, surely unimagined. Her chest trembling, she chose not to glance across at them to corroborate her uncertainty. Suddenly she was running instead, and she thought they were running too, making chase.
As she crashed through the gate between those two boarded-up houses, so familiar, she refused to look back, running, still running, all the way to the gap in the fence. Unthinkingly, she slid through as she always did, but in her hurry let the mesh spring back too soon and cried out as the rough ends scraped across her skin, drawing blood. But there was no time to tend to her scratches, she told herself, and she raced onwards into the cover of the overgrowth.
Hidden there, she awaited their arrival, trying her best to quieten her mad panting, desperate to disappear. Without her watch, it was impossible to accurately assess how long she had lingered there, but she soon deduced that they were not coming, if they had ever been in pursuit at all. Regardless, she supposed it had not been long enough to enable her to turn back and follow the path back towards the street. What if they were waiting for her, she asked herself, ready to pounce on her; what if they were still there, plotting to do her harm?
Emerging from her hiding place, she wandered ahead instead, stumbling repeatedly on the uneven ground and vegetation, grasping between the dark shapes, the slither of moonlight barely lighting her way. Her familiar refuge felt so alien now and she felt afraid, scared to carry on, but terrified of the return. Her old trampled paths were hidden and all she could do was head in the direction of a lighter shade of grey-blue in the distance, which she hoped would be a way out.
‘Satnam,’ she sobbed ten minutes later, dropping in defeat onto a bed of nettles beneath a tall black trunk, ‘Why am I so stupid? Oh, why am I so stupid?’
She thought herself stranded in the wood, oblivious to north and south. She could find no way out, only trees and trees and trees, and now she was feeling the cold so much more fiercely than before. In her dash from home, she had not felt the evening’s cool breeze, but now she wished she had grabbed for her coat, for her red tunic was suited only for a summer’s day. Hunching her shoulders did not help, nor did folding her arms: nothing helped, and she began to cry. ‘Satnam,’ she muttered, ‘What am I meant to do? Please, help me.’
She looked around, hoping for a sign or a glimmer of light, for enlightenment if there was any. ‘I know, I know,’ she cried, ‘this is all my fault. I know. But what do I do now? Must I wait until dawn? Is that the only way? I’ll freeze to death if I have to wait until then.’ She held the palm of her hand in front of her eyes, but she could not even see that. ‘Satnam! Do you hear me?’ She heard an owl hoot, somewhere up there. ‘Could you send me a fox? Or a shooting star? Oh, I am so stupid. Just so stupid.’
In daylight, this place was so beautiful, so full of peace, but as the evening grew old the shadowy darkness caused fear and Satya glanced around in horror whenever a leaf rustled or a bird fluttered its wings. No longer was there serenity here, only her great regret. Three days ago, her legs had carried her back here too, trekking down that dilapidated street at midday, her revered oasis in the midst of the urban sprawl forever calling her home.
‘So here you are again,’ came the voice of self-reproach from deep within. Slowly she lifted herself from the ground, the stings of the nettles suddenly biting, and rotated in a full circle, hoping that her eyes would catch sight of something other than the darkness as a guide. When she could find nothing, she decided to press on in a straight line, wishing for the eventual intersection of a boundary that she could at least follow back to her gap in the chain-link fence. That was not an easy task, for great trunks kept on appearing out of nowhere, knocking her backwards or to the side, while roots and the remnants of the old brickworks would catch her feet, tripping her up or locking her in her place. ‘I’m so stupid,’ became her perpetual refrain all the while. ‘I’m so stupid,’ she complained.
She marched onwards for ten minutes, but the rusty old fence eluded her. Despairing, she cried out into the night again, but when no relief came, she continued on, thrashing desperately through the bushes and trees for another ten minutes and then another twenty. The hope she had held a quarter of an hour ago when she felt that she was ascending the slope and was thus on her way out of the little valley had all but diminished. Her only hope now, she told herself, was the quick passage of time, but that ambition too was about to be dashed.
All around her she thought she could hear a slow pitter-patter upon the leaves. Wary of the sounds, she slowed to a jog and then came to a standstill. As she glanced up towards the canopy, a raindrop spotted on her forehead, followed by another and another. Her heart sank. She would have to sprint now, she told herself, but the rhythm only increased, warning her of the total futility of her escape. As the percussion grew stronger, she pushed her spine against the rough trunk of a tree instead and prayed that it would protect her from the rising downpour. Were she to venture on, she realised, she would be soaked to her skin within a minute or two; this makeshift shelter would have to do.
