A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  He goes out to the back. Raju recognises him now. He is standing up, trying to bite the tree trunk, but on seeing Lakshman resumes his normal quadruped position and tries to advance towards him, but the four-feet rope pulls him up short. Undeterred, he makes that odd guttural sound, punctuated by short squeaks here and there, that makes Lakshman think Raju is trying to say something to him in his own language. He moves closer and strokes the creature’s back, tentatively, gingerly, ready to leap back if he shows any sign of attacking, but Raju continues to emit sounds that can only be of appreciation, even affection, and for the first time in god knows how long Lakshman feels that lightening he has felt once or twice, in the company of Raju, or while contemplating his future with the bear, far away from this village.

  The following day when Geeta is out working in the Bengali house he puts a few things in a small sack – his ration card in its blue plastic sleeve; a few items of clothing (he doesn’t have much: his shawl, a sweater and a snuff-coloured, skull-hugging woollen cap, a lungi, a pair of pyjamas, an old white vest, now the colour of dust); a small tin of puffed rice; a coil of rope; two half-empty boxes of matches, anything he can take away without it being missed. He picks random things – there aren’t many to choose from – without any thought or reason. He ties the sack, flings it over one shoulder, picks up the damru and his qalandar’s stick, goes out, unties Raju from the tree, takes the rope in the hand that holds the stick and whispers – Come, we’re off. The bear makes slobbering noises and roots around in the earth with his snout, as if looking for something that he wants to bring with him on the journey. The sounds change to what Lakshman thinks of as yawning ones: mouth wide open, a long glimpse of pink, and those dots of mewling notes.

  – Yes, you’re happy. I know. Let’s go.

  He doesn’t really have a plan except to stop at each small town at the end of a day’s journeying and make Raju dance the following day, collect the money and move on, repeating this routine until he reaches the city where Ramlal is working on building giant homes and river-like roads and arcing bridges. Three to six months at the most, he tells himself; he will be home long before the trees have shed their leaves, certainly long before snowfall fells trees and closes the roads to traffic.

  They take the steep paths through the hills, eventually descending to the only road that connects all the villages, but at a point several feet below his own, and several kilometres away. From this juncture, marked by a shop that sells everything, from candles and batteries to Maggi noodles, car lubricant and strings of small sachets of Sunsilk shampoo, they stick to the road. The periodic truck unsettles Raju – he jerks around at the end of his rope, moves his head wildly, whimpers and growls.

  – Shush, shush, it’s all right, it’s only a car, you’re going to be all right, no need to be scared.

  A driver rushing past leans on his horn, doubtless at the sight of a bear. Raju goes berserk and pulls at the rope so hard that he drags Lakshman along with him over the verge into the trees and bushes. Lakshman shouts. Raju blinks in a baffled manner, then looks down and, after a few seconds, into the distance. The narrow two-lane road falls away steeply, in a scree of rocks and earth, to the shrinking green ribbon of the Rishabh river, rushing along the rock-and-boulder-strewn gorge far below. After Raju’s reaction to the loud, horn-tooting lorries, Lakshman realises that it would be safer to walk on the other side of the road, the one that banks against the slope of tree-dense land.

  They make their way down to the river for a drink and for Lakshman to splash his face with cold water. In the dappled shade of trees they come across a still stretch of water, an overspill from the river and now cut off from its parent by a narrow bank of sandy earth and grey-green rocks and a strip of paler pebbles. On the surface of that island of water float many brown leaves that have fallen from the trees. No sooner has Lakshman seen them than he thinks there is something not quite right about them, but he cannot tell what. As if someone has read his thoughts, the dry leaves move in unison, in a blink-swift movement, and the folded-up undersides of the drinking swarm of butterflies change to a flickering mosaic of oranges, yellows, browns and blacks, stippled by the dance of spots of lights and shade. Lakshman finds himself unable to move. Before the reaction to pull back Raju to stop him has managed to travel to his hand, Raju has taken three or four steps. The sound and the movement disturb the butterflies. Like handfuls of coloured paper thrown upwards by a playing child, they scatter, then flit away. Raju stands up, chatters and reaches out his paws to swat them. But they are far away from him and in any case they are moving and, finally, all gone. The skin of the water is now just a green, shadowy screen for the swaying points of light and shade.

  At the first hamlet they reach, Talla Panchgarh, which is a loose straggle of low houses with asbestos or tin roofs, all distant from one another, Lakshman buys a big packet of sliced bread from a small roadside shop, some stale, soggy biscuits and a small paper packet of groundnuts to eat with his puffed rice later.

