A State of Freedom
Page 8
Behind the short arm of the L, at the back of the house, lay a large vegetable patch and a pond. The larger part of the pond was obscured by the low brick box with cross-shaped windows that I had seen from the front courtyard; this was the bathroom. It had an unpainted tin door riddled with rust, which ended a good eight to ten inches above the floor. Inside were a latrine set in the floor, three buckets and a tin drum filled to the brim with water, and a large red plastic mug hooked to the rim of one of the buckets. There were no taps. A thin coir rope, attached to two nails on opposite walls, hung in a slack convex along the breadth of the bathroom. On it were slung two thin gamchhas.
Raja-da said, ‘We bathe in the pond. We filled buckets for you in case you are not up for jumping in. Can you swim?’
Then he stopped and looked at me and gave a laugh, part invitation, part dare: ‘Want to try it?’
I hesitated.
He said, ‘It may be too cold for you … it’s the month of poüsh, after all. Anyway, the buckets and drums have all been filled up for you.’
We went back to the front room; I was going to sleep there, he said. ‘The bed’s big enough for you? You’ll fit in, yes? If not, you can sleep on the floor – we have enough shataranchi, duvet, blankets, sheets. We’ll make it really comfortable for you, don’t worry about it.’
‘No, no … not worried at all,’ I hastened to say.
‘Think of it as your own home, do you understand? Your uncle’s home, mamar-bari. You call Renu “cooking-aunty”, so this is your mamar-bari, right?’ He laughed at his own witticism; he was as uncomfortable as I was, perhaps even more.
The boy, Chanchal, brought in tea, and trailing him came Mamoni and Lakshmi, bearing huge bowls of puffed rice – they looked like white hills – and an enormous plate of fresh batter-fried aubergines.
Lakshmi said, ‘Eat them quickly, otherwise they’ll get cold, they’ve been taken out of the hot oil just now. There’s more coming.’
I thought of doing the typical Bengali coy demurral act, faced with so much food, but dismissed it almost as soon as I had thought it; greed was too powerful.
‘Eat up, eat up,’ Raja-da urged. ‘You don’t get this kind of food in London, I bet.’
He was right. The aubergine fritters were perfection of their kind. The crispness of the kalonji-flecked batter giving way to the near-oozy softness of the aubergines, the puffed rice adding its own different crunch to the mouthful, the sharp heat from the powerful green-purple, squat local chillies …
‘Enjoying it?’ Ratan-da asked. ‘I can tell that you are.’
Yes, he could: I had closed my eyes while munching.
Ratan-da’s children were lined up against the wall, watching us as they would a gripping circus act: mouths slightly open, eyes huge and round as owls’. The youngest of the lot, an intrepid girl of six, came forward and handed me something: a picture postcard. I turned it over, saw the German stamp before realising that I might be seen to be reading the words of the sender, so I turned it back again: a picture of an old, beautiful bridge over a river with a castle in the background, with the words ‘Heidelberg Old Bridge and Castle’ on the bottom left edge.
‘Tell him, who sent this?’ Raja-da coaxed her gently.
The girl had reached the end of her courage; she ran back to join her two brothers.
‘Who sent it?’ I asked.
‘My elder son. Dulal. He studies in Germany, in Heidelberg.’
I stopped chewing and looked up. Was he joking?
‘He’s been there for three years now. This muri-beguni that you’re eating is his favourite. He eats it every afternoon when he is visiting.’
‘What does he study?’ I brought myself to say. My voice was hoarse.
‘Orrey baba, now you’ve got me!’ he laughed. ‘I don’t understand that stuff, it all goes over my head. We are foolish, unlettered farmer-types’ – he used a common Bengali expression, mukhyu-shukhyu chasha bhusha manush – ‘how can we tell you what he studies?’
‘But what is his subject?’
‘Phee-jeek, he studies phee-jeek, that’s all I can say,’ he said.
I took this to mean Physics.
‘My younger son may be able to tell you better,’ he said, then hollered, ‘Khokon, ei Khokon, come here for a minute.’ In the time that it took for the boy to arrive, Raja-da said, ‘He, too, goes to school, the same school that Dulal went to, Ramkrishna Mission in Narendrapur.’
It was a highly reputed school in Calcutta, with a long track record of academic success, and apparently difficult to get admission to. Before I could phrase any questions – and I knew I would have to do so carefully – Khokon came into the room.
‘Tell him what Dada studies. You know I don’t understand such things,’ his father said.
‘Physics,’ the boy said. ‘Particle physics. He’s doing a PhD. He’ll be called a Doctor at the end of his degree, but it’s not a medical doctor.’
He stood taller as he was saying this. I even imagined his chest was puffing out. Education had leached away some of the accent that his father and uncle had. Maybe he, too, would go abroad to study, or become a real doctor, a medical one.
In the event, I didn’t have to ask anything; the story came out over dinner. They could barely stop talking about him; all except the women. Dulal’s mother, while serving me food, mentioned him for the first and last time: ‘He is my son, he lives so far away, my mother’s heart is restless and anxious. I can’t sleep at night. I worry about him all the time – is he eating properly? Is anyone looking after him? What’ll happen if he falls ill? So many worries in my head. It’s all very well that he’s studying, that he’s going to make a name for himself, but all I want is for him to come back.’
