A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  This time she whispered a ‘haan’.

  He asked, ‘Come outside? Just for a few minutes?’

  Long pause.

  ‘Will you come?’ he pleaded.

  Pause, then a faint, ‘They don’t let me go outside.’

  ‘Can you not make up an excuse and come out? On an errand?’

  Perhaps this was what Milly was waiting for, an expression of interest from the world outside, a door opening to another, bigger place, that would allow the echo-chamber in her head to become a story that could be told. That story started spilling out, but halfway through she heard the front door open. She whispered a panicked, ‘They’ve arrived, they’ve arrived, don’t call me’, and hung up.

  It took her over a week to give him the whole account. At the end of the story, he surprised her by remarking that the problem was not so much her masters as the guards: her masters went out of their home often, leaving Milly on her own, an interim when she could have done anything, including escape, but they relied on the guards to prevent any such mishap. It was the guards that they – no, he – needed to think about.

  Ten days after the last instalment of the phone conversation, the doorbell rang. She opened the door and there he was, hardly the distance of two hands from her, standing with two large paper boxes in a plastic bag, his face a picture of sweaty nervousness, one of the ‘Sukh Niwas’ guards at his side. They had planned this meticulously – when the Vachanis would be away, how he would say to the guards that he was the delivery man from a shop, how she would corroborate when the guard accompanying him to Flat 10 rang the bell – but no amount of rehearsal ever took the dread away from the first night of the performance. As soon as Milly had confirmed that something had been ordered by her malkin, the guard went downstairs to resume his game of cards.

  She kept her head down throughout, refusing to make eye-contact or speak to Binay directly, choosing instead to address the doorframe, the threshold, the white-grey-and-black tiled floor of the landing. When she had to look up, her eyes focused on the red swastika on the lintel of the door to Flat 11, behind his head, and on the tiny glass Ganesh perched on top of that, right in the centre. She had never seen it before, never having paid such attention to the front door of the opposite flat.

  ‘Take,’ he said, handing her the plastic bag.

  She didn’t take it, but asked, ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Food.’

  ‘What food?’

  ‘I work in a restaurant. It’s food from there.’

  A pause as she absorbed this.

  ‘I had to have something in my hands to convince the guards that I had come to deliver,’ he said, almost injured that she shouldn’t accept the food, although it was only a prop in a somewhat elaborate game.

  ‘What food?’ she asked again.

  ‘Chow mein and chilli chicken,’ he said.

  She didn’t understand a single word; her mind was elsewhere. ‘If they see the food, what am I going to say to them?’ she asked. ‘I’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘You can eat it now.’

  She smiled, then said, ‘So much?’, and went back to looking anxious.

  He knew it was dangerous for him to linger, and unwise of him to force the food upon her, but he wanted to eke out the moment – who knew when he would be able to come next? Above all, he wanted to hear her speak the words she had said on the phone, but face-to-face, looking into his eyes: ‘You’ll rescue me from this place, na?’

  They moved with the stealth of stalking predators. Binay knew that making friends with the guards and depending on their connivance, or even sympathy, to smuggle Milly out was not a reasonable option. They planned on the phone, in conversations snatched hastily during the rare moments of privacy that Milly had when the Vachanis were out of their home. She had little to contribute to the plans except to convey her fears – fear of the plan failing, fear of being found out before it was executed, fear of the hundred and one things that could – would – go wrong, fear of repercussions, fear of the guards being sent after her … The world was one giant pitfall.

  The greatest of the insurmountables was the question of the police. ‘What if we are found out?’ Milly would chant her mantra.

  ‘In that case we can call the police, if they force you to go back,’ Binay would reassure her.

  ‘The police won’t bother to listen to people like us.’