  – Is that a bear? the shopkeeper asks.

  – Yes. His name is Raju.

  Then inspiration strikes – or a canny calculation.

  – He can dance. Do you want to see him dance?

  The shopkeeper shrugs.

  Lakshman calls out Raju’s name authoritatively a few times, strikes the ground with the stick, then detaches the chain from the thick collar around the neck at the same time as he frees the rope through the nose and the hole in the snout from the knot into which it has been tied to attach it to the muzzle guard. He tries to do all these actions as swiftly as he can while crooning in a very low voice. Before Raju knows it, the rope is in Lakshman’s left hand and the damru begins to sound its beats, arrhythmically at first, then settling to the rhythm of whatever tune inside Lakshman’s head is animating his right hand. His heart thuds almost painfully against his chest; this is the first performance he is giving outside his village. The knowledge transmits some kind of keenness to him. He tugs the rope hard. Raju, who has been looking confused, instantly stands up on his hind legs, squealing, then drops down almost immediately. The action produces a soaring, followed quickly by a deflation, of Lakshman’s heart. Maybe he is losing his touch; he needs to practise and let Raju have his daily routine more.

  Suddenly the rhythm of one hand synchronises with the movement of the other, and the beats of the damru and the tugs on the rope going through Raju’s nose are as one. Lakshman watches – more feels than watches – this unity of rhythm spread and make Raju a part of its entity: the bear, too, now begins to keep moving on his back legs, shaking his head, as if marking beat or signalling a gentle yet sustained ‘no’. The squealing has stopped. He looks like a giant dog, not much like a bear. The shopkeeper is smiling. Lakshman keeps up a patter – Shabaash! Dance, my Raju, dance. Little bear, little bear, dance. Yes, that’s it, my little bear, that’s it. Well done. Forward, now. Now a few steps back, that’s it – that seems not much different from the private, one-sided conversations with Raju that he has begun to fall into when they are on the move.

  The rhythm breaks; Raju falls on all fours; or maybe it is the other way round, Lakshman can’t tell.

  He opens the packet of bread and throws four slices to Raju. Before he can tie a knot in the plastic bag, the bread has been snaffled up and Raju has ambled right up to him, his snout trying to press into the packet. Halfway through leaping backwards and tautening the rope involuntarily, to bring about a safe distance between himself and Raju, Lakshman thinks, no, let me show him I’m not afraid of him, even if deep down I really am, and tries to slow down both actions so that they are more casual, more natural. Simultaneously, another bright idea occurs to him.

  – Won’t you give me something for making the bear dance for you? he asks the still-smiling shopkeeper.

  The man is unwilling to part with any money, so Lakshman asks for food and water for the bear. These materialise, and not only for Raju: sweet biscuits; laddoos, sour, on the turn; some stale rot
is; a lump of jaggery; some oranges, even, and a couple of squishy bananas. Raju, overexcited, breaks into a whole choir of noises. Lakshman puts away the jaggery and rotis, keeps an orange and a banana for himself, and gives everything else to Raju. In less than a minute, it’s all gone. He sniffs the ground where his food has been, avidly, as if there’s more of the stuff that is oddly eluding him, all the while making his grunting-snuffling noises. He comes up close to Lakshman, raises his clawed paws – Lakshman freezes with terror; those claws are like miniature swords – and brings them close to Lakshman’s ears, touches his head and brings it down to the ruff around his neck. The grunt-snuffle changes to a panting mew, with a few guttural notes mingled in it somewhere, while Lakshman, with a dry tongue cleaved to the roof of his dry mouth, is unable to move. But after the first few moments with his head in Raju’s chest, he realises that the bear intends no harm, and it is over in seconds.

  Lakshman and Raju do not get to the first town until the beginning of the summer. If he can spend the next three months in this town by a lake in the valley, its houses and shops lined along the road and hugging closely the hill-slopes on both sides of the lake, he will have saved enough money to find a shelter for the monsoon months. So far he and Raju have slept under trees or behind houses in the lower slopes of the densely vegetated hills. The more they progress south, the more the hills open up, allowing for wider valleys, more space, until he feels one day that the tight fist in which the mountains have always held him is correspondingly loosened, sometimes even absent.

