A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  In that first year of training she went to a school run by Maoists; there were several such schools, mobile or permanent, in the base area. There she was taught English, mathematics, science, geography and Communism. She learned about capitalism, labour, exploitation, about the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois, about false consciousness and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  The recruits got training in how to set up their bunker and, equally important, how to dismantle it quickly and move on without leaving a trace. Bunker meant no more than a plastic sheet or thatch spread over four bamboo posts. Soni’s squad had five women and six men. The women got extra rations of food, particularly eggs, and if eggs were not available, groundnuts. Life on the move, in the open air, was tough. Sometimes it felt that they were little more than wild pack-animals, carrying loads on their backs and heads, sacks of rice and grain, heavy kitbags, moving from one village to another through the jungle. The guerrillas’ main – often only – source of sustenance was the food levy they imposed on the surrounding villages: they took five kilos of rice and lentils from the thirty kilos that every villager who held a ration card was entitled to, from the public distribution system. Not infrequently they would have to collect the food from villages which had missed the ration day, because they were so far away from the distribution hub, so there was either nothing the guerrillas could be given, in the worst situation, or they had to do with very little, with food that could barely be called food: rice that was more stones than rice, lentils that had gone maggoty. There were days when they subsisted on this stony rice and tamarind paste or a fiery chutney made with ants, salt, tamarind and dried red chillies. On such days they looked upon every animal they glimpsed in the jungle – a bird, a scurrying rodent in the undergrowth, a crashing boar, a snake – with hunger, wanting only to bring it down, roast it over a fire and fall upon it. Weakness and exhaustion slouched and pressed against them.

  The guerrillas slept outdoors in the winter months, with nothing but a thin blanket to cover them. They learned how to harness nature for their purposes: which trees were best to hide behind because their trunks could withstand or absorb bullets; how to read the forest so that they knew how to navigate, where to walk, where to go, where to hide, even though there were no visible paths; how to create traps with trees or in the undergrowth without any sign to betray their existence; what kind of formation to follow while spreading out in the forest to surround the paramilitary forces sent to hunt them out, so that the soldiers did not know from which direction they were going to be attacked.

  There were speeches on most evenings to remind everyone what and who they were fighting, to keep them fervid, their anger shiny and whetted. Her blood ran swifter, hotter, when she listened to the leaders. Theirs was a different approach – no longer the old lies of ‘If you vote for me, I promise to bring about this and that change’, but the direct action of taking power in your own hands. ‘If you kill, we kill too. If you have guns, we have guns,’ as one comrade had put it so simply. Here was a kind of equality, at last.

  6: Jamshedpur

  Milly’s mother considered the new position in Jamshedpur a move up because Milly’s salary increased. The increment was only by a hundred and fifty rupees, but to her this meant a week’s worth of staples. The young Bengali couple at whose home Milly began work – Debdulal, a railway engineer, and Pratima, his wife – did not mistreat her in any egregious way, but worked her hard and grudged her any leisure or resting time. ‘Standing at the window again?’ Pratima would scold her. ‘Don’t you have work to do? Is the rice picked? Did you hang out the washing?’

  Once Milly made the mistake of responding. ‘I’ve done all that,’ she said meekly.

  ‘How dare you answer back?’ Pratima shouted. ‘Idling away all day! Go soak the bedcover and wash it, then make the bed in our room. Why is this table here? I have told you to move it to that corner so many times that my mouth is foaming. Why are you standing here, staring at the floor?’

  Pratima was particularly incensed if she caught Milly napping in the afternoon, even if there was no work to be done. She invented tasks to prevent this – an errand to run in the blood-drying heat of the afternoon, spice pastes to grind, various forms of spring-cleaning. She gave Milly two square meals a day, generous portions, heavy on the rice, but Milly felt the food discrimination here more than she had at Dumri. If Pratima’s nagging, scolding and surveillance hadn’t existed, Milly wouldn’t have noticed, but one kind of ungenerosity sensitised her to another.

  There was one incident that lodged like an arrowhead inside her. Pratima discovered Milly with a book, one of several of Vinti’s from her earlier school years.

  Pratima had laughed with open derision and said, ‘Turned into quite the educated lady, huh? Shouldn’t you be doing something more suitable? Have you kneaded the flour for tonight’s rotis?’

  Much later it occurred to Milly, as she was picking the scabs of this wound, that she was far better at Hindi than her Bengali employers were: they always got their hota and hoti, karta and karti wrong.

  The thing she learned in Jamshedpur, however, was how to cook Bengali food. Like most Bengali people, Debdulal and Pratima wanted to eat their own food all the time and looked upon what they called non-Bengali cuisines with a degree of contempt and suspicion. Milly was taught how to cook egg curry and, when Pratima was in a more economising mood, omelette in a thin gravy with diced potatoes. She learned about the use of the Bengali spice mixture, panchphoron, and various ways of cooking cabbage and cauli­flower and peas in the winter months.

