Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Half in her sleep, Bhaskar’s mother had been seeing them going up, the collapsible gate opening, shutting, opening, shutting, the voices in Vidyasagar Road coming down the narrow passage way by the house, and then coalescing and coming up the stairs. She needed her sleep; or else she had migraines. From outside came the sound of the occasional bus or car passing down the road; long deafening horns. But nothing frightened the crows.

  The boys went straight up to the second storey, and there began their rehearsals. Bhaskar’s mother could hear their voices, far away; she was half dreaming and half listening. Upstairs, they were practising their lines between the bed and cupboards and dressing-table; from time to time, one or two of them wandering to look out at the street and the houses on the opposite side. ‘Whose house is that, Bhaskarda?’ asked Dipen, clutching a mullion and pushing aside a fragment of a curtain and pointing to the house that the window looked out upon. ‘That’s the advocate’s house,’ said Bhaskar. ‘The advocate died when I was ten, but we still call it the advocate’s house.’ ‘Bhaskarda! Tell Deepu to shut up so that I can say my lines!’ said Dhruba, standing in front of the bed. His ‘lines’ were really an inarticulate roar. A man called Mahesh in a rather dirty dhoti was sitting on the floor with a dholak on his lap; he’d brought it to beat out a rhythm during the chants. But the sounds they made were always being overpowered by the single-minded, protracted hooting of state transport buses. ‘We can use my house for rehearsals,’ Bhaskar had offered generously; and this explained their presence here.

  ‘OK, let’s repeat the lines!’

  ‘Dhiren, stand in place!’

  ‘Allah-hu-akbar!’

  ‘Allah-hu-akbar!’

  And then:

  ‘Let’s have a tea break . . .’

  They tried their best to simulate the feeling of performing on the streets, and the atmosphere of the street-play they were preparing for, which was two weeks away. They went over their rudimentary but voluble roles with enthusiasm. They loved the freedom and heat of performing on the streets, of being uncircumscribed by the proscenium, the proximity and palpability of the houses that bordered their performance, their gestures spilling over onto the pulse of the ragged audience, the nearness of the street-sky; and they loved the exaggerated sketchiness of their own rehearsals, the lines never wholly or faithfully committed to memory.

  ‘Haridasi!’ sighed Bhaskar’s mother downstairs, still lying in bed. ‘Haridasi!’ When the girl had finally appeared, she said, her voice a decibel lower and deeper after her nap, ‘Take them tea upstairs.’ As Haridasi was turning to go, she said, ‘And listen! Give them some biscuits—those biscuits we bought a few days ago.’

  Sometimes when Bhaskar’s mother heard them rehearsing she thought about Bhaskar worrying for the poor people in the world and she thought just how difficult a place to live in and understand the world was. Look after your own, was her own view.

  And she was filled with an apprehension that couldn’t be put in words when she heard their voices.

  Yet he wasn’t going to listen; he must give five hundred rupees of the two thousand he earned to the Party.

  Unlike her husband, she had a sharp business sense; but her energies must be devoted to the housekeeping accounts. These she kept with great meticulousness, and zeal, little figures and computations inside a note-book. Meanwhile, it was left to her husband and now her son to preside over the business.

  She thought, at times, of the family house in Shyambazar. During her childhood she had not known what it meant to live anywhere but in a great mansion with many rooms, so prosperous that she had not had any idea of penury.

  She had left the house when she’d been eighteen, after getting married, though she kept going back to it for this or that festival. But after her father died she didn’t feel the urge to visit it as frequently as she had before; it was as if her ties had been loosened a little; even her ties to the world had been loosened slightly, and, although her ambitions and concerns for her children were still in place, it was almost as if she’d let go.

  Even her children did not know if they knew her completely. Now, she rubbed her eyes absently in her half-sleep. It was when Bhaskar and Manik were growing up that her life had passed through its worst phase, with Bhola’s business going bankrupt. She had been, then, for the first time, full of fear.