  Binay knew this was true, but he didn’t want to be appear to be daunted. He said with bravado, ‘The world has changed, the police can’t get away with everything. This is a big city, not a village. There are crores of people here. We can make a big havoc with the people in the streets.’ He didn’t have a clear idea of the hue and cry that he said he was going to raise, but it sounded good and it seemed to calm her temporarily. But at night, when Milly was alone with the indefatigable choir inside her head, the questions would come out of hiding again, like the cockroaches, stealthy but unignorable. What if they sent the police to find her and bring her back after she managed to escape? They were the police, they were in the business of knowing how to find people hiding from them. Binay’s words about how in the city the two of them would be like two grain-sized pieces of stone in a granary packed with rice sounded hollow at this hour. Didi could easily bribe the police. And who knew if they didn’t already know of this racket? The thought of that Marwari woman in Kolkata resurfaced, as if in illustration of her fears. Milly curled up like a foetus. She didn’t think she had it in her to go through with the plan. Then it struck her – what would happen to her bank passbook? Would she be able to get her hands on her money without it? Would they send the police to the bank and wait for her to show up? Even if that were not the case, the bank people could easily inform on her when she went in to take out or deposit money … Various scenarios played out in her head until, exhausted, she thought: perhaps it was better to stay put and see it to the end of her days in this cage. Some of the possibilities that could follow, if the plan was put into action, could be far worse than what she had in this house. Why not shut up and put up with the present state of affairs? Look at Soni – what was she doing with her freedom? Running around in jungles, wielding guns, living under the sky, barely getting two proper meals a day; she was a marked woman who would have to remain in hiding for the rest of her life – that was a kind of imprisonment too, wasn’t it? Especially that life? Wasn’t she, Milly, better off? She thought of Soni’s words, ‘The lives of people like us are nothing.’ Yes, her life may be nothing to others, but to her? Wasn’t it something to her? Everything?

  It had to be on the day the Vachanis went to the Siddhi Vinayak Temple for the big festival of Ganesh Chaturthi. Didi talked about it for days beforehand and Milly remembered that temple visits often took three to four hours; a good, clean window for her and Binay. Their plan seemed more and more absurd, unworkable, as the hour approached. She found herself thinking of ways to sabotage it, just to have the inevitable consequences happen early and put her out of her misery. What if the guards didn’t let Binay in? That wouldn’t be such a bad thing; to have the plan ruined at such an early stage meant that at least she would not be implicated.

  No such mercy. She watched the iron gates downstairs open to let in two cars, then close again. A woman, clearly someone who worked in one of the other flats in the building, clanged on the gate and was let in. Milly’s heart was a rattle in the hands of a child. A guard opened one of the two panels that comprised the gate to chat to someone – she couldn’t see who it was; she felt faint. He closed the gate again. Was it Binay? Had he not been allowed in? How could that be? There seemed to be a hollow where her chest and stomach used to be. There was another short banging on the gate. A guard walked up and opened it a crack. Brief exchange. Then he lifted up the bolt that fitted into a hole on the ground and opened both doors wide. A huge wooden cupboard was carried in, held aslant by Binay and another man, both of them dwarfed and angled sideways and slightly backwards, by the effort of wielding it. Before s
he could assimilate this sight, there was a rapping on the front door of the flat.

  A guard stood outside. He said, ‘Almirah delivery. There are two men downstairs. Shall I send them up?’

  ‘Haan,’ she said, but she couldn’t hear herself above the roaring of her blood.

  The cupboard had to come inside the flat horizontally. The door was shut. As planned, Milly walked into the wooden box – there was room inside for at least two of her. Beyond her own weight, Milly didn’t have much to make the cupboard any heavier. She had very little to take with her: two shalwar-kurta sets, her Hindi textbooks, a book of elementary English words, a toothbrush, a comb, a small hand-mirror, her mobile, her little purse, which held next to nothing, and the most important thing, her ration card. This was the card that she had to show to the bank to prove that her account was hers. This was the card that Sabina had said she must hide from Didi, and guard with her life and never, ever give up if Didi asked for it.

