A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  In the morning Lakshman discovers that Raju has chewed the upright pieces of the thin, long wooden sticks that had held up the tin roof to his shed; the wood is in splintered little pieces not far from where the four pillars had stood before. Raju’s wet pelt is covered generously in mud.

  They leave him out in the rain for days until his battery of grunts and yowls drives a hot knife through Lakshman one night and he comes out with his thin guide stick, which he has fashioned as best as he could, following Salim’s description and guidelines, and brings it down on Raju’s flank and head and face and sides wherever he can, and on the tree trunk too, for he cannot see to aim in the dark. Raju cannot run or hide because he is chained to the tree with the rope that is only four feet long, so he lets out a run of cries that span the spectrum from roaring grunt to high-pitched shrieking without any punctuation, one modulating into another seamlessly. The noise wakes up everyone and the children begin to cry. Geeta runs out and shouts – Stop now! Stop! He’ll keep making that hellish noise unless you stop. She takes the stick from his fevered hand and flings it into the dark.

  In the grey, drenched light of the following morning, Lakshman comes out to find Raju cowering and whimpering at the sight of him. But Lakshman hasn’t forgotten or forgiven yesterday, so Raju goes without food. The cub whimpers all day, digs up the earth around him while emitting that sound between grunting and snuffling that Lakshman is becoming familiar with, then continues with the whimpering. Lakshman comes out, bent on teaching him a few rules: the beginning of his training. He shouts out the ‘Shhh’ so forcefully that it ends in him spitting. Raju goes quiet. Encouraged, Lakshman raps out – Stop that din. Stop. Raju blinks, looks down, then away. Lakshman feels a stirring of joy inside him. It is stubbed out the moment he goes inside and hears Raju begin his whining again. He comes out and repeats the shushing and shouting. Raju obliges by falling silent for the duration of Lakshman’s presence. Today, I have won, Lakshman thinks.

  Geeta says – He’ll keep up this racket unless you feed him. He’s crying from hunger.

  – No, don’t feed him. He’ll get food only when he stops the noise. He needs to learn this lesson now.

  – He won’t stop, I’m telling you.

  The lid, that familiar, grinding weight, descends early now, when he is awake and alert, watching his children and his nephew and niece and his wife and sister-in-law. He cannot bring himself to focus on any one thing for long – it’s as if his attention, something inside him, is bent on wandering and will not, cannot, be moored.

  Geeta reads the slackness and goes out to throw some cucumber and ragi rotis to Raju. Loud slurping-snuffling noises, like an army of animals at a trough, over in seconds. Then silence that lasts and lasts. Everyone inside is holding his or her breath, including the two toddlers, Ajay and Meena. Lakshman refuses to look at Geeta’s face. Later in the night, with the sound of the rain dotted occasionally by a whimper or a guttural croak, an image comes to Lakshman, an image that helps him hold off the weight falling on him again. It is the recent memory of witnessing Raju standing on his hind legs. He holds on to it as sleep takes him.

  Their walks have been troubled from the very beginning. First, the gaggle of children following them, stubborn, mischievous and dis obedient, refusing to disperse despite his repeated threats. Instead of disappearing, they let a slightly greater distance open up between them. Lakshman and Raju walk ahead. The children stop throwing stones and twigs and whatever missiles they can aim at the bear. Sometimes there are monkeys overhead, leaping from branch to branch, tree to tree, following them, but from a height. The most persistent problem is the dogs and their unstoppable barking. At times Lakshman has to turn back and threaten the dogs with the stick, or bend down to pick a stone and hurl it at the pack. Still they continue, if hesitatingly.

  It is for Raju that Lakshman is anxious. Raju had seemed afraid of the dogs and halting in his progress, but after the first few excursions, the bear appears more or less indifferent to the volleys of barks and the presence of other animals. As they move deeper into the forest, the dogs fall off, one by one. The ground is thick with pine needles. There is no undergrowth, only the occasional pine cone, and fallen branches, covered with lichen and moss. Raju strains at the leash towards a cone or two; Lakshman obliges by leading him to them. That awkward, lolloping gait, as if Raju is moving forward clunkily while simultaneously swaying from side to side, interests Lakshman – is this because he is young and will learn to walk properly when he grows up, or do all adult bears move similarly?