  The lake is green and where its edges meet the road there is the usual rubbish of plastic bags, food wrappers, cigarette packets, empty cartons, plastic bottles, flowers, paper, unidentifiable debris, shit, wildly coloured algal blooms, stretches of green slime, slicks of some viscous chemical or other, colonies of sedge, foamy scum, all so dense as to form a solid, ragged border, immovable, unlike the water further in, which is ripply and wavy in its ordinary way.

  They attract attention – a bear is not a usual sight – and are soon followed, first, by one or two street-children and then, a bit later, by a bigger group of children, seven or eight, even a couple of young men and street urchins. A refrain begins – Bear, bear, show us how you dance. After a while it has the effect of something blunt slicing through Lakshman’s head, but he ignores the retinue. Raju follows him docilely, undistracted by the clamouring children. It’s only when one or two of them pick up stones and start throwing them that Lakshman turns round and spits out – Do you have money to see him dance?

  A slightly older boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen, it’s difficult to tell, swaggers forward aggressively and asks – How much do you want?

  Lakshman tries to argue reasonably – I don’t have a rate. People gather around me and I make the bear dance. Then more people come, seeing that. I take whatever they give me at the end.

  The boy says – So you’re a beggar then.

  The words wind him but he recovers quickly enough to snarl – Do you know, I can set the bear on you and he’ll maul you to shreds in five minutes. Why do you think there is that band around his mouth?

  The boy’s swagger leaves him. The entire gaggle steps back, then halts. Lakshman turns back and continues in the direction he and Raju were walking. His back prickles in the way it does when one is being watched, but he senses that the boys are no longer following them. A stone lands behind him, almost getting his ankle, and a second one, hard on the heels of the first, strikes the ground, bounces up and hits one of Raju’s back legs so that he gives a little startled jump. In one furious movement, Lakshman picks up two stones, wheels around and, screaming, hurls them at the fleeing backs of the boys.

  – Motherfuckers! Sisterfuckers! he shouts. The stones he throws at them come nowhere near. Does he imagine their contemptuous laughs from this distance? He realises that he is snarling, a thread of sticky spit dangling from his chin. From their assuredly safe distance, one of the boys turns back to face Lakshman, goes down on all fours and does a mocking mimic of Raju’s walk for a few seconds before he joins his running friends. The thread of spit falls to the ground.

  It is at the third performance in this town that Lakshman notices the boy who had called him a beggar and then, in close succession, he thinks he recognises some of the younger ones’ faces too. He has had slim pickings at the first two events – twenty-three rupees and thirty-four rupees, barely enough to feed him and Raju for three or four days – and although this crowd looks bigger, he is beginning to learn that this does not always translate into proportionate takings.

  The act is lacklustre; Lakshman knows this. It’s not only Raju who is in need of being trained into a routine, with different numbers, but also Lakshman, who is a novice, all at sea. These street performances, on the other hand, are developing by a sort of impromptu trial-and-error. He plays the damru and tugs at the rope going through Raju’s nose; the bear gets up and scampers around as long as the rope is being pulled; Lakshman chants some repetitive words – See, see, the dancing bear, now he’ll get up on his back legs, now he’ll dance, see, see, dance, dance, dance – and that’s the pitiable extent of it. Today he wants to try out something new: make Raju go round and round in a circle around him. He will have to work out a way of doing this without the rope encircling him; the easiest solution would be to remain standing and rotate as Raju describes a circle; but he wants to keep sitting because he feels tired. Not for the first time he wishes that he could sing a couple of songs – any old, or new, Hindi film songs would do – to perk up matters a bit, give the audience the illusion that this is a rehearsed performance, that Raju is dancing to his singing.

  The desultoriness is broken when a child, no more than six or seven, pipes up – Can I ride the bear? I want to ride him.

  A man, presumably her father, brings her out of the surrounding circle to the centre where Lakshman and Raju are.

  – He won’t bite or attack? he asks.

  Lakshman quails before the question, but the calculation that results in the lie – No, no, he’s a total baby, a paaltu bhaloo, wouldn’t even know how to hurt a fly – easily overrides the fear. This business of letting small children ride Raju could bring in more money than simple bear-dancing.

  The girl comes hesitantly towards Raju, one of her hands tightly clutching her father’s. She stands about four feet away from the bear, watching him intently.

  Suddenly, a shout from one of the spectators – It’s not a bear, it’s a dog in a bearskin.

  Lakshman knows who said this without needing to look; yet he does look and his eyes alight instantly on that boy, as if some kind of mocking destiny had singled him out and presented him solely, to the exclusion of everyone else, to Lakshman’s vision. The pinning focus dissolves; Lakshman can identify a couple of the other, younger boys from that earlier day by the lake.