For the first fifteen minutes, she believed the shower would be quick to pass. Thereafter, as she shivered and sneezed, warding off the occasional splash passing through the branches above her, she resigned herself to a long wait. Though she felt cold and feverish, she put her warm bed out of her mind and dreamed instead of a destitute beggar facing the Indian monsoon five thousand miles away. She could always rely on those less fortunate than herself to put her worries into perspective, she mused within, commending herself for her great piety. A second later, she was ridiculing herself again, ashamed to admit that she was illiterate in the path she claimed as her own, save for the incidental guidance her grandfather occasionally proffered. She wondered now if real Sikhs addressed God the way she did, or if she had it all wrong, mispronouncing Punjabi words nobody had ever thought important to teach her.
Pushing those uncomfortable thoughts from her mind, Satya slipped back into her pensive reverie, remembering the absurd reasoning that had led her here. It had all seemed to make sense back then, in that dim and distant epoch, three hundred thousand seconds ago. She recalled how she had found that gate so easily then, wandering down the gap between two boarded-up houses, the brown pebbledash rendering on their faces disguising all of the beauty that lay at the bottom of their bramble-filled gardens, just beyond the heap of abandoned fridges, soiled mattresses, and shopping trolleys. The scorch marks on the ground and the melted shell of a moped spoke of the bonfires that had delighted the bored youth in the middle of summer, but even they seemed oblivious to the vast treasures beyond the rusty chain-link fence, threaded with Russian vine and raspberry fronds.
Pulling back the wire mesh by the decayed concrete post, the steel rods within exposed to the elements, brittle and brown, Satya had squeezed through the gap the way she always did, sideways, right leg first, her left foot guarding her hands as the fence sprung back into shape. Once through, it was as if she was in the beating heart of the countryside, wandering amidst an idyllic pastoral retreat instead of the forgotten post-industrial wasteland she knew it to be. It was true that remnants of its former self could sometimes be seen beneath the undergrowth in broken bricks, fragmented iron and full lengths of stacked railway track, lying in wait for an unsuspecting visitor to stumble on at the least convenient moment, but in her mind, she had discovered paradise here. Where the old botanical gardens across town had been lost to development a century ago, here nature had re-established them in the decay of abandoned industry, triumphant in its secret reconquest of the realm of man.
Following tradition, Satya had wandered down to the foot of the slope, retracing her own markings in the trampled vegetation left behind by a summer of adventure. Reaching the natural clearing by the lake at last, she had dropped to her knees beneath a willow tree and settled on the ground. Down here she breathed in that magnificent peace, the bird song and the faint notes of moving water blown by the breeze punctuating it like musical notes, adding to the joyful serenity. Shifting for comfort, she had crossed her legs in front of her and rested her back against the ridged fawn trunk. ‘Waheguru,’ she had sighed quietly, her eyes settling on the ripples before her, ‘grant me peace like this.’
As the minutes passed by, she had remained still, silencing the voices in her mind. Though the air was cold, her shivers could not force her from that spot. Though her stomach rumbled with hunger, she did not think to pursue lunch. Half past one approached and then two o’clock. In the distance, she imagined she had heard the school bell toll, beckoning the pupils back inside, but even if it had been real, Satya did not care and would not move an inch. ‘Not today,’ she had whispered, addressing only the birds and herself.
Resting beneath that secluded canopy, its curtain of feather-veined leaves cloaking her from the world, she had begun to contemplate every word and action that had filled the past day and a half, and the summer months she now realised she had taken for granted, building up a gloomy picture in her mind which only made her feel even worse. Beneath the willow tree, now her only friend, she had found herself arguing with her brother and her sisters, and her new classmates, answering them properly now, though they could not hear her at all, until a kind of clarity settled within.
Tomorrow, she had agreed all of a sudden, as if the different voices competing for attention in her head had finally made amends, she would return. She would bring her books to study alone amidst nature’s symphony. She would abandon that sorry excuse for a school and learn independently, as she knew she could. This landscape would be her campus, each clearing a classroom for every lesson of the day. Tomorrow would be a brighter day, she had told herself, pleased with her new resolve.
Contemplating that bold strategy now, Satya only berated herself, decrying her ludicrous logic. For three whole days, she had almost convinced herself that her masterplan was a stroke of pure genius, her inventiveness in the face of such folly sure to land her great plaudits with her parents. They were supposed to have commended her for taking the initiative in her efforts to overcome the asinine milieu which would otherwise have led her to disaster. Now it was clear that it was her response alone that was pure folly.
