Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Bhola on the way back.

  ‘What should I think?’ said Bhaskar. ‘We didn’t speak. She was busy eating ice-cream.’

  And Bhaskar, after a gap of five days, resumed going to the factory. He left agitated and late in the morning after a meal of fish and rice.

  The factory—time had not dulled the route to it nor made it easier—took an hour and a half to get to by car; it meant crossing the Howrah Bridge; then passing through places that were neither towns nor outposts, but that had names; and negotiating a bad road. Neither tree nor bird in sight, nothing but the little stalls one left behind with pictures of Krishna in them; this was the road to Howrah. By train, it took a little less time.

  This was the journey his father had made for the last twenty-five years, the journey he’d made when Bhaskar and Manik and Piyu were at school, their heads bent separately over books, and their mother at home. Its frequency and purpose had, by now, after all these years, diminished, the trip almost become ordinary, a repeated ritual rather than an ambition. And Bhaskar too had now embarked upon this sketchy but indelible route.

  Part of the reason for the aggravation of Bhaskar’s backache, it had to be admitted, was the jolts and bumps of the drive. The Municipal Corporation, it seemed, had no money to repair these roads and would have none in the near future. The interconnected, anonymous roads, adorned at intervals by small tea-shops, one half-defined vista giving way to another, shrank at last and resolved itself into something concrete and real and small, into this factory that had always been there. Its gates presented itself along a lane only wide enough to accommodate one car at a time.

  The larger companies around it had left, but it and others like it had remained and made of this place their special habitat. It was Lord Vishwakarma who looked after this company and the cranes that it made and who looked after its neighbours and their small range of products.

  And yet of late Bhola and Bhaskar had been discussing in a slightly emotional way the effect liberalization would have on their company. For new times bring new and unforeseen exigencies. ‘It’ll be difficult for us to survive,’ said Bhola with satisfaction. ‘The big ones will go in for collaborations and mergers. And the small ones will be pushed out by multinationals.’ They made gloomy and extreme predictions.

  Here South Calcutta receded; homes, children, mothers, servants were replaced by men in dirty overalls wandering about in the workshed. Without explanation, the machines hummed and rattled. In other factories nearby, machines hummed and rattled as well for the purposes of a tiny but persistent line of production.

  There was a calendar on the wall of the office’; an old map; near the workshop, a small shrine.

  Bhaskar oversaw what everyone else was doing; checked if any fresh orders had come through; dialled several phone numbers for fresh orders.

  ‘The whole world’s in a recession,’ he said. And indeed it was.

  Then he made a few more phone calls.

  This company had been founded by a group of friends, some of whom, like Bhola, had given up jobs to pool their resources into the business, others who had been waiting to make a beginning in some sort of enterprise. That was a time when many middle-class people decided to start small businesses. All of Bhola’s partners lived, as it happened, in South Calcutta, not far from each other.

  Then the daily journeys began, exultant at first, routine later. As a business grows or fails, the families of its employees and owners live out their separate destinies. Children grow up over a time that seems longer than it will in retrospect; wives age subtly; they seem young and unchanged for a considerable period of time; men visit the factory and the business enters the bloodstream.

  Two years after his marriage, Bhola had decided to leave his job and put the money he had received as a gift from his father-in-law into starting this business. His father-in-law himself was an inspiration; a stern man who, through acumen rather than sophistication, had made his enterprise a success; and there was no reason why Bhola and his partners couldn’t do what his father-in-law had done. The father-in-law (dead for thirteen years), whose name had been Radhanath Das—all his products bore the legend ‘Das’—had personally been aghast at Bhola’s decision.

  The partners had intended to contribute something to the country: cranes, and other nuts and bolts of the manufacturing industry. For they were civil engineers, not Marwaris and traders; the country needed them; and there would be big money in it and great demand for it; the country needed dams, bridges, roads and pylons as it grew . . .

  The name they came up with for the factory, Goodforce Literod, was a judicious composite of English words; and Literod became the brand name of a pulley they manufactured.

  They produced calendars every year, simple dignified squares with a sheaf of dates attached, and the name Goodforce Literod imprinted upon them, the calendars as much announcing this name as the year they were produced in. Each year, the calendars and that name had their rebirth. It was as if the calendars, whose pages so quickly became ragged, gave the company a legitimacy.

  It was during the years of the Naxals that the company went bankrupt. A protracted abeyance began, in which the business brought in nothing, no income, and when it became a symbol of some specific but not easily grasped meaning; it was at this point that the business finally became more than a business, and became a way of life, a definition of the existence of the families that had invested their lives in it. Each morning Bhola’s children saw their father going to work, wearing a shirt, trousers, and shoes, although something in them knew he was not going to work.