  Her innate business sense (which she must have inherited from her father, and which had never been put to use) had made her, recently, create a savings account whose foundations had been laid by a sum left in her father’s legacy, and she would not let Bhola tamper or interfere with the savings for the purpose of his business; at first, she had not even told him about it. But mixed up with this hard-headed sensibleness were also shades of spiritualism, of irreducible faiths, and thus, there hung in the big room on the second storey, above the clothes-horse, a picture of Ramakrishna sitting cross-legged, and, next to it, a picture of his wife, Sharada Devi. Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik, and Krishna sat in the prayer-room, in some way involved with the destinies in this house. This was one side of her that no one could plumb, where this accessible and ever-smiling woman was most herself, and where also lay, not in a rational way, her hopes and fears for Bhaskar, Manik, Piyu, Bhola and herself, in that order.

  There was a loud scraping movement upstairs, furniture being moved, and then the sound of feet running. What was happening?

  She herself was a bundle of fears she had never grown out of. Doctors, medicines, TABC injections; all these things she ran from, running literally from the last, climbing up the stairs with the sari pulled round her ankles when the health worker used to come on a visit, chased by her children, laughing and weeping at once; thus she had rarely been vaccinated, but had rarely fallen ill as well. This is what perpetually puzzled her sons; that the prospect of contracting a disease should cause her less fear than the simple pin-prick of an injection. For this was the only time—the visit of the health worker—when they saw her frightened and agitated. Her general good health had been cause for some contentment. But she had sensitive ears, and they ached at times. The imbalances of the menopause caused one side of her face to swell occasionally. Her childhood had been spent in the then prosperous area of Shyambazar in North Calcutta, she the third youngest child of a family of three brothers and four sisters, her father doing a very successful business in cheap detergent soap. Her mother had died when she was six, but it was strange to think that she felt she knew her in a way; her picture now hung next to her father’s in the house.

  Years had passed, and she was left here, suddenly awake, half listening to the traffic outside.

  She was closest to the sister immediately younger than her—Reena—and in an album there was a series of silly photographs taken on that day, one and a half years before she was married, by Chhorda (‘Right, stand together, you two!’) when they had dressed as men, especially for these photographs to be taken, Reena as a police inspector, wearing a real khaki uniform with a cap and a baton, she just as a civilian, both with ridiculous moustaches etched above their lips, and with serious expressions full of suppressed smiles. They, Abha (which was her name) and Reena, were sixteen and seventeen then, and neither had really known what it was to be either a man or a woman; they had posed on the terrace with the other old buildings in the area behind them. At the age of eighteen she had got married.

  Ah, her youth, her youth. Her children would never know it.

  Then another life began for her, in another house. She found Bhola full of opinions about what was Art and what was not, and about politics; and, vexed as she was by this man, a secret affection grew for him that was inseparable from the exasperation she felt. Life changed; their children grew up; but he did not change. And in the inconsequentiality of such emotions lay a specialness, that it did not matter to the world or to anyone else what his opinions were, as if there had been, alas, a pact between her and him to see what he was really like. Yet what arguments had to be tactfully averted! She had been a f
an of Uttam Kumar, but Bhola, she found, thought he was a ‘bad actor’ and had a ‘stupid face’, and these revelations came as a shock and at first she could not possibly understand how anyone could think these things about Uttam Kumar. Nevertheless she tried to understand. Music he took very seriously, more seriously than she had ever seen anyone take something like music before—after all, what was it but music?—and he spoke of tunefulness and bad singing. He spoke of the great singers he’d heard when he was a child. All this to her was an alien idiom; thus she never told him, until many years later, that she had learnt the Hawaiian guitar for two years before her marriage, and could just about play three or four Tagore songs like ‘It is your beginning, and my end’ and ‘Are you only a picture?’ on it.