  Binay and his friend tested the thing on which everything turned – whether the bolt could slip and the doors fling open while carrying her out. They had even come prepared for this eventuality: a lock they could attach on the outside, securing the bolt in its place. It was roomy inside, and the cupboard was made of wood, not cheap plywood boards, so she imagined it must be very heavy. The men lifted. She felt the whole world, or what little there was of it in the confined scrap of pitch-darkness, tilt around her. She gave a little scream. They set down the cupboard gently.

  She heard Binay’s voice, muffled, ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Haan.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Haan,’ she repeated, louder.

  ‘Listen. We’ll lift the almirah and lean it forward, so that you are pressed against the door. Do you understand? Put your entire body on the door, don’t resist, don’t rest against the back wall. Understood?’

  ‘Haan.’ She didn’t, not quite, but she wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  Again, that lift and cant, that brief feeling of weightlessness followed by the tiny, dark space going topsy-turvy. Then an awkward jerk brought her sharply in collision with the door. It held. They rehearsed this three more times. Milly could hear the exertions of the men, their grunts and huff-puffing, even smell their sweat. She felt like a ball in a game of catch-catch between giants. She summoned all her courage and asked meekly, ‘Can I come out for a minute?’

  Outside, the world was full of light – blinding – and air. Standing on the tiled floor of the living room felt so solid, so good; she had never thought she would consider any part of this flat, however fleetingly, as offering a feeling of liberation. The smell of the men’s sweat was ranker now. Their foreheads were wet.

  Binay said, ‘We have to be quick. Is it too bad in there? Give us a glass of water and then we’ll get out of this place. You’re sure you aren’t leaving anything important behind?’

  Milly said, ‘Why don’t you put the almirah – with me inside it – in the lift? It’ll save you having to take this down the stairs.’

  Out on the landing, Milly showed them how to operate the lift. ‘Make sure you close both the doors tight shut. Like this. And press this button after that, the one with the zero on it, do you see?’

  They went back into the flat and Milly entered the cupboard, which Binay locked from the outside. They were ready at last.

  In her dark, moving cabin, Milly heard her own pounding heart, that betraying beast, and was certain that the guards outside could hear it, too: the wooden walls of the almirah were fairly pulsating to the beats. The world outside came to her in the form of muffled sounds – traffic, perhaps the aimless conversation of the guards? – and that needle-thin line of light where the doors joined. Would she be able to see thin segments of the world if she pressed her eye to it? Here she was, in a rocking boat, like the one she had read in her Hindi book: ‘The fishermen go out to sea in boats. The sea is full of waves. The waves rock the boats and the boats sway. The fishermen, too, sway in their boats.’ Here she was, borne aloft in a locked box from one life to another, swayed not by waves but by the imperfect strength of those delivering her and the cumbersome nature of the delivery. She heard fragments of conversation: ‘… taking away the old one …’ in Binay’s voice, then something­ she couldn’t make out in another, unfamiliar voice. She held her breath. She had put her trust in one man, a man she didn’t know at all, with whom she had only had a number of phone calls, she was putting her whole life in the hands of this man. The air in the cupboard was suddenly not enough. She put her nose to the hairline of light and tried to breathe in. It did not improve matters. Were they out of the building compound? She did not remember hearing the sound of the iron gates opening and closing. If they were outside, why weren’t the street noises louder?

  Suddenly she felt elevated higher, as if Binay and his friend had lifted the box up above their heads, their arms fully stretched vertically. It was not possible. Just as suddenly, she was lowered with a thud: the cupboard had been put down on some surface but on its side; she was in the sleeping position now. Voices, again, but speaking unintelligible words; sound of slamming vehicle doors, metal on metal, a metal door or gate being bolted. The long, thin crack of light had disappeared. She could not breathe, she was going to be choked to death. The sound of a vehicle starting up. She understood then that her almirah was in the back of a truck or Tempo and that it was moving. She let out a trial scream, but who would be able to hear her above the incarnation of noise that was Mumbai? So she screamed and screamed and pounded on the door with her fists, but in that cramped space she couldn’t get enough leverage to strike with full force … But who could hear her weak cries, dampened by the coffin enveloping her on all sides, and swallowed by the roar of life’s unimpeded flow outside?