  Milly had a plate (stainless steel) and bowl (aluminium, enamelled, chipped and dented) for her food, and a small stainless-steel beaker for her water. These were separate from the crockery which Pratima and Debdulal used; she wasn’t allowed to eat off those. Her things had to be kept in a different cupboard, the one that held the gas cylinder for their cooker. The rule was set on the very first day she started work. But to Milly, it was the availability of regular food that mattered, not the plates and bowls from which she ate it. She never gave the business of separate plates a thought.

  There were other, subtler rules, made known to her by some process that eluded her, leaving only the strictures in her mind. She had to make the bed but she wasn’t allowed to sit, let alone lie, on it. On the occasions she could only reach a tricky corner to tuck in a sheet tightly or smooth a crease by lying partially or by supporting a part of her body – say, knees or upper half or haunch – on the surface of the bed, she used the special broom to beat, extra-hard, the areas her body had touched. This rule did not need to be spelled out simply because no servant would ever have thought of the possibility of sleeping on their master’s or mistress’s bed. And although Milly had never broken this cardinal rule – in fact there was no rule holding her back, since the act was unthinkable and had, therefore, never occurred to her – she was once reprimanded by Pratima after she discovered the imprint of Milly’s palm indenting the soft surface of the bed. She had needed to press her hand down in order to shift a corner of the mattress, but from that day she had taken great care to erase all traces of her touch.

  She wasn’t allowed to sit on the sofas and chairs. She could watch television when Pratima turned it on, but she had to either stand or sit on the floor to watch it. Again, she didn’t mind; she knew the rules. But when she was alone in their home, she sometimes sat on all the chairs, armchairs, sofas and divans in turn, just to see what it felt like. She was also very careful to remove any traces of her sitting on sofas and armchairs: she dusted them again, and used the special broom for the bed to beat the seats and fluff them up. After a while, she lost interest in sitting on the forbidden furniture when she was alone.

  One evening, hypnotised by Kyoon Ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, Milly was told by Pratima, ‘Don’t lean back, your spine will become crooked.’ Milly, sitting on the floor, was supporting her back against the edge of an empty armchair. She straightened her back but it still touched the cha
ir.

  ‘Move forward a little bit more,’ Pratima said.

  Milly obeyed. She still didn’t get it.

  After ten minutes, Milly, lost in the world of television, heard Didi again, her words a little bit more commanding this time, ‘How many times have I told you not to lean against that chair? Sit up.’

  The following evening, before the television was turned on, Pratima reminded Milly, ‘Don’t lean back against the furniture.’

  Milly nodded. There was no melodrama unfolding in front of her eyes to dilute the message this time.

  Watching television was a flexible activity that sometimes depended on Pratima’s mood. Generally speaking, it was allowed if Milly had finished all her chores and didn’t neglect her duties. She was mostly undiscriminating about programmes – she was so fascinated by audiovisual entertainment at the flick of a switch that she could joyously sit through anything that involved moving, speaking figures far removed from her life. But slowly distinctions began to open up: she preferred serials to the news, films to talk shows, programmes that featured a suite of songs from different films. She quickly picked up the times of the day and the days of the week when her favourite shows went out, but whether she got to watch every one of them was up to Pratima’s whim. Pratima strongly believed that servants ‘sat on your head’ if you indulged them by letting them watch television or allowing them anything they appeared to enjoy. Whenever she got a whiff of any such activity from which Milly derived pleasure – and watching serials was an obviously readable one – she clamped down on it by inventing extra, unnecessary chores. If Milly did them swiftly enough to leave her some time in front of the television, Pratima invoked the mistress’s prerogative: a curt ‘Don’t sit here and watch TV, go to the kitchen.’ Milly had never been able to detect any rhyme or reason behind Pratima’s conflicting signals on this matter, unlike the clear directive about sitting on the furniture, for example. Still, orders were orders; she couldn’t question them. What the fickleness left Milly with was an escalating tension in the evenings: would she be able to watch Nukkad? Or would a mood swing see her banished to the kitchen from where she could hear every line of dialogue, every note of the billowing music, but not see any of the action?

  It was in Jamshedpur that the matter of accidentally broken or damaged household items became an unpleasant issue. Pratima used some of the vast reserves of time on her hands to form strong attachments to objects. She had what she called a ‘showcase’, a wooden cupboard, about six feet high, glass-fronted, with shelves inside. It housed objects precious to her – porcelain plates and cups and saucers, a few framed photographs, glass and terracotta decorative bric-a-brac; in short, things she thought of as suitably indicative of her status as the wife of a man who had a government job. The crockery inside the showcase was never taken out and used, not even for guests Pratima and Debdulal were trying to ingratiate themselves with – it was for display purposes only. The moot question was who the showcasing was for, the couple themselves or for their infrequent visitors. Milly was not allowed to touch the contents of this display cabinet, which was kept locked anyway. This did not hold back Pratima from complaining how dusty and untidy everything inside looked and blaming Milly for it. By this time Milly had learned that she was not to answer back. If that china was ever used, she would have to clean it, handling it with all the care and delicacy extended to a newborn’s head; the very prospect filled her with terror.

