he doesn’t know whether he dates his obsession with that boy from that day he never saw him again but he wanted to be him to be inside a car with his father on their way to a big new house distributing tangerines to children on the roadside and the boy’s face floated up too unbidden at strange times so many years later and even now even now he can picture that face the big eyes looking at him the shape of the tangerines in his hand and their dull yellow-green glow
oh to be born in the next life as a boy in a car sitting beside his father
where was all that time if he got it all back and he was that age again would he be here at this point again a mazdoor on the streets or would he could he walk along a different path and end up being that boy then he smiles and thinks he cannot be the boy at the end of that path because the boy has grown up like he has but could he be what the boy is now and what was he not a mazdoor on the streets certainly but he didn’t have to try his father had a car in which he rode with the rest of life outside and that was all that mattered you had to be born into the life inside
for without that you are nothing as he is nothing to the great world outside spread out below him the trees so many trees from up here they look like a colony of green animals hulking in the form of huge smudges and sometimes it looks like an interrupted green river foaming up here and there among the scatter of buildings like a toy town and the cars like toys moving in a line but more often a narrow snake of dozens of them stuck outside in a jam some waiting to let the ones ahead go into the hotel so that they can move forward to their destinations he has always noticed this sometimes still sometimes sluggishly inching snake of cars outside the big hotel and wondered if one of those cars is carrying a boy and his father to the hotel like a gigantic palace storey above storey above storey what does it look like inside what are the rooms like built by someone like him who’ll never get to see what it’