  How was one to speak to such a man? And such an impractical man: it was almost as if he’d made whatever he wanted of their lives, and she’d sat back and allowed him to do it. At first they used to have arguments. It took years to just properly understand each other. By that time, one part of life was finished.

  Upstairs, it was quiet again; and she wondered, for a moment, if everything was all right. But she was reassured that they were at work. Sometimes they were loud as demonstrators on the street, and at other times secretive as thieves. There was no telling when they were excited and when planning something quietly.

  ‘Borda doesn’t live far from here, does he?’ Returning from the nursing home three days later, Mini asked this question. It was put forward shyly. For it was like something of a holiday for her, to be in the cool, neat, constricted South; these little trips to and from the nursing home were outings, and even now had the air, for her, of freedom. And each new day with Khuku was a measuring out of time; she, Mini, must go back before long, but to be in this part of the city was to explore a world and witness those who had been changed completely.

  ‘Very near here,’ Khuku revealed. ‘It’s round the corner, isn’t it?’ she asked Mritunjoy. Not far away was Golf Green and that block of flats.

  Mritunjoy mumbled words that sounded like ‘Yes, mashima.’

  Borda, Khuku’s elder brother, had stopped going out since last year. Any visit to the little flat in Golf Green was thus welcome. There were lapses in his memory these days. This had happened after the pneumonia infection, when he’d been on the brink of moving across to the other world, and had just managed, in a nursing home in Mandeville Gardens, almost against his will, to come back. Thus, he might not recognize Mini when she visited him today, though she had visited him in the autumn only a year and a half ago, when he’d been healthy. So this is what it came to, those years in Sylhet. He used to wander about Sylhet town with an umbrella, to protect his complexion; dispensing with his studies, he used to gaze softly at girls, some of whom were Khuku’s friends. Khuku suffered as her friends, unaware he was her brother, made satirical comments on his tender appraisal. Then he had got tired of that life, and he’d demanded of his mother when he was twenty-six years old, ‘Ma, can I get married now?’

  But there were, these days, moments of clarity. For instance, recently, when his daughter Beena had been speaking about Bhaskar with her mother, he’d said, ‘What—Bhaskar? He’s become a Communist, hasn’t he?’ Then he’d gone into a sort of contemplation.

  There was a time when he had a great deal of love for his nephews and nieces; but that was obscured now, absolutely, by a veil of silent but complete obsession with personal health and hygiene. A little over a year ago, his only grandson in Jodhpur Park had died at the age of six of a rare form of cancer; yet at the shraddh ceremony for the child, all Borda could worry about was whether he would be able to have his expected meal at the usual time. At times, now, he sat on his bed ruminating. A visit, no matter who it might be, made his eyes light up with happiness. The words he said were hardly audible, because his voice had become soft. Golf Green surrounded him with its identical verandas.

  Golf Green. A maze of houses, predominantly off-white and red, with scattered islands of green, dull façades, one lot of houses hiding from another. One could hardly ever quite remember the way, and Khuku had to rely on the man who had a small makeshift stall for ironing clothes as her landmark.

  Very small children and cats sat in the balconies.

  They came to the staircase on whose side was imprinted, in the style of graffiti, the letters by which one identified Borda’s building.

  The two got off from the car. Mini walked towards the staircase.

  They had not been expected; Borda’s wife, this old, faded woman, in fact, had just begun to prepare lunch.

  He had been sitting there, alone, a faded red pullover pulled casually over a woollen vest. He happened to turn his head and was taken by surprise to see his own younger sister standing there and said:

  ‘Khuku?’

  The room was narrow. To see the familiar and the living in a moment of inattention is sometimes as extraordinary as seeing the dead; or perhaps that was only true of Borda. He stared at Khuku in astonishment.

  At Borda’s question, Boudi came out of the kitchen. Borda often spoke nonsense these days and she had to check if he was babbling nonsense again.