  There is the beginning of a collective titter, then another voice – The bear dances, and the fox pulls the rope to make him dance.

  The tittering explodes. A collective chant goes up – Dog, fox, dog, fox, dog, fox …

  The people are all gathered up into a derisive laughter. How did it all degenerate so quickly, the time between the strike of a match and the conflagration so short? Lakshman looks up around him. There are construction sites everywhere, flatland and hillsides gouged out, piles of brick, cement, sand, machinery, one or two heavy vehicles. Hotels? Why couldn’t Ramlal work here, near his village? Why did he have to go so far, no one knew exactly where?

  Most of the spectators have left, leaving only a desolate handful. Lakshman is rooted to where he is sitting by a bottomless exhaustion. Raju has sat down too; docile, deflated, it seems to Lakshman. There is a single one-rupee coin on the cloth spread out to collect what people give.

  Before they leave the town the following morning, Lakshman goes to a grocery stall right at the end of a road lined with tea shacks and places selling fruits and vegetables, grains, rice, onions, garlic, gourds, potatoes. He looks through t
he produce, making sure the man in the stall has noticed Raju.

  – Is … is he a bear? the man asks, his interest stoked.

  – Haan. A baby one. Raju, he’s called, Lakshman answers pleasantly. His heart is beating madly. He knows he’s taking a big risk but they need to eat. He lets go of the rope in his hand and nudges Raju’s back with his foot. Raju wiggles his bottom a bit but doesn’t move. Lakshman nudges him again, this time more forcefully, while keeping up a patter to sustain the shopkeeper’s initial curiosity.

  – He’s just a baby, very quiet, very friendly, like a paaltu dog. Aren’t you, beta, aren’t you a little doggy-woggy? Go, go to this new bhaiyya, go.

  The plan, such as it is, is unfolding on the hoof. Lakshman bends down and, with his hands on either side of Raju’s rear flank, urges him gently to make friends with the new bhaiyya.

  Raju takes a few steps forward, seeing which the shopkeeper blanches and exclaims – You’ve let go of the chain? No! Don’t let him loose, tie him again, tie him!

  Lakshman disregards him – He won’t do anything, ekdum bachha hain – as Raju begins to advance, the blinking, resigned confusion on his face intact.

  The shopkeeper repeats his injunctions, his voice rising, the panic in it becoming uncontrollable now. Raju sniffs the ground, a sack of dirty potatoes, another sack of tired pink bruised onions, looks up and yawns. The shopkeeper gives out a strangulated shout, edges himself out from behind his scales, with the stack of polygonal black iron weights lying beside it, and runs out of one corner, almost tripping over a huge basket of shrivelled gourds at the threshold. He retreats into the narrow dirt alley adjacent to his stall. Raju, perturbed by the perplexing feeling of not being on a leash, and the proximity of food, snuffles and grunts and ambles towards the corn near the mouth of the alley down which the shopkeeper has fled. Fearing pursuit, he runs further inside, leaving Lakshman, incredulous at his good luck, to stuff anything he can lay his hands on into the sling-sack that he has improvised from the large sheet that he spreads out for people to throw money on, when he is making Raju perform. Dark potatoes; onions slipping out of their papery skins, mushy here and there; gourds; sweet-corn; mangoes; bananas; packets of white, sliced bread … until the thought of capturing Raju makes him pause and drop the sack, now impossibly heavy. But Raju hasn’t worked out yet what the novelty of unshackled movement means; instead he is rooting around in a jute sack of half-rotting cold-storage carrots from last winter, snout in, gobbling them up with absolute abandonment. Lakshman cannot bring himself to disturb that unity of focus and concentration, so he carries on with his erratic pilfering. Then – while Raju is still lost to the world – Lakshman catches hold of the free end of the chain and gives it a tug, two pulls, three, before Raju registers and looks up. The sack is going to impede a fast getaway; fear is upon him now. He has a good idea of how easy it would be for the shopkeeper to raise a cry of Thief! Thief! and have a crowd of people instantly at his back. Slinging the sack over his left shoulder, he pulls Raju sharply and hurries to the mouth of the road and from there slips into the scatter of houses amidst the trees set back from the road, turns left and right and right and left randomly, in case anyone is following them, and at last reaches the final line of built structures beyond which lie only trees. He stops to catch his breath and ease the sack off his shoulder.