Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  ‘Which father will?’ echoed Khuku. ‘It’s Bhola’s fault. Though he’s a good-looking boy in his way. I used to call him “Black Beauty” when he was younger.’

  ‘Leave your “Black Beauty”,’ said Puti. ‘“Black Beauty” won’t help him when his father-in-law finds he sells Ganashakti.’

  Later, Khuku put her feet in her slippers and walked to the dining-table. Mini was wrapped in a shawl, and Khuku’s husband was wearing a dark blue slip-over upon a shirt whose sleeves were rolled up above his wrists.

  ‘It’s cold,’ said Khuku, pulling her shawl tightly around her shoulders.

  Both hers and Mini’s hair were tied in buns at the back; both had wavy hair, but Khuku’s was crowded with curls, with not an inch of straightness to be found anywhere, only skips and jumps and leaps.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mini. ‘Ever since yesterday.’

  ‘You should wear your full-sleeve pullover,’ said Khuku to her husband.

  ‘Where is it?’ he asked, a little crossly but dreamily.

  ‘Can’t you find anything? Mini,’ she said, ‘he really can’t do anything for himself, and, God forbid, if I die before he does. . .’

  Mini smiled at her friend.

  ‘Have some oranges,’ said Khuku to Mini. ‘They’re sweet as sugar. Mritunjoy bought them yesterday from Park Circus, and do you know how much they cost—you won’t believe me—fourteen rupees a dozen.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Mini, looking up.

  ‘Yes—fourteen rupees a dozen! Who said Calcutta is not an expensive city? They say that Bombay is expensive, but I think Calcutta is no less.’ She said this as a complaint but a note of pride was audible in her voice.

  ‘Jochna!’ she cried. ‘Give Didimoni an orange! No, don’t give it, bring the bowl here, I’ll choose one myself.’ Jochna, with a mysterious smile on her face, held the bowl in her hands while Khuku delved in a hugely absorbed way into the oranges, turning them over, till she picked one and handed it to Jochna. ‘Give it to Didimoni,’ she said.

  ‘Give one to Shib,’ murmured Mini.

  She looked at her husband, as if she had just noticed him.

  ‘Will you have one?’ she said.

  He shook his head, never wasting a word if he didn’t have to. As Mini, with her small dark fingers, ripped the peel, the smell of orange suddenly burst upon the air.

  ‘Do you know what Puti told me?’ Khuku separated the portions of the orange, which came off with white threads hanging by their sides like bits of cobweb. Absent-mindedly she picked off some of the threads with her finger and put a piece in her mouth. ‘Bhaskar sells Ganashakti in the morning. Mmm, it’s like sugar.’ She picked up another piece and sprinkled sweet white powder upon it. ‘The sweeter the better,’ she said. Such a sweet tooth had she that when she was a girl she would eat handfuls of sugar, crunching the large unrefined crystals happily with her molars, and no one would notice, for she was a lonely child who haunted the margins of her large family. Once she had eaten sweet homoeopathic pills till they had given her a stomach-ache, much to the disgust of her elder sister. What was normally called ‘food’ had held no appeal for her until she got married.

  ‘Ganashakti?’ said Khuku’s husband.

  ‘Yes,’ said Khuku, spitting out the pips into her cupped hands. ‘Mohit was there with him.’

  Khuku’s husband shook his head, but said nothing.

  ‘There are many boys in my area,’ said Mini, putting a piece of orange in her mouth, ‘who get so involved they don’t do anything else for the rest of their lives. Many. Two boys, Anshuman Biswas and Partho Guha—good students at school—have even left their jobs.’ Khuku and Mini worked busily while talking, spitting out pips which were being heaped in torn pieces of the peel. They were enjoying the winter.

  When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes—Piyu’s dresses, Bhaskar’s pyjamas and kurtas, even a few soggy towels—hung from a clothes-line which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downward, as if a smile were forming. To the people in the house, the clothes formed a screen or curtain which threw shadows and provided bewitching glimpses of the speedy criss-crosses of the grill, and through those criss-crosses bits of the balcony of the house opposite and the sky and the shajana tree, all of which surprised by still being there. The slow leaking of the drops of water from the clothes and their casual, flirtatious flutter with every breeze would not have been noticed by the passer-by on the road, who, if he had looked beyond the remaining leaves on the shajana tree and the iron nerve-pattern of the grill, would have seen them suspended there stilly, like ghosts or patches of colour. Who had put them there? To know that, one would have had to be present at half-past two, when Haridasi, helped by Bhaskar’s mother, watched regally by Piyu, had hung up the clothes one by one, till the passer-by would have seen all the figures, including Piyu in the doorway, gradually consumed by the clothes that they were hanging up.