  So when she was asked to clean the interior of the showcase – ‘Take out every single thing, I don’t want to find dust hiding behind and between things, understood?’ – Milly thought she had avoided great danger: it was, after all, the safer job of cleaning the cupboard, not the dangerous task of handling the fragile contents. She took out the china very carefully, set it on newspapers laid down on the floor and did the same again with everything inside. Pratima sat on a stool, watching her and repeating, ‘Be careful, very careful. I don’t want a single thing broken.’ By the time Milly finished dusting and cleaning the inside, and putting everything back, intact, her hands were shaking and she felt that she hadn’t exhaled since the task began. Then she turned and thought she saw something on a piece of newspaper that she had forgotten to put back in – it was nothing, just a large picture on the paper that had caught the corner of her eye – but in her tense state, nervous that she was going to step on something fragile, she overcompensated her correcting movement, lost her balance and hit the showcase with her shoulder and side. A neat crack went through the pane that she collided against. Pratima was speechless for what to Milly felt like aeons, before she exploded. It was a relief to be slapped by her, and shouted at, after the build-up to the inevitable.

  ‘I’ll deduct it from your wages, you just wait and see,’ she screamed. ‘Everything you break, big or small, will come off your wages. That’ll teach you to break things you won’t be able to afford in your lifetime.’

  It was not an empty threat, made in the heat of the moment; Pratima deducted money for every article that Milly broke during her time in Jamshedpur.

  7: A change of place and a meeting

  Just when she had begun to think that the low hum of unhappiness in Jamshedpur would last for ever, Milly went back to her village on her annual leave and was told that she wouldn’t be returning to Debdulal and Pratima’s, but instead going to Mumbai, for five times the pay. It had come about through Sabina, a Christian woman from the village, who worked as a domestic maid in Mumbai; Milly barely knew her. When Sabina had returned home for a month’s holiday after her first year in Mumbai, she had told everyone how there was this endless demand for housemaids in the city. Word reached Joseph, a local clergyman, who was always on the lookout for ways to make the hopeless lives of his poor flock a tiny bit better, whether through using what little influence he had to get them small jobs, ‘loose-change work’, as they called it, or through acts of charity. What he managed to acquire for them was, in the long run, trivial – a week’s work as replacement labour in a bottling factory, slightly higher margins on sales of basketloads of tamarind or mangoes or mahua flower, getting an NGO based in Patna to give some kind of vocational training, such as machine wool-weaving classes, to women – but this business of going away to big towns and cities, especially Mumbai, to work in people’s homes, struck him as a somewhat bigger opportunity. Besides, there was nothing to do, especially for girls, in this village; gathering kindling, grazing cows, helping in the fields … that was the extent of it. And now some of them had started joining the guerrilla squads in the surrounding forests, a course of action that could only end in one thing. A Mumbai salary could mean significant money sent back home to the fam­ilies; the girls would, after all, be living and eating in the homes they worked in, therefore saving the larger part of their wages. His head buzzing with hope and ideas, Joseph went to see Sabina.

  It took Sabina a few phone calls to find a home for Milly; what helped was the fact of Milly’s work experience. Sabina, about to return to her job in Borivili, was taking two girls from the next village for whom she had found jobs as housemaids, also in Mumbai. Milly’s appointment was to the home of a Sindhi family in Lower Parel, the Vachanis. The biggest city she and people in her village had ever heard of, unimaginably big with an unimaginably large number of people living in it, everyone making money, living a life of ease, of four meals a day, a brick house with two or three rooms, a world of opportunity and plenty, a world very far from their own … the excitement, stoked by stories Sabina had to tell, was so palpable that even Milly, who was slowly being gripped by an escalating fear at the prospect of going to such a big place, occasionally felt its touch. Sabina wore a wristwatch with a golden metal strap on her right hand. Her sandals, a tiny red flower at the junction where the two side-straps met the toe-peg, had big city written all over them. She spoke more Hindi now than Sadri.

  Budhuwa’s first reaction to Milly’s new job was a laconic, ‘You’ll find it more difficult to come back here on holidays.’
Ever since Milly had returned home from Jamshedpur, she had struggled with watching Budhuwa go about his daily life with his one, left hand. He was much better, of course. He had learned to do most things with one hand, even his work unweaving the large plastic sacks, separating out each cord and then tying it on to a spool. He could now do it with a degree of deftness; the money he earned was calculated by the number of spools finished and Budhuwa could often manage to do up to four or five bobbins a day, depending on how many sacks had come his way. In the months after the attack, he had found it impossible even to take apart the sacks, holding them down with his foot and using a pair of pliers to pick out the threads: an entire day would go and he would have disassembled about one-third of a sheet, the frayed, untied ends sticking up like the unruly hay at the extremities of a bundle. Now, however, he had a rhythm, and a fleet one, too, and an ability, his own peculiar, imperfect way of getting things done.

  Milly watched him at work and said, ‘You’ve become quick at this.’

  Budhuwa looked up at her, turned his head back down to his plastic cords and said nothing. After a while, noting that she hadn’t gone, he said, ‘Yes. Doing the same thing every day for hours …’