Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Bhaskar put an arm around the boy, who was a little out of breath, and said, ‘Then come; I don’t mind.’ Two pigeons, making rapid pistol-like sounds with their wings, took off over their heads.

  Now, at half-past six, two state transport buses went down Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Road, blowing their loud hooting horns; they were half empty, an unusual sight. There was a small encampment of rickshaws along part of the pavement, their extended arms planted on the ground, their collapsible roofs raised, their wheels at rest; rickshaw-wallahs, heads and shoulders covered with a piece of cloth, were slapping their hands in imitation of applause and hurling tobacco into their mouths. Retired men, as free as children, all of them dressed for some reason in white dhoti and kurta, were either creeping out of their houses or returning from a walk, with or without a walking-stick. The first to go about their business were the crows, clamorous, a little neurotic, turning up, as usual, by the tea-shop entrance (if one could call that absence in the wall an entrance), by the lane’s rubbish dump, on the pavement, upon the roofs. Fog, a compound of charcoal smoke, exhaust fumes, and mist, hung in the lanes; you did not notice it at close quarters, but, a little distance away, you saw it loitering by balconies and doorways. The colours of the houses on Vidyasagar Road, pink, or moss green, or light yellow or blue, were dimmed by the mist, till they looked like the colour of old cotton saris that have been worn for many years and still not thrown away.

  They came to a house. An old man was sitting on the balcony of the first floor upon a wicker stool and eating from a bowl. A woman in a cardigan leaned over the banister and looked over her shoulder and cried, ‘Hurry up, Mira, do you want to miss your bus?’ The old man dipped his spoon into the bowl and said, ‘Don’t scold her, ma, she’s a little slow.’ The mother said, ‘Mira—Mira? I can see the bus coming now,’ although the lane was still empty. The door to the room on the ground floor was open, separated from the courtyard by a porch which was a little stage that accommodated a coir mat and two or three pairs of rubber slippers. There was a message on the wall outside: C.P.I.(M.) FOR UNITY AND HARMONY AMONG ALL COMMUNITIES. A man, wearing pyjamas, a shirt, and a sleeveless pullover, came to the door and said: ‘You’re late.’ ‘Give it to me, don’t waste time,’ said Bhaskar. As they were waiting, Bhaskar lit a cigarette, and Mohit, still a little awed and shocked by this act, began to pace up and down the porch, stopping only to inspect a fern that had grown on one side. A small girl had arrived at the pavement in uniform, a blue skirt, white shirt, and blue pullover, accompanied by a servant girl who would herself have been no more than ten years old. She was swinging her plastic water bottle upon its infinitely co-operative strap and standing a little way from the servant girl and talking to herself. Occasionally, she looked up at where her mother and possibly her grandfather were standing, ignoring the rest of the world, as if her imminent farewell were meant only for them. The man in the sleeveless pullover emerged with a pile of Ganashakti and transferred it from his arms to Bhaskar’s. ‘Did you sleep well last night?’ he said sourly. Bhaskar ground the cigarette underfoot and kicked it into the courtyard among the mournful plants and ash-grey earth. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he replied. He walked out of the gate, followed hotly by Mohit.

  Each newspaper was folded and tied with a jute string. ‘You take half,’ said Bhaskar. ‘Here.’ ‘What are you going to do with them?’ asked Mohit, cradling them and laughing. ‘Distribute some,’ revealed Bhaskar very seriously, ‘and sell the others later.’ Bundled up, they were slim and surprisingly hard, and each paper could be held in the fist like a baton. They began to walk back the way they had come, to an increasing accompaniment of noise from motorcycles and cars. As they passed the houses, Bhaskar aimed his paper at one or two of the porches, where it fell on the floor with a sharp sound, or sent it flying at a first-storey balcony, a swift journey in the course of which the paper arched in mid air and finally landed just beyond the flower-pots. There was a special purpose in these throws, for the readers of Ganashakti were fellow-travellers of the Communist Party, they believed in its necessity and its vision, and an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house. Mohit glanced back to see if the houses in which the readers of Ganashakti lived were any different from the others, but they were the same, with the fronts of balconies and doors painted in white or green, and other parts chipping away to reveal a structure of stone and iron that was as intricate and fragile as a honeycomb. The two went on until Bhaskar had completed the round and they had come to the end of Vidyasagar Road. By now Bhaskar had acquired a small limp; Mohit said: ‘You’re growing old, Bhaskarmama. The Party must be in a bad way if they’re taking members like you.’ ‘What do you think I should do?’ ‘I think you should do yoga,’ said Mohit. ‘Buy a book and learn the asanas. Or you won’t be selling newspapers for long.’ ‘I want to have some tea,’ said Bhaskar.