  Yet the name—Goodforce Literod Ltd.—still possessed its music for the children.

  Most of the partners had died over the last fifteen years. The factory remained a husk of its first intentions.

  Naturally it did not seem that Manik, Bhola’s younger son, would ever return to Calcutta and have anything to do with the company. Recently he’d written from Germany that he wanted to study management in America once he’d graduated, which was a very wise thing to do.

  Yet—unexpectedly—the company had been functioning for the last two years with a tepid body-warmth, something approaching a normal temperature: and no one knew or could explain why. It was as if the dead partners had, from another world, bestowed their hopes and benedictions upon it.

  And each year there was the Vishwakarma Puja. And all members and friends of the family who’d been invited would set out in their cars after filling the tanks with forty litres of petrol, towards Howrah. Though the last cook, whose fragrant preparations of goat’s meat and fish-head dal were well known, had died two years ago of cholera, the present cook too had a reputation. For an hour and a half they would travel, to go to the factory in Howrah and eat at the Vishwakarma feast.

  But Bhaskar’s joining the factory had been seen by others with bemusement and surprise; for it was not so much an entry into the world of business as an escape from it. Why should a young man, unless he had no serious ambition in life, or no choice, want to join a company that was already a ghost of itself? His parents tried not to have to think about the answer to this question. But for Bhaskar, who, after graduating with a second-class commerce degree, and rather desultorily, for a period, studying Cost Accountancy—for Bhaskar, who, afterwards, had moved restlessly from job to temporary job, it had meant a familiar place to go to; it meant not being swallowed up in the orbit of temporary sales work for large companies; and, most importantly, his pride would not be challenged, for he would not work under anyone except his father and with his father’s old friends. He gave himself, thus, whole-heartedly to securing fresh orders. He went off to meet Marwari traders; he went to Ranchi to confer with representatives of small companies. He tasted the food in various small towns.

  When Bhola came back to India from Germany he was only twenty-eight years old; he had no idea then he’d go into business. He had gone on a course of technical training; and he was married within a year of his
return, when he was twenty-nine. Bhaskar’s mother was nineteen years old then, barely a woman, and she was still—it was heard—studying for her BA. But her student life ended next year, the first year of her marriage, when she found she had failed her BA because she hadn’t worked hard enough for her English exam; tears flowed down her cheeks. And Bhola patted her lovingly on the back. The English language ever eluded her and then, graciously, came to bother her not at all.

  Thereafter, on failing her BA, she, who had little interest in books, would devote her sporadic but avid reading habits to women’s magazines, and, as she grew older, to Ramakrishna’s Kathamrita (which her mother once used to read) for its queer parables and homilies; for she often found her mind turning to things that were holy. She had married Bhola solely because her father had decided it should be so; a German-trained engineer counted for a great deal in those days. Bhola’s family were secretly disappointed, although Bhola’s wife came, as it turned out, from a rich business family; but they would have preferred a background with more pedigree, and perhaps a fairer bride. From Assam, Bhola’s elder sister, the one they called Didi, came in a train for the wedding; Khuku came in a plane from Delhi.

  During the first two years of his married life, he and his wife quarrelled frequently because they often misunderstood each other. But he had a job that was secure, a furnished flat; he had a good beginning in Calcutta.

  It is useless to speculate what his life and the lives of his wife and his children might have been like had he kept his job. But he had left it one day on an impulse, ready to listen to no one else, and they vacated the apartment, and moved to a small flat on Swinhoe Street. From there, later, they went to Fern Road, where, probably, Bhaskar was conceived. Below their flat, two doors away, there was a jeweller’s, with a collapsible gate and a fat man in a dhoti and cap leaning behind a counter. Finally, they came to Vidyasagar Road.

  After Bhaskar’s birth (his eyes were so large and dark that they seemed to be outlined with kohl), his mother suffered from a brief but acute spell of depression, such as is common to women after the experience of childbirth. She even wanted to go home; it seemed, strangely, that she could take no more of the marriage. A few days later the depression disappeared and she never spoke of it again.

  Such were their lives’ inconsequential beginnings.

  And they had social obligations that kept them all occupied early that February. It was a dance with complex steps; they went to a wedding; they had to go to Banidi’s funeral, she who had died unexpectedly; they visited one of Bhola’s friends, whom he’d almost lost touch with; a meeting was arranged with a family in a little flat off Lansdowne Road, to see another ‘girl’ for Bhaskar. Her father was a widower: her mother had died of cancer.

  Bhola had decided secretly that he must not dwell on Bhaskar’s politics or even politics at all (a difficult renunciation) during the meeting for the sake of a smooth passage to marriage. Possibly he was going to be a little disingenuous, but a little disingenuousness didn’t count.