  Winter came only once a year, and it changed the city. It gave its people, as they wore their sweaters and mufflers, a sense of having gone somewhere else, the slight sense of the wonder and dislocation of being in a foreign city. Even the everyday view from their own houses was a little strange. Smoke travelled everywhere, robbing the sunlight of its fire. Afternoon, with its gentle orange-yellow light, was the warmest time of day, though the wet clothes, assisted by a breeze, dried more slowly than in the summer. And as the orange light fell on the brickwork and the sides of the houses, it was easier to tell, from the flushed rose centre that now appeared on a terrace and now a parapet, that its origins lay in fire.

  On the street, Tommy the dog haunted the rubbish-heap again, probing, in a concerned way, its bright smelly edges with his nozzle. When someone cranked the handle of the tube-well, it creaked and twanged like a one-string instrument. Crows, sometimes alighting on a window-sill or a banister, clamoured as usual, comforting the child in every human figure in the house, those who were half asleep or awake, bringing up memories of other human, beloved faces, or creating the expectation of homecomings. Their cries had something to do with hope and return and the continuance of human business. Bhaskar’s mother, turning in her sleep, grew full with the return of her son in the evening.

  She was sleeping with Piyu on the bed; her husband lay sleeping on the divan in the next room. He was snoring, but gently compared to his night-time snores, so that one would not have heard it from the bed that Piyu and her mother were sleeping on, but, moving closer to the doorway, one might have been distracted by a faraway sound that was hardly a sound at all, trapped, urgent, but private. Then, abruptly, one would have realized what it was, and the body with its small belly and bald patch, clothed in kurta and pyjamas, and the frowning mouth and big nose, would have formed around the snore.

  On Bhaskar’s mother’s outstretched hand, on the shining dark brown skin, there was, near the thumb and the index finger, a large pink spot like a rose where the skin had peeled off after one drop of boiling oil had leapt on it while she was frying luchis. The yellow Burnol paste that she put there timidly and perfunctorily after stubborn exhortations from Piyu had now faded into what looked like healing dabs of turmeric. She was dark, and slept intensely, while Piyu, beside her, was fair and fresh-faced, a plant that had been nurtured in this garden, in the shadow of pillows, cupboards, shelves, clothes-horses, untouched as yet by life. Let it always be so, the house around her seemed to say, the four walls and the beam on the ceiling, let us always keep her as she is. Let her not leave us. She breathed gently. The sun came in through the clothes-line and printed the wall and the blue bed-cover with triangles and rectangles.

  Haridasi, small Haridasi, barely four feet six inches tall, had cleared the dining-table, first cupping her endlessly compliant p
alm and pushing bits of moist rice and salt that had littered the table into its dark cave, to rest there between her heart line and her life line, collecting bits of fishbone as well to deposit them there, and then curling her fingers as if she were holding a secret and throwing the debris into the kitchen basin, though she had been told not to. She wiped the table after this with a wet cloth. Then she sat in one corner of the kitchen, the only one awake in the house, a guest, a stranger, a friend, and ate from a plate with a heap of rice and a puddle of dal and vegetables on one side. She was quiet as a mouse. Without being aware of it, she tried to mix the puddle of dal uniformly with the huge quantity of rice. She loved rice.

  It was today, in the evening, that Bhaskar’s mother would take her husband to the doctor for his annual check-up. For about two weeks she had been persuading him to go, but something else always came up instead. Now, at last, they had a free evening ahead of them. It was a short journey by car, past the Lake Market in Rashbehari Avenue, turning into a lane at whose entrance wheat and grain were piled in open heaps by the roadside. It was a lane they came to seldom, except on these visits to the doctor’s chambers, and they usually forgot where exactly the house was, with its porch lit by one bulb and the narrow corridor, smoke-filled in the winter, that ran next to it, inward to the green waiting-room at the back. The lane seemed far away and strange, and yet, in reality, was only a short distance from Khuku’s house, and from the lane in which Bhaskar’s mother’s sister lived, and Piyu’s college, and Lake Market where, once or twice a week, Bhaskar’s mother bought fish and vegetables. Once the visit was over they immediately went to the Fern Road Pharmacy and bought the medicines that had been prescribed, and proceeded without further delay to a relative’s house.