  Afternoon saw Khuku and Mini fall asleep on the double bed, Mini on the side on which Shib slept at night. These days the fan was not switched on, and the women hugged their own bodies, a light shawl lying casually upon their feet, taking on their tender, ghostly shape, while now and then Khuku complained of the cold and shivered. She had had all the windows closed except one, which let in a smell of smoke that must have drifted, unmoored, from a distance. Because the room, without the hum and movement of the fan, was so still, the world outside seemed proportionately larger, with more space having come into existence to accommodate the different afternoon noises, of bird call and bird chatter, and vendors, hammering, and taxis. Somewhere below, cars arrived, people got out, doors were slammed one by one, or almost together: not everyone was asleep. Next to Khuku, Mini, very softly, was snoring, and on another floor, someone coughed, the little angry explosions seeming to go off just outside the window. Khuku clasped her throat with her hand and warmed it. How pleasing that sensation was, warmth, so rarely known for most of the year! Khuku began to fall asleep.

  Outside, Jochna, sitting on the veranda at the end of the hall, combed her loose wet hair and considered the city. Uma, leaning over the banister and looking unconsciously upon the tiny heads of the watchmen far below, hung clothes to dry from different-coloured plastic clips. In a slow, imperceptible way, the city swam around her, the temple with its pseudo-classical shape that was being ‘completed’ for fifteen years, which they thought of simply as ‘the temple’, the vacant white perfect terraces of decaying ancestral mansions, surrounded by the enigmatic tops of masses of trees, the solitary, invisible factory chimney, with its waving plume of smoke the colour of pigeon feathers, the weathered white marble dome of an ancient princely house now given out to wedding parties, shining as coldly and beautifully as a planet, and, at large intervals, the famous multi-storeyed buildings with mythical Sanskrit names, all this swam around the two maidservants, Uma and Jochna, the first, who did not know her age, but looked thirty years old, abandoned by her husband, but vermilion still fresh and bright and new each day in the parting of her hair, and the other, fourteen years old, short, dark, with intelligent eyes, and slow to smile. Uma was telling her the story yet again:

  ‘He begins to go for weeks to the other village, until I ask him, “What do you do there?” and he tells me, “I’m living with my wife,” and I say to him, “If she is your wife then who am I, eh?” He was like that from the first day, I can touch you and say that. He said, “I never wanted to marry you, it was my people who made me.”’

  Jochna had other stories to tell, of her elder sister who was learning to make clothes in a tailoring class, and her nine-year-old brother who went to a municipal school. Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that i
t looked like a set of new teeth. In the lawn before it, a mali in khaki shorts, alone, unaware of being watched, fussed over a row of potted plants. In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion—both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried—a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.

  For a long time, neither of them seemed to move from where they were sitting. Then, burrowing into the hall, they lay down on the carpet between two chairs, a sofa, and a centre table, their feet, or Uma’s shoulder, visible depending from where one saw them, leaving empty the place where they had been, a veranda framing a winter sky, and light, an occasional sweep of birds, and grey, thinning smoke. Now only the sounds remained, giving a sense of the city outside, caught in the light, and a mosquito, like a lost aeroplane, that had wandered in; the sound of the two voices, Jochna’s and Uma’s, fell like drops of water, again, and again, deep, sounding muffled underneath the sofa. The colour of Jochna’s dress, with red and black flowers, reminded one of the interiors of pavement stalls on Rashbehari Avenue, with dresses folded or hung up in the afternoon, and a fist clutching forty rupees. It could have been worn by a small plastic doll. There was something of a cat’s secrecy about the two figures.