  Bhaskar would put on some weight after these visits; for he ate whatever was offered to him. It didn’t matter whether he was hungry or not; he believed he should profit in some way from these occasions; it was a habit he’d had since he was a child.

  For many days now, Bhola had been trying to arrange another meeting with a ‘party’, but Bhaskar had lapsed easily again into a state of indifference. They showed him photographs; but he was never at home! When they put their questions to him directly he mumbled his replies. It was not that he didn’t care; he was twenty-eight years old; and he experienced an acute absence at times by his side. But it was as if his recent eloquence on politics had left him inarticulate about personal matters; and he had a profound fear that he would not find a bride to his liking. Which girl would marry someone who did not have a well-settled job with chances of promotion in an established company—at the very least? It was to conceal these fundamental and unspoken doubts that he commanded his parents, ‘Do what you want, then. And don’t wait for my permission. Frankly I have nothing to say on the matter; and when have you listened to me, anyway.’

  They had gone to the house in the lane off Lansdowne Road early that month. They consulted a shabby calendar, saw that the date had arrived. Bhaskar hadn’t returned home yet; they panicked briefly. No one remembered, later, how this meeting had been arranged. The door of the flat was open; a corridor led to the sitting-room; here, a neutral pattern of furniture awaited them and Bhaskar and Piyu and their mother seated themselves.

  Dr Ghosh sat joyously upon an arm-chair facing them. Without delay, he embarked upon an explanation about how his two children, his daughter, Sandhya, and his son, Bipul (the younger of the two, studying management in South India), had grown up looked after by him, because his wife had died twelve years ago of cancer, as if he was recounting an old instructive parable. Over the last five years, the daughter, he confided, had taken over the household.

  ‘Coughs and colds and diarrhoea I can take care of,’ he said, ‘but not food.’ He taught medicine in a college.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Bhola, smiling.

  ‘She’s in the kitchen,’ said the doctor, too young at fifty to be bereft of a wife, ‘making tea. She’ll be here in a minute.’

  ‘And what does she do?’ asked someone.

  ‘She’s doing an MA in sociology, but she’s an interior decorator as well . . . That, I would say’—he smiled—‘is her first love. Everything in this house was decorated by her . . .’ They looked around them with awe at the prints on the walls, the lampshades, and the decorations: wooden Kashmiri miniatures, a picture of a yak and a Tibetan herdsman done with coloured threads.

  ‘It’s very quiet here,’ said Bhola, ‘in spite of being so near the main road! You’re lucky to have a flat here, Mr Ghosh.’ This congratulatory observation mildly embellished the air of what was a modest but neat flat with breezes circulating in it.

  Sandhya came out from the kitchen with a tray full of tea-cups and five plates of sweets; they sat up as if they’d been ordered to, and Dr Ghosh said, ‘No, you must have something.’ She had a peaceful face; she was dark, and wore glasses. No one could decipher from her serenity that she had already seen in the same capacity a cost accountant, a marine engineer, and a lecturer, and been seen; today she had been informed she was to see a businessman’s son. No, she was, admittedly, not particularly beautiful, but youth—she was twenty-four—has its own beauty wherever it resides, like a rare flower in a wilderness even in a city as large as Calcutta, an apparition before its bloom fades. Everyone was made speechless by her and Bhaskar glanced at her quickly. They were filled with wonder for a stranger.

  ‘You must have one,’ said Dr Ghosh to Piyu. ‘What’s your name? A very pretty girl. . .’

  ‘Say something,’ said her mother.

  All her life, except between the age of one and five, when she had been garrulous, albeit with a limited and repetitive vocabulary, Piyu had found talking difficult before strangers, as if she was hiding the best for another encounter, or person.

  ‘Piyali,’ she said at last, after a long time.

  ‘We call her Piyu,’ said her mother, as if by imparting this fact she had sealed a special pact between them.

  ‘Tea?’ asked Sandhya suddenly.

  So easily these crucial meetings could lapse unobtrusively into boredom!—but this did not happen now. Once Sandhya had poured tea, they considered the sweets and weighed them figuratively. ‘The size of these langchaas . . .’ said Bhaskar’s mother. Bhaskar said nothing. ‘They’re fresh,’ said Dr Ghosh, as if he were speaking of children he had delivered. ‘They come to the sweet-shop every evening—I went and bought them an hour ago.’ As they ate, he, without undue emphasis, began to ask after Bhola’s company. ‘We manufacture cranes,’ said Bhola, ‘and other kinds of engineering implements.’ Bhaskar opened his mouth once or twice, cleared his throat—and said nothing. He put a roshogolla whole in his mouth.

  �
�I saw you devour those sweets,’ said his mother, ‘you can never resist them’; but that night, when he ate very little at the dining-table, there was palpably some other reason for his loss of appetite.