  And then it happens, by accident, and takes Lakshman by such surprise that he is left wondering what caused it. On a steep slope along a track, on the other side of which a small house is falling to ruins and its orchard and trees running wild, the sizeable patch of land surrounded by slack barbed wire and up for sale, Raju lets out a whimper, stands fully erect on his hind legs and does a brief trot before resuming his original position on all fours. Lakshman lets the rope go slack and finds himself speaking to Raju – How did that happen, huh? Do it again. Go on. Stand on your legs and dance.

  Raju sniffs the ground.

  – Come on, do it again.

  Raju gives no sign that he has heard. In his impatience, Lakshman tugs at the rope going through the bear’s nose. Raju squeals, jumps up and hops about. Lakshman lets out a whoop of joy and pulls unthinkingly at the rope again. This time Raju emits a yowl, while springing up and prancing again. Revelation floods Lakshman – so it’s the rope. He feels the joy as a hollowing-out of his insides; such a lightness. He lets out another shout, pulls the rope again, this time to test the new knowledge, and when Raju reacts, the cry of – Shabaash! comes out almost involuntarily from his mouth.

  After he gives a demonstration back home, the children want to have a go at making the bear dance. Word spreads swifter than the rain falls. Soon there is a crowd and Lakshman half-teases (but only half) – I should be charging you for this. The rope is pulled numberless times; Raju can barely recover from one tug before another unseats him. Someone has brought Lakshman a damru so that he can shake it to produce the traditional percussion rattle that accompanies animal shows, a rhythm to which the animal dances. Lakshman tries his hand at it and pulls Raju’s nose-rope. The animal stands up and executes a dragging-hopping movement on his two hind legs, squealing, his head held up, his mouth open. Lakshman attempts to synchronise the hitting of the bead against the hand-held drum’s skin to Raju’s movements, but each time the animal cannot sustain the dance after a few steps, maybe eight or nine, and goes back to all fours. Some of the children mimic dance moves when Lakshman starts on the damru. A few of them, the adamant and intrepid ones, get very close to Raju and poke him, or kick him, and run away to a safe distance to see if he will react and get up to dance again.

  Lakshman’s order – Dance! Dance! – sometimes modulates to pleading, in desperation, then switches back to angry shouts again. His face turns hot, he feels he has been humiliated in front of all these people who know him, even children. There is a white flash behind his eyes, that familiar friend, and for a few seconds he sits still. Then he drags Raju to his station, tethers him to the tree, makes sure that the knot is secure and brings down the thin stick on to Raju’s back in one swishing movement that cuts the air. Raju flinches and squeals and tries to hide behind the tree but he is exposed on all sides. This attempt at self-protection liberates Lakshman – held now in the blindness of that white flash, he beats Raju with unstoppable energy, with infinite and perpetual motion, the stick becoming the engine that drives his hand, the soul animating his body, bringing itself down like a malignant rainfall on the flanks, back, mouth, muzzle, face, legs, head of the animal, wherever it can land and strike, and Raju squeals and whimpers and growls and shrieks, a demented singer possessed by spirits, and then rewards Lakshman many times over by rearing up and hopping and prancing on his two hind legs, clutching the tree trunk with his forepaws as if it were a dancing partner and Raju were a singin
g and dancing actor out of a film and he, Lakshman, the director and music-director and dance-director all rolled into one. And Lakshman laughs and laughs and laughs until the stick drops from his hand and, with his sweaty palms, he is wiping his snot and tears and drool and trying to stop the sobs that come out of the stranger that he has become.

  There is absolute silence from outside at night as Lakshman lies awake, his chest alive with a threshing, and heavy at the same time. No snuffling or rooting or gurgling sounds, not even the sound of loud breathing. In the morning he comes out to give Raju his food. The bear starts a kind of staccato mewling before Lakshman hoves into view and, at the sight of the man, cowers and tries to hide behind the tree trunk. Lakshman cannot bring himself to start the process of befriending – a terrible lassitude grips him. He flings the rotis towards Raju and goes inside. When sleep arrives, it comes smuggling a weapon – those dreams of fire, again.