  In the kitchen, the blue fluorescent light was suddenly extinguished, leaving its doorway dark until a pale, undecided patch of colour appeared in it—Nando, in his white pyjamas and shirt. On his black face, the eyebrows were knitted, either because he could not see well these days, or out of concern or puzzlement over some elusive thing.

  ‘Hey, you,’ he said.

  The two figures stirred as if they had been immersed in something, lifting their heads like cats raising their whiskers from a bowl of milk.

  ‘What?’ said Jochna, altering her voice to a surprising hardness and volume, for she, among the two, was unafraid of his bully and bravado.

  Nando softened.

  ‘What?’ he returned.

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Jochna.

  ‘No, I was only saying—have you washed the pans?’

  ‘Can’t you see?’ She might have been addressing a hectoring child.

  Nando didn’t mind this scolding. As if something had suddenly occurred to him, he turned back to the kitchen. Poor man, he had probably just wanted to have a few words before going in and smoking his bidi by himself in the servant’s room—because he never slept during the day. But the girls kept him out of their afternoon world, to which they had already returned, their sides and shoulders pressed against the carpet till they hurt, their breasts rising and falling lightly. They let no one encroach upon their territory between the sofa and the centre table; if someone did, they got up, flustered and serious. And Nando could not make normal conversation. He either flirted with Uma, standing beside her by the kitchen basin and brushing his shoulder against hers, or they quarrelled loudly, or made fun of each other in small, irritating, uncharitable ways. With Jochna he dared nothing at all, because she bore his daughter’s name, and was just as short with him as his daughter was; in fact he tried to please her whenever he could; but, in that frail demonic body with red eyes and tobacco-stained hands, there also existed a genuine paternal soft spot for Jochna. This was known and accepted in the household.

  While these people rested at home, Khuku’s husband sat in an office on the outskirts of the city. It was an old company, once reputable and British owned, called Little’s, and it produced sweets and chocolates. There was a time when its oval tin—Little’s Magic Assortment—was available in every shop in Calcutta, and its toffees and lozenges in cellophane wrappers stored in jars in every cigarette shop. The company had changed hands several times, until now it was owned by the state government, and, after having made losses for many years, was named a ‘sick unit’. Its loyal machines still produced, poignantly, myriads of perfectly shaped toffees, but that organ of the company that was responsible for distribution had for long been lying numb and dysfunctional, so that the toffees never quite reached the retailer’s shelves. Years of labour problems had sapped the factory and its adjoining offices of impetus, but ever since the Communist Party came to power, the atmosphere had changed to a benign, co-operative inactivity, with a cheerful trade unionism replacing the tensions of the past, the representatives of the chocolate company now also representing the government and the party, and the whole thing becoming a relaxed, ungrudging family affair. This kind of company was not rare in the ‘public sector’; in fact, brave little bands of men held out in such islands everywhere; but Khuku’s husband, before retiring, had worked in a successful private company, where every department whirred and ticked from nine to five thirty like clockwork, and he and his colleagues had only heard of the renegade lives of the ‘public sector’ companies from the outside. They were spoken of as backward but colourful tribes with a time-tested culture of tea-drinking, gossip, and procrastination, who had stoutly defended, for many years, their modes of communion and exchange from being taken over by an alien ‘work ethic’. Little did he know, then, that, in his days of retirement, he too would end up here. It was, in a sense, a relaxing place to be in, like withdrawing to some outpost that was cut off from the larger movements of the world. The factory was tucked away in a lane on the outskirts, not far from an important and congested junction on the main road, where no one would have expected it, hidden behind stone walls and a huge rusting gate that opened reluctantly to outsiders. Once, the two-storeyed buildings made of red brick, with long continuous corridors and verandas, with arches that were meant to give shelter from the tropical heat, would have been impressive and even grand. Now it was like a hostel; cups of tea travelled from room to room, and bearers ran back and forth in the verandas. There was a perpetual air of murmuring intrigue, the only sign of life, until the doors and windows were shut in the evening.