We sat out on the veranda to eat. A long sheet had been laid out on the floor, against the wall, so that we wouldn’t have to sit on the cold floor. I wondered if they ate in the bare, poky inside in the winter and whether they were making a sort of celebratory ceremony of dinner tonight – eating off banana leaves instead of ordinary plates, for example – because they were at pains not to let their handicaps impinge upon my comfort. The children and I were fed first. They wouldn’t listen to my repeated requests that all the adults should eat together; this, in reality, meant only three men, since the women would have eaten only after all the men were done; it was an unshakeable rule. Again, I read this to be hospitality doubling as a diversionary tactic, turning my attention away from the more ordinary food the family would be eating, fewer dishes perhaps, after the guest had been given the best that they could barely afford. The food wouldn’t go down my throat.
My mother would have called the menu vulgar but it pierced me: breaking all rules, they had cooked fish (‘From our pond’) and egg because they couldn’t perhaps stretch to meat. The fish wasn’t special and the cooking was workaday, uninspiring. I deduced that Lakshmi and Mamoni were functional cooks. Shame and pity made my eyes prick; I stuffed my mouth with more food; everything was more delicious than I could have imagined.
Raja-da said, ‘We brothers went to our village pathshala, we didn’t have much education. I was determined to send my boys to school. I want them to have a different life, a better life. This life of a farmer, cultivating rice, growing a few vegetables … it’s a difficult one. We struggle. Our days are not easy. I don’t want this for my boys.’
‘Your daughter goes to school too?’
‘No, we can’t … can’t afford it, after sending the two boys. Dulal’s education was taken care of by Renu. She loves him more than anything else. More than her own daughter. When Dulal was born, we were dreaming about how we wanted him to grow up and have name, fame and wealth, and Renu said, I am going to take care of his studies, I will work and earn money and put him through school. That’s why she went to Bombay. Someone told her that in Bombay they paid cooks lots of money, thousands of rupees. So she said, Dada, I’ll go to Bombay and earn money and save and send money home for Dulal’s school.’
Raja-da continued, ‘She earns a lot of money now. She works at a lot of places, four or five or six. Your home, too. Saving has become a habit for her. She has very few needs, she lives very simply, spends very little. She saves everything. And she sends money to Dulal in German country. He got a full scholarship but the plane ticket, the clothes – it was a lot of money.’
He paused, thoughtful now, as if the very memory of that amount was sobering. He brushed it aside and said, ‘All that money, Renu provided.’
I had to say something. If I didn’t say something, I couldn’t trust myself to speak again in the company of my hosts.
‘He must have been an exceptional student to go to Heidelberg on a full scholarship,’ I said.
‘Yes, he is very bright,’ Raja-da said. His face was aglow in the dim yellow light of the sooty hurricane lamps. ‘He got a scholarship from Ramkrishna Mission to go to IIT in Kharagpur. Then he came first in IIT, got a gold medal. His teachers at IIT said to him, You must go to foreign land to study. All his fees were paid for in IIT, we only had to pay for his food and clothes and hostel and transport. Renu took care of everything.’
A star student at the elite IIT. Something in this broken country worked. I had reached a place of what I could only call wonder. The parakeet, which I thought was dozing, began to shuffle about on its perch. Ratan-da’s son got up to feed it whole chillies. The bird made a noise that sounded like a cross between crooning and tsking.
‘Didn’t she get married? Where are her daughter and husband?’ I asked.
From Raja-da’s slight stammer when he began to answer my question, and the way his wife and sister-in-law exchanged a glance, then looked down, I got the impression that I had stepped into awkward territory.
‘Yes, she got married, but … but she left with her daughter,’ Raja-da said. ‘The man … turned out to be … n-not good, he drank, gambled, so she left. We brought up the girl, Champa. She was five years younger than Dulal. We married her off last year, she’s moved to Muchipara with her husband. Renu always wanted to go to Bombay and find work, I told you. She thought only of Dulal, how she could make the words of the astrologer, who came to see the boy when he was born, how she could make his words come true. The astrologer said, “This boy is going to grow up to make a big name for himself one day.” The words scored a deep line in Renu’s mind.’
I noticed how the moment the conversation came back to Dulal, the ease and flow returned. I had so many questions about Renu but I could hardly ask any of them now.
At night, under my slightly oily-smelling lumpy duvet, I worried that sore over and over: how much had it cost them, and not just in terms of money, to host me? Was someone going without a duvet, or even a bed, because of me? Who slept in this room? Where were they sleeping tonight? And then more shaming thoughts. The rice had been the cheap, thick-grained, reddish rice of the area. The food had been the paradoxical combination of oily and watery. Were the sheets and pillowcases clean? There was no running water, so they had been washed in the pond, in which they bathed, washed their dishes and did god knows what else. How was I going to use that bathroom? They had no electricity – how unbearable did it get under a tin roof in the summer? The sweets after dinner – there had been three different kinds – had been of bad quality, rancid and stale, from a low-grade sweet shop. Why didn’t they serve the sandesh, made from the new season’s date molasses, that I had brought as a gift from Girish Ghosh? I felt ashamed but couldn’t stop myself from thinking the small, mean thoughts; the mind really was the unruliest and basest of human attributes.