  It happened when Ramlal and Lakshman were little, both just old enough to have begun school. The Forest Department, which owned all the land that was not private – the land on the hillsides, the forests of baanj and chir, the valleys and ridges and banks – had invited applications from locals to tap the natural resources: collecting oil from pine-sap, honey from beehives, cultivating bamboo. Their father had put in an application and, much later Lakshman found out, when he was an adult, also a little something in the right hands to expedite the process. And he had been successful. The news had spread immediately.

  A day or two after this, Lakshman and Ramlal had woken up to the sound of commotion and an orange glow outside. The forest was on fire and their father was missing. Of that night, Lakshman remembered odd things: the breathing, whispering sound the fire made as it spread, so much more soothing than the punctuation of crackling and popping wood; the rhythmic, lulling creak of the high branches, then the whoosh and thump and pop of them giving in to the fire in a spray of sparks; the smell of pine and burnt wood; the sound of birds, confused, fleeing, so odd in the dead of the night … Hypnotised by it all, still caught in the net of sleep, he didn’t think about their father until he had picked up on the talk of the villagers gathered to witness the spectacle. Apparently, their father had rushed into the heart of the burning wood, trying to extinguish the fire, trying to save the area that had been allotted to him by the Forest Department, the portion set on fire by a jealous, malicious neighbour who had also bid for the same contract but had not been successful. But maybe all the explanation and piecing together had come later, when the boys had been told that their father’s body could not be found because there was no body, only a length of black something, part ash, part charred matter that could have been a tree trunk. Had they seen that thing or had Lakshman imagined seeing it?

  And, then, the new term attached to ‘the fox twins’ – bin mai babok – whereas previously they had been only chhor mulya, motherless. He remembered how a wealthy man, a raees admi’s car had passed by some of them sitting on the low stone wall outside the school, and the car window had rolled down and the man’s son, no older than he and Ramlal and the other boys hanging around aimlessly outside, had reached out his hand and given them tangerines, presumably at the urging of his father beside him. Not a single word had been exchanged. The car window had gone up soundlessly as soon as the boys had taken the fruits, and the vehicle had moved on as silently. While they had sat, peeling and eating the fruits, someone among them – he forgets who now – had pointed out the little segments of a tangerine that nestle among the larger, regular ones, and said that the little cloves, chhora, were for motherless boys: they had secretly been put into the fruit by their dead mother’s soul for her children. The boy had given his anomalous segments to Lakshman and Ramlal.

  The bear’s pelt grows long as the days get crisper and shorter and nightfall arrives more quickly. Lakshman builds Raju another shed with wood and salvaged tin and even a scrap of tarpaulin, which he installs over the tin roof and secures with large rocks and bricks positioned so that they don’t get dislodged in high wind or heavy snowfall. The tree to which Raju remains chained is inches away from the entrance to the shed. The eldest boy, Jeevan, his nephew, comes back from school and says that bears live in caves, that’s what they were told by the teacher.

  – See, I’ve built him a cave, Lakshman says to Jeevan, forcing himself to smile. He has always felt that he doesn’t know how to talk to children, not even his own; not just what to say to them, but what tone to use, what manner, what kind of voice. The feeling has increased lately and it sometimes changes form to become that familiar lid again, a shutting-out of light and air.

  – See, doesn’t it look like a cave? Lakshman asks, baring his teeth.

  The boy turns his face away.

  Geeta grumbles that they will now have to find money to pay someone to come every day to clear the bear’s shit from the shed.

  – How was the shit better, lying outside, near the tree? Lakshman asks.

  One day, before the weather turns really cold, Lakshman sees Jeevan feeding Raju by holding a roti high enough against the tree trunk so that the bear has to stand up to get it. This Raju does. Then Jeevan moves the second roti around the trunk, making Raju move on his hind legs to get it.