  Yet the employees were, in their own way, simple and good-hearted. And though Khuku’s husband was only an adviser, they treated him with a bit of extra respect and sometimes as if he ran the place. ‘Put it back on the rails, sir,’ they said, ‘we need people like you. What a state the company’s in!’ And Khuku’s husband came home and told Khuku these stories, his eyes shining, and felt young again. And Khuku told her brother in Vidyasagar Road, ‘He’ll put the company right.’ Khuku’s brother, in a kind of infatuated haze, said, ‘Little’s—Little’s will be all right again.’ For many days after, he would not let Piyu or his brother’s children touch Cadbury, and go out himself in search of Little’s chocolates. His relationship would become temporarily strained with the keeper of the local shop, Pick and Choose, who was always doing his accounts on a scrap of paper and was not very concerned about human beings. ‘What, sir, you don’t keep Little’s toffee—we ate it when we were young. You must have eaten it as well. No, this shop is not what it used to be,’ he would conclude, shaking his head. ‘What can we do, Bhola babu?’ the shopkeeper would say. ‘They don’t send us the chocolates,’ as if he were speaking of a powerful but heartless family.

  Meanwhile, Khuku’s husband had discovered that, in spite of their good intentions, the employees, after making their supportive and rallying statements, went back first thing to a convivial round of tea in the canteen. So he resorted to saying, ‘Do it at once!’ or ‘I want some order in this place!’ till he knew better. A few weeks later, he met, at last, the Managing Director. The Managing Director had joined the company three months ago, but since he was a state civil servant as well, he naturally could not spend all his time here—he was merely a stop-gap before a full-time man came along. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Purakayastha,’ he said to Khuku’s husband. ‘I’ve heard so much about you—we are very fortunate, very fortunate. We need your skills, sir. Tell me—are you happy with your office?’ A new room had been refurnished speciall
y for him, with a filing cabinet, a telephone, and a window that looked out over the wall into the lane. ‘Oh yes, you shouldn’t have gone through the trouble,’ said Khuku’s husband. ‘No trouble, no trouble at all! In fact, you’re the one that’s going through the trouble,’ he said, waving around him. ‘No, no,’ said Khuku’s husband. ‘In fact, Mr Sengupta, I would like to have a talk with you.’ He smiled and looked seriously at the other. ‘Definitely, Mr Purakayastha. We are very keen to hear what you have to say. Definitely.’ Yet the Managing Director—a relatively young man—spoke like one who would not be around for long, for all Managing Directors used this company as a kind of airport lounge, from where they went on to somewhere else, never to be seen again. And so it was the eager tea-drinking employees that Khuku’s husband spent most afternoons with.

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’ It was morning again. Khuku was speaking to Mohit’s mother, Puti, in their familiar East Bengali dialect.

  ‘Mohit told me yesterday.’

  Khuku laughed, disarmed by the picture that composed itself before her eyes—Bhaskar marching down the street early in the morning, brandishing newspapers.

  ‘What will he do next?’ she said.

  ‘He should get married before he does anything.’

  ‘I hear they’re trying to find a girl.’

  ‘It won’t be easy.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t be easy, will it?’ she asked.

  She cradled the receiver and curled her toes; her feet were up on the divan.

  ‘Mashi, how can it be easy?’ cried Puti. Her voice came agitated but musical on the ear-piece. ‘You know how long Arun took to find a wife.’

  ‘Yes, Arun,’ agreed Khuku. ‘But Arun is so . . . short.’

  ‘Arun is short but Bhaskar is dark,’ said Puti. ‘And tell me, which father will give away his daughter to a boy who has Party connections?’