Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Then she remembered her friend’s arthritis, and the pain, persistent, monotonous, as personal as something imagined, which was born of neglect and carelessness. Yet the thing about arthritis was that you didn’t know why it happened to one person and not to another; there appeared to be no clearly identifiable cause; it was yet another mystery that governed and left its casual impress upon existence. ‘It’s four months now,’ she thought, and recalled that Mini should have been back in three months for another check-up. And yet the thought of Mini, whose every trouble filled her with a sense of responsibility, also, contradictorily, brought to her a feeling of happiness and excitement.

  The last time she’d called her was when there had been an explosion in Central Avenue, not very far from Mini’s building; and they’d trembled and thought that the troubles had begun in Calcutta. But no, to their relief, but almost to their disappointment as well (for they succumbed easily to excitement), it was the arsenal of a local hoodlum that had blown up by accident.

  ‘I wonder how she is,’ thought Khuku (for Mini came back to her as a person in a dream), and dialled the number of her school. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I speak to Supriti Biswas?’ The person at the other end seemed to weigh this question and consider its merits. Supriti Biswas. In a voice that sounded slightly put out, the person eventually relented and said, ‘Hold on a minute, please.’

  There was a gap of five minutes. She heard the voices of children, random and happy, in the ear-piece. Then a voice she knew well said, ‘Khuku?’

  Later she grew sleepy; the talk had relaxed her. The light of oncoming dusk played and scattered on the large windows. It scattered and seemed to vanish but remained like a glaze. A thought came to her: I’ll go there tomorrow; she said she’d be at home.

  She’d fall asleep now as usual in the middle of the afternoon and wake up unable to tell for how long she’d slept, whether it was ten minutes or half an hour or more. Why, sometimes it seemed to her she’d fallen asleep as a child and woken up to find that most of her life had passed by; she was here.

  A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy. Sometimes it seems that there is no reason, except a slight sense of boredom, a hint of life’s emptiness, a memory of familiarity and a promise of pleasure. Half asleep already, she prepared herself for the journey.

  Five years ago, after her husband had retired, she’d come to this city with some trepidation and uncertainty to make her home here in old age. The young leave this city if they can; the old, it seems, return to it; and this had been the incentive for coming here—the possibility of experiencing, in early old age, the buoyancy of visiting known houses through these roads, of watching the old apparently arrest and embrace time as children and grandchildren grow taller and older, surprising one.

  And there were friends, which she hadn’t thought of then. Every time she went to the New Municipal Corporation Buildings with its strange E-shaped block of flats off Central Avenue it was as if something had changed slightly from before and she couldn’t put her finger on it. The route was familiar, though, the dust and reconstruction and disrepair. It was not so much a return to childhood for her as a contact with something she’d known for a long time, in conditions neither she nor her friend could have foreseen. And now, very lightly, like a merciful gift of remembrance, obliterating as it engendered, it began to rain. It fell on the graffiti on the walls inside lanes, the hammer and sickle that multiplied everywhere and the pleas for family planning, the advertisements for companies; it first rained on South Calcutta and then moved towards the North, the clouds prefiguring, and desultorily washing, the route Khuku would take. I’ll take a flask of tea and some sweets from Mahaprabhu, she thought.

  For she didn’t want Mini or Shantidi in the kitchen once she’d arrived.

  Must tell that rascal straight away, she decided, thinking of Nando. Of course, if I tell him now he’ll forget about it tomorrow.

  She must remind that shirker to put the tea in the flask the first thing the next morning.