  She stood on the open deck of the Tempo, clutching one of the metal bars behind the driver-and-passenger capsule. Binay sat on the floor next to her, holding on to the side. The almirah lay open, still on its side; inside, two plastic bags containing Milly’s worldly possessions. She breathed in huge lungfuls of the heat and dust and traffic fumes and was silent. Her eyes were wide open to take in everything. She felt small yet infinitely alive, like a tiny baby sparrow in the middle of a huge human palm. When she spoke, it was almost to herself, in just above a whisper.

  ‘So big? We’ll get lost here.’

  Binay, who couldn’t hear her, who didn’t even know that she had spoken, said, ‘We’re coming into Bandra soon.’

  She sat down and held the side of the Tempo with both hands. So many cars. So many people.

  Binay said, ‘Look, the sea. Have you seen the sea before?’

  That, the sea? Like a huge pond whose other side you couldn’t see?

  9: Home

  It was Sabina who found Milly a new position in under a fortnight of her escaping from the Vachanis. Binay had to keep reassuring Milly that her former employers couldn’t come after her, since no one knew who he was, where he lived, what his role in the escapade was. They married the week after she started her job on Mount Mary Road, a ten-minute walk uphill from her new home in the seaside jhopri between a luxurious hotel, Taj Land’s End, and Bandra Band Stand. The job, in a seventh-floor apartment in a high-rise called ‘Sea Crest’, was not a live-in one: she had to turn up early, just after 6 a.m., to make breakfast for the family of four (a couple and their two children). The man left for work around seven-thirty, taking the children with him to drop off at their school on the way to his office. Milly stayed for another hour and did the dusting, cleaning, washing-up, laundry, and even ran a few errands. By eight-thirty she was done. Binay, who worked evenings in a restaurant in Pali Hill nearby, would still be asleep by the time she got back home.

  She thought of her village as home, too, but she used the word gaon for it, never ghar; the jhopri in Bandra was home now. Three narrow alleys traversed the slum, each wide enough to fit one person of average height, fully stretched out, with some wiggle ro
om at the extremities. She knew exactly because she saw, on numerous occasions, drunken men lying at full stretch, barring the way.

  The homes – a room for each family – were ranged along these lanes, packed tightly and joined. The sizes of the rooms varied, as did the number of people living in them; some of the rooms housed as many as twelve members of a family. The walls were brick, most of them painted, some in eye-piercing blue or pink or green, while others were simply whitewashed. The tight, dense cluster of rooms built alongside and behind each other meant that access to a lot of homes was through the patchwork of even narrower side-alleys, down which it was impossible for two adults to walk abreast, and through back yards or even part of the living quarters of some of the dwellings. These spider-web alleys turned into overflowing drains during the monsoon.

  It was a watery world in other ways, too – the western side of the slum, bordered by the sea, was built almost flush along the water’s edge and separated from it by a raised-stone, compacted-mud and brick walkway, crooked and cracking in places, of a width that allowed people to walk on it only in single file. Water lapped against one side of this path permanently. On the other side, two feet from the water, were the backs of the rooms that formed the western extremity of the slum. During low tide the walkway stood about four or five feet above the surface of the sea, and at high tide about less than half that height. For the three months of monsoon, this path, which was also a boundary wall, remained submerged under water and those homes backing on to it regularly and continuously flooded. When the rains were extremely heavy, the entire slum got inundated, parts of it swallowed by the rising sea, and the inhabitants had to be evacuated by the police and the fire brigade. Milly and Binay’s home was towards the eastern side, nearer the road that connected Band Stand to Land’s End, so they were spared these contingencies, although flooding caused by heavy rains turning the interior alleys and lanes into temporary waterways and overflowing drains was something they still had to contend with.