I returned to Calcutta, spent one more day there, went to Bangalore and Kochi to visit friends as part of the research for the book, then returned to Bombay. I had given my mother an indication, in our phone conversations, of what I had learned about Renu in Medinipur, but I hadn’t asked Ma any of the questions that were bothering me. Now they came gushing out.
‘What I can’t understand is this: wouldn’t that ne’er-do-well husband have claimed Renu’s portion of the land after she did a runner? Or the money that she sent home for Dulal’s education? He must have kicked up a fuss,’ I asked.
‘Difficult to know,’ Ma said. ‘Maybe the brothers closed ranks against him. Remember, they needed Renu’s money, so it was in their interests to fend him off. I wouldn’t be surprised if they helped her run away.’
Yes, of course; that hadn’t occurred to me.
‘That could be the reason why Renu sold off her portion of the land to her brothers. So that her husband couldn’t claim it,’ Ma said.
‘But what about the daughter?’
‘If he was a useless drunk, maybe it was a relief to him not to be saddled with the responsibility of looking after a child and providing for her.’
‘No, I’m talking about something different. How did Champa take it, being brought up by her uncles, her mother away, sending money for her cousin’s education? It must have been obvious to her that her mother preferred Dulal to her.’
‘You are forgetting something – she’s a girl, she’s got no expectations.’
It was true; I couldn’t say anything to this. I tried another angle: ‘But she is Renu’s daughter, while Dulal is her nephew. Isn’t blood supposed to be thicker than water and all that?’
Ma made a face, as if to say all things took second place to a talented boy in a family, especially if they were poor. She said, ‘Who knows what they worked out between them?’
‘And you don’t think I could ask Renu to her face?’
Ma whinnied like a panicked horse. ‘No, no, I absolutely forbid you,’ she said. ‘You will go away in a couple of days, it’s I who will be left to deal with her every day. I don’t want to field any consequences of you and she becoming friendly.’
‘But what consequences? What do you mean by friendly? I’m only going to ask her a few questions about her life. She may respond positively to someone taking an interest in her. God knows, the people who have domestic help don’t exactly treat them as their equals.’
‘Ufff, this “equals” business again. You live abroad, you don’t understand the culture here, you shouldn’t come trampling in with your fancy notions. There will be difficulty for us to clean up afterwards.’
‘You still haven’t managed to explain the nature of the difficulty,’ I said heatedly.
She replied with equal irritation, ‘I have said several times before. It’ll only set you off on your word-chopping and equality high horse. We’ll be going round in circles.’
With that, she left the room. I was too riled to see her point of view.
When Renu arrived that evening to cook, I thought I discerned a curiosity on her face that made it almost mobile. I also knew she wouldn’t say anything in front of my parents; she understood that I had a different, more informal and, yes, friendlier dynamic with her, which was a world apart from how she related to my parents or, indeed, to all the people in whose homes she worked.
A fine tension had descended between my mother and me. I went into the kitchen, drew the sliding door shut and said, ‘It was wonderful. They fed me till I was bursting. And such good food. I ate fish from your pond, aubergines and chillies and cauliflower from your vegetable garden. It was all so so delicious. I met your family, your brothers, your sisters-in-law, your nephews and nieces …’ I knew I was babbling but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
Renu continued to acknowledge impassively what I was saying with a curt nod or an ‘Achha’, but without once looking at my face – she was busy taking stuff out of the fridge. I had the impression that she was either embarrassed by the gush or didn’t know what it was and, therefore, what to do with it. Or was I talking so much as a way of preventing her from saying anything that I would have found embarrassing?
‘A
ll right, tell me, what are you going to take for dinner?’ she asked.
I said, ‘I heard about Dulal.’
She looked up sharply.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him all this time?’ I asked.
She didn’t reply – she had gone back to arranging the vegetable drawer in the fridge.
I didn’t know what to say after this or, more accurately, what to say to her. Anything would have come out as platitudinous or sentimental or false, but perhaps those things only to my ears and not to hers?
What came out after this internal debate was no less stilted, although I meant every word: ‘He studies in one of the best places in the world. I know you’re all very proud of him. You should be: he has achieved extraordinary things. I was very happy to hear about him. And very proud, too. And … and … you made him.’
She dismissed it with that gesture of hers, that performance of half-joking impatience: ‘Arrey, leave all that, tell me, jaldi jaldi, what will you take for dinner?’
I ignored her, reading her words and gesture correctly for once, I thought. ‘Do you know what he’ll do after he finishes his studying? Will he come back?’ I could imagine a successful future for Dulal as a professor in IIT, or at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, or even the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, but being the person I was, I thought he would be better off working at CERN or any number of European or American universities.