  The following day, Lakshman takes Raju out to the woods, ties him to a tree and moves himself away a distance of eight or ten feet. Facing Raju, he goes down on all fours in an attempt to imitate the animal. From that position, balancing on one hand, he starts playing his damru with the other. At the first few beats, he gets up and does a little, hopping walk, then goes down on his palms and knees and stops playing the little drum. He keeps saying to Raju – You saw that? Now you do it. Go on, you do it, I’ll show you again – and repeating the short suite of actions over and over. Raju blinks, yawns, scratches the trunk of the tree, circles it once, twice, sits down, sniffs the ground, looks towards Lakshman without betraying any signs of seeing him, lets out a series of different sounds, including a huff-puff one, but does not imitate him. Lakshman moves slightly closer and does his routine all over again. Raju watches him, impassive, blinking frequently, then walks back slightly as if to re-establish the original optimal distance between them. Lakshman grits his teeth; his mantra to Raju now comes out less gently coaxing, more impatient, more commanding. The second time Raju moves away – this time it seems that he wants to bring the tree between them – Lakshman takes it as a slap to his face.

  – I’ll teach you, sisterfucker, he spits out and lashes Raju with the stick. – You will learn, you will learn, he shouts, then, seeing Raju leap up and try to scurry away upright, in so far as forty-eight inches of rope could allow him to, even trying to hide behind the tree, Lakshman exclaims – See, sala, see! You can do it, you’re just being difficult. What do you take me for? Soft in the head, haan? I’ll teach you – and keeps hitting Raju. The bear whimpers and shrieks, tries to bite the stick, catch hold of it with his paws, but Lakshman is too quick – there’s a fiend in him. The stick catches the bear’s face twice, three times. Raju howls and tries to charge at him, upright, front paws held up, mouth a-snarl, a white thread of spit flying out from one corner, but is pulled back almost immediately by the limited length of the rope. Lakshman howls, too; with laughter.

  After what he considers to be a period substantial enough for Raju to have forgotten the previous training session, Lakshman tries a different tack. He attaches a carrot to a long piece of thin coir rope and fills his pockets with several more carrots. He picks a different spot this time, far from the earlier location – a large tract of land, bounded by a low stone wall, with rusting spiked wire strung out here and there to mark it out as private, designated for some future use, probably a large house and gardens around and behind it. It has an orchard – the peach, apricot and apple trees all look dead, but they can be rejuvenated – and it is this phalanx of dormant trees that he has in mind for today.

  He tethers Raju to a pear tree. To his great relief, Raju doesn’t baulk at it. He ties the
free end of the coir rope to his qalandar’s stick, hiding the carrot end from Raju. The bear looks mournfully at the base of the tree. Lakshman plays the damru, slowly, hesitantly; an alertness comes upon the bear; he makes a brief whining noise. Lakshman moves back and aims the tied carrot to a point more or less four feet in front of Raju. The bear moves forward immediately, Lakshman pulls the carrot just out of his reach, Raju rears up on his hind legs. Wiggling the vegetable on the ground but still keeping it out of bounds, just so, stepping up the beat on the damru, Lakshman watches Raju strain at his leash, jig where he stands, walk around the tree to approach the carrot from another side, all the while erect; Lakshman is flooded with hope. He baits Raju a little bit longer, letting his own chatter fall in with the rhythm of the beats from the damru. At last he allows the bear his reward. Raju, ravenous, does not bother to sit down to eat it from the ground, but instead grabs hold of it and puts it in his mouth while still standing. Lakshman nearly leaps with joy. No sooner has he done that than a seed of doubt plants itself in his head: does this limited success mean that Raju is going to become habituated to dancing only when a carrot or something edible is dangled in front of him? That would make the actual street performances ridiculous. Who cannot make an animal dance by starving it a little first, then tempting it with food?

  Lakshman repeats the first act but this time without the carrot. Raju works out soon enough that there’s nothing in it for him, so he stands for a little while, ultimately settling down on all fours and returning to the vacant blinking and yawning. The hope leaches out of Lakshman. He waggles the rope a little bit more, even play-whips Raju with it half-heartedly, but faced with all the different combinations and exclusions – damru and carrot and chatter but no stick; or perhaps damru and chatter and carrot but the last only as something shown, not given; or maybe damru and chatter and stick but no carrot at all; or carrot right at the end of the day, not during training – Lakshman’s mind reels. Deflated, he pauses the training. The same frustrated anger against the dumb, stupid beast begins to grip him again. He tames it in the only way he knows: he unties the coir rope and uses the stick to beat Raju into understanding what it is that he’s trying to make him do. A monkey, which has been watching the entire proceedings from its perch on a tree, perhaps in the hope of stealing the carrot, lets out a chatter and runs away, leaping from the high branches of one tree to another.