  Although she was only four years older than Khuku, she looked several years older, partly because Khuku looked much younger than her real age, and partly because Boudi herself had aged prematurely. But the strange thing was that over the last ten years she had remained the same; it was as if she could age no more.

  ‘Khuku, Khuku,’ said Borda.

  ‘Look who I’ve brought with me,’ she said tolerantly.

  ‘Who’s that—is that Mini?’ asked Boudi.

  When they were going back down Southern Avenue, the trees bare, children playing football and smoke rising at the back, she looked twice at Mini and saw that she was unmindful.

  ‘When do you think it’ll end?’ asked Mini, her jaw jutting out slightly. For the signs of upheaval were still there, the daily killings, for here was a billboard coming up proclaiming Hindu and Muslim amity.

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘I mean you’ll never be able to appease them,’ said Mini.

  What if one mosque had gone—for hundreds of temples had been destroyed before. She could not understand what the fuss was about.

  By the lakes, the trees with outspread branches were bare. A few boys were playing football; further away, someone had lit a fire and a funnel of smoke was rising from it.

  Promises, always promises. No sooner had the mosque gone down than the government had promised that it would be built again.

  ‘Who’ll rebuild those temples?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Khuku. ‘No one talks about them.’

  They turned left into Gariahat.

  Each day the azaan rose in the morning. Over the alley-ways it rose, and the tram-lines, spreading for a radius of over a mile.

  This winter had not been a particularly cold one; it had been diffuse and gentle and chilly rather than crystalline in the mornings.

  Meanwhile, the muezzin went on praising the virtues of Allah in syllables that sounded like ‘laillallah rasulallah’, and Allah was great, Allah was good and glorious.

  The government did one thing today and another tomorrow. Today they said they would rebuild the mosque, and the next day they failed to honour the statement.

  Some people thought they’d been too tolerant in the past.

  Some people thought that the whole conception their country had been based on was flawed; so they must start again. Speeches were expended on the ‘idea’ of the country and what the meaning of that idea was.

  The word ‘fundamentalism’, travelling everywhere and belonging nowhere: people tried to understand what it meant.

  They appealed for the razed site to be left as it was, as a memorial to an event. Let the rubble stand.

  In one newspaper, a Muslim writer said, ‘The heart of the parrot of Hindu fundamentalism beats in the giant of Muslim fundamentalism. Kill the giant, and you will have killed the pa
rrot.’

  At half-past ten, a lemon-coloured Ambassador arrived to pick up Khuku’s husband. This was a government car. It waited downstairs as Shib wore his trousers and shoes and wound a tie around his collar.

  This lemon-coloured car might thus be considered one of the ‘perks’ of working at Little’s. It had a young longhaired driver at the wheel who talked indefatigably and had grown rather fond of Shib, and who took him to the office each day and brought him back. He was, naturally, one of those who’d lose his job if Little’s ever ceased to exist, as there seemed every possibility it might; the driver, however, appeared untouched by this possibility, which was more remote to him than his fantasies. ‘What was it like in Bombay, sir?’ he’d ask; for he was endlessly curious about Bombay. Last week Shib had been to the Writers’ Building, to the third floor, where the department that dealt with ‘sick’ companies was. The department had a resonant name: Industrial Reconstruction Department. Around it the inexhaustible, murmurous business of governance continued. Under its purview fell a number of companies, although the larger firms which were once impressive but now a liability, prehistoric dinosaurs that were in a museum that was constantly being added to, like Indian Iron and Steel and Bengal Potteries, had been bought over by the Central Government; their lives were governed from Delhi; they were maintained like tamed and exotic pets. Infrequently a sincere effort was made to have them privatized and release them from the imprisonment of an artificial existence into a normal life; but immediately the local trade union resisted the move as a betrayal that might cost employees their jobs. The state government took over smaller companies; it watched and waited; and when a company had ceased performing indefinitely it bought its shares, as it had bought Little’s.