The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota

The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota

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The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota

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The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in search of a new life.

Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep has a visa wife in a flat on the other side of town. And Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar.

The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101809 in Audible
• Published on: 2015-09-21
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Running time: 957 minutes

The Year of the Runaways, by Sunjeev Sahota

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Most helpful customer reviews

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful. Lofty dreams and stark realities By D. Christopher D'Guerra It’s winter. Randeep lives in Sheffield, England with 13 other Indian illegals. This house is squalid, cramped and cold. He is assigned the breakfast shift this morning, meaning he gets up at 3 to make and pack lunch for the whole crew. The van picks them up at dawn and they spend the next 12 hours at the construction site, laboring and trying to keep warm, all for a pittance. Still, they are thankful there’s work this week. And the house hasn’t been raided yet.Randeep to his room-mate: ‘I mean when you were a kid, did you ever think you’d be working in Sheffield, in England, and living in a house like this? I’d never even heard of Sheffield.’When Randeep, Avtar and Tarlochan left the misery of their lives in India in search of opportunity and fortune this is not what they had envisioned, and it is this realization that lends poignancy to the novel.These initial pages were written in a pleasant graceful style, the conversations were engaging and book’s overall tone was inviting: I felt as I do when I walk along the beach, enjoying the water’s soothing effect on my toes as I contemplate the sunset. What I didn’t see was the approaching tidal wave that would hurl me into the lives of the various personages and engulf me in their tumultuous vicissitudes. Exploited and threatened, the trio relies on sheer fortitude and determination to ensure their survival.“Runaways” drew me in completely. I was transported to a land and a situation unbeknownst to me and humanized to the plight of these particular migrants and their search for a better life. At book’s end, though sadness pervades, a glimmer of hope emerges.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Exposes some of the truly unpleaseant aspects of Indian society By ann mcdonald This novel was challenging to read but not because of Sahota's writing skills. It takes the reader out of their comfort zone reading about the struggles of Indian immigrants to the UK, living on the border of legality if not illegal. It certainly asks you to rethink your views about "economic migrants".The novel explores the circumstances which motivate each of the "runaways" to try their luck in Britain, believing as they do that jobs and money will be easily available, enabling them to help their families. Their lives in India are centred on family but constrained by social expectations and gossip. Expectations that the younger generation(male) will have brilliant careers and support their parents and younger siblings; fear of not maintaining a successful facade seems to dominate the lives of the mothers. Women have few opportunities beyond the hope for a satisfactory marriage. All the families' hopes are pinned on the young men who are driven to terrible lengths to realize these hopes.The lives of the young men in England are increasingly driven by desperation- the relentless need to make enough money to support family and pay off debts. They are preyed on by their fellow countrymen who also live on the shady side of the law. They have no recourse to England's social services as most of them are terrified of being found and sent home.The novel exposes some of the truly unpleasant aspects of Indian society as well as the hollowness of the dreams of wealth and status in England. Although the young mens' stories end well, the ending seems tacked on and seems hardly plausible, given their dire and hopeless circumstances. However, the novel is hugely engaging to read and each character's story( there is one woman) reveals another aspect of the endlessly fascinating culture of India.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful. Another Culture By Roger Brunyate One reason we read is to get inside other cultures and see their relationship to our own. India, for example. I have read many novels about the British Raj (into which my father was born), many more about post-colonial India, and still more about the Indian diaspora, as immigrants, rich or poor, try to make new lives in Britain or America. On the face of it, Sunjeev Sahota's novel is of the latter kind, following four young Indians over the course of a year in Sheffield, a grimy industrial city in the North. But by some extraordinary magic, its effect was less cultural dislocation than to take me deeper into a particular minority culture -- that of Punjabi-speaking Sikhs -- than I think I have ever experienced in an Indian novel before, let alone one set on the illegal-immigrant fringe.Sahota's main tool is language, and his utter refusal to compromise. Here is a passage almost at random: "Afterwards, Narinder touched her forehead to the ground, said, 'Waheguru ji ka khalsa, waheguru ji ke fateh,' and accompanied her mother to the gurdwara, to spend the afternoon doing seva. […] That was why her bibi and baba sent her here. Sometimes she performed the kirtan while Bibi Jeet Kaur played the harmonium…." For the most part, Sahota avoids the usual practice of fiction writers, putting in a foreign phrase or two for local color, and then immediately translating them. He simply assumes that you will understand them -- snatches of what I take to be Punjabi (with occasional Hindi and Urdu), words for religious devotions, clothing, food, the basic furniture of everyday life. For a long time, they are indeed foreign, for the most part incomprehensible. But you read on for the story, and eventually the extended immersion method has its effect. You begin to understand, not merely the meanings of words, but something of the culture, beliefs, and value systems that lie behind the strange terms.Each of the three main male characters is in Britain either illegally or on some borderline status. Tarlochan (Tochi), a Chamaar (untouchable) fleeing caste discrimination, has been smuggled in by truck. Avtar is on a student visa, but is working miles from the college in which he is nominally enrolled. Randeep, who is trying to earn the money to marry Avtar's sister, has gone through a sham marriage with a girl called Narinder, whose family are already English residents, hoping to get a permanent visa when the year is out. The first few chapters showing their lives in Sheffield, sharing a squat and working on minimum-wage jobs in a kitchen or on a building site, are interspersed with seventy-page chapters giving flashbacks to their lives in India, each brought low by misfortune or tragedy.I must admit that the strangeness of language and culture, the relentless accumulation of bad luck both in India and England, and a certain difficulty in keeping the three men straight, made the first half of the novel heavy going. What kept me with it was Sahota's ability to tell a story -- and his underlying compassion, painting his characters with sympathy, even when they have to do despicable things in order to survive. But then, at almost the halfway point, a miracle occurs. This is the chapter "Narinder: the Girl from God," in which we learn why she, coming from a middle-class family and engaged to a considerate and prosperous young man, should decide to put everything on hold and go to live in a threadbare flat in Sheffield, in a pretense marriage to a man she virtually never sees.Narinder is a lovely human being. She is also deeply religious. It was only when reading her story that I fully realized that all the characters are, at least nominally, Sikhs. Inspired by Narinder's story, I looked up something of their beautiful monotheistic religion, whose tenets are summed up by Wikipedia thus: "The fundamental beliefs of Sikhism include faith in one Creator God, unity and equality of all humankind, engaging in selfless service, striving for social justice, and honest conduct and livelihood while living a householder life." You can see these qualities in Narinder, though they take a while to emerge. But you also see that the novel as a whole poses a challenge to these values. What happens to Randeep, Avtar, and Tochi is far from social justice -- much of the worst that happens to them is at the hands of their own community -- and whatever honesty and selflessness they had at the start is sorely tested. And as she gets drawn deeper into their lives, Narinder too begins to question the God she had taken for granted.So far had I become immersed in this other culture, that Narinder's doubts did not read as a critique of some alien religion that I did not believe in anyhow, but as fundamental questions about the meaning of God. Not just the Sikh Waheguru, the Christian God, or Allah, or Yahweh -- though all of these and more -- but the concept of whatever moral principle we use to order our lives. And, alas, the godlessness of a world bent on bringing it down. It is a sad book, at times an almost perversely nihilistic one. But in the end, it is a profoundly moral exploration of life, all our lives. And THAT is precisely why I read great literature.

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