  Bhaskar’s father had a great, childlike respect for this doctor. Though he was himself an engineer, the doctor was what in his youth some of the brightest young men went on to be: an FRCP from London. Those were the days when young men went to England, not America, and came back with degrees and sometimes even an English wife who wore a sari. The letters FRCP made Bhaskar’s father feel that both he and India were suddenly, completely, though temporarily, young again. Each time he went there, he signed his name on the compounder’s slip and sat in the waiting room with his wife and the other patients as shyly as if he were visiting his in-laws, flicking through, meanwhile, old copies of Span. Once they were inside, he loved listening to the doctor’s diagnosis and asking questions about the prescription, not because he doubted the doctor but because he always wished, whenever he had the opportunity, to widen his own limited, though not negligible, knowledge of medicine. The doctor was a mild, slightly boring man whom time had passed by; he wore black-framed bifocal spectacles and had small tufts of black and grey hair coming out of his ears. He was content to see fewer patients these days and sit behind his old wooden table with its green leather top, his arms resting behind a glass paperweight with little flecks of pink and blue suspended in its strange, crystalline atmosphere, and talk in a leisurely way about his son who was studying at Caltech, and in winter, about all the marriages that were now underway in the city. Behind him, on the wall, there were two framed photographs—the class of ’49 in Calcutta Medical College, and the class of ’55 in London, the students mostly men, with recent, smart, close-cropped hair-cuts.

  Now an interminable mail-train passed on the railway tracks that formed the horizon that could be seen in the gap between the houses on the other side of Vidyasagar Road. For a while, all other local and habitual noises, of birds and cars, were subsumed under the long, swelling note of the mail-train whistle, which, with its lone trumpeting, made the air vibrate around one. But yet they slept in that vibrating air. Then, when the train had gone, the air was cleansed, and the room was as quiet as its reflection in the dressing-table mirror, with Oil of Ulay, Lactocalamine, Vaseline, Pond’s Dream Flower Talc, and two lipsticks arranged carefully, with all devotion and seriousness, on the shelf before it. Very slowly, like town officials who had respectfully ceased their transactions for a minute, the crows and sparrows began again, but sounding more distant now, even chastized, perhaps in comparison to the grand interlude of the train whistle. In this new, petty, semi-silent, post-whistle moment came the postman to Vidyasagar Road, dressed in civilian clothes, a dark red sweater, a full-sleeve shirt whose broad collars were hidden by the sweater’s neck, and black terry cotton trousers with bottoms that were wide and floppy; on his shoulder there was a hand-woven cotton sling bag such as college students swing casually and thoughtlessly by their sides, crammed with neat, though uneven, stairways of letters, a small blue aerogramme climbing up to a broad brown-paper envelope, which rose again to a disproportionately small inland postcard. This frail man, eclipsed almost entirely by his sweater and his trousers, now, retrieving more and more piles from his shoulder-bag, seemed the paradigm of modest, unattractive, but real generosity, as he, without any special demonstrativeness or affection, left at least one letter in every letter-box on his progress from one house to another. In the yellow-green letter-box by the gate to Bhaskar’s house there came a wedding card with ‘Shubho Bibaho’ inscribed on the envelope; on the card inside, embossed in fine gold lines on a red background, a wedding procession moved forward, looking as wedding processions might once have looked, with a palanquin and red and gold revellers in profile, wearing turbans and blowing pipes and beating drums and making an infernal racket. There was another card, announcing a funeral, with ‘Ganga’ printed in Bengali on the envelope. Lying on it was a yellow postcard from Bangladesh, sent by a distant relative; one half of the square, divided by a vertical line from the other, had clean horizontal lines that had been meticulously loaded with Bhaskar’s father’s name and his address, and the numbers of the pin code imprisoned inside tiny printed boxes. The letter, written in blue ink, began on this side with pleasantries and general reminiscences and then came, in its tidy persistent way, to occupy all of the other side, ending with a plea for financial help for a daughter’s marriage. Like a house which shelters sons, daughters, grandparents, servants, frustrations, expectations, a whole world under its roof, the postcard, with not one inch of it wasted, gave whatever space it could to words that expressed both necessary sentiments and urgent requirements. And there was a letter from Robi, a nephew in Pennsylvania, with photographs of his daughter enclosed, now seven. He had once lived in this house as a student. The one-dollar postage stamp, with Lincoln’s picture on it, would be acquired by Mohit for his collection.

  On the first floor of the house, on the double bed where Piyu and her mother were now sleeping, a grandmother had lived twenty years ago. She was Bhaskar’s father’s mother; of her seven children, Khuku was her favourite, but she was in those days in Bombay with her husband and a son of her own. From time to time, the grandmother’s children, who were scattered with their families in different parts of India, would visit this house to see their mother, who was eccentric and did not have much to say to them any more; she had brought them up and now her duties, she had decided, were over. Bhaskar’s father, Bhola, and Khuku, who was only a year older than him, often called their mother ‘Goonga’. The bed on which Piyu and her mother were now sleeping was her bed, her divan, her arm-chair, her footstool. In the morning her quilt and pillows were banked on one side of the bed, the bed beaten with a jhata by Durga, and then draped with a bed-cover. She, wearing her white sari, for her husband had died thirty years ago, sat peering at the Amrita Bazaar Patrika through her reading glasses, beginning at the first paragraph on the first page and ending at the last. No one dared bother her but the children, among whom she was only openly affectionate towards Piyu, who could still barely walk, and was regarded by everyone, including six-year-old Bhaskar, as a discovery, a curiosity, and especially amusing in the way she imitated certain grown-up gestures. The grandmother’s lunch was laid out on a table before the bed by Nando, who worked then in this house, and looked much the same in his white shirt and pyjamas, his hair oiled, and
his face demon-like. ‘Ei Nando,’ she would shout, ‘Bring the salt and the oil!’ and Nando would rush back with salt on a plate and a bowl of mustard oil. She had died a few years later. The pomelo tree by her window, whose fruit she ate with mustard oil, secretly adding sugar, had blossomed again this winter, its fruit picked and stolen by a new generation of urchins and scallywags who looked exactly like the ones who had climbed the tree twenty years ago. Some of her children, in those twenty years, had grown old and died as well, leaving Khuku, Bhola, and two more brothers, including the eldest, who, though hunched now, and forgetful of names, still found time to get angry about umpires’ decisions in cricket matches.

  It was an old house, a hospitable house. In the big room on the second floor, which Bhaskar now had more or less to himself, and where he engaged in animated discussions or restful gossip with comrades from the Party, shy men with moustaches whose frail chests suddenly expanded during these discussions—on the large bed in this room Bhaskar and his brother Manik, who was now in Germany, used to sleep once. When Khuku’s son, Bablu, came down for the summer, Khuku’s elder sister would also have arrived from the hills of Assam where, in a town with a funny name that sounded like a kitchen utensil, she was headmistress in a girls’ school. Reading everything from Beowulf to Puja annuals at the oddest of angles—for she would lie sideways and let the magazine dangle from the fingers of one outstretched hand, moving grudgingly only when it dawned on her that it was impossible to turn the page without the aid of the hand that was trapped beneath her—reading everything at such angles had given her eye a squint, and her an incongruous lost and searching look. Incongruous, for, despite being widowed when she was thirty-four, she had raised her children robustly, feeding them well and twisting their ears. During those summers, on the bed on the second floor, she told Bablu and Bhaskar and Manik stories about ancient Rome, and the last days of Pompeii. At present, the bed upstairs was empty, with winter sunlight falling upon it, obstructed only by the mullions in the windows, and Bhaskar was away at the factory in Howrah—but once he had lain there on his stomach with a new book before him and seen rakkhoshes with fangs and nose-rings drink the blood of innocent kings, rakkhoshes who married female rakkhoshes and produced hordes of fearful little khokkhoshes with small fangs and round eyes. Durga had told Bhaskar and Manik when to be careful of ghosts—between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, when grown-ups slept or were away at work and even real objects threw no shadows, and, at night, during the pregnant hours that preceded dusk. If they sensed anything unearthly, Bhaskar and Manik promptly muttered to themselves the lines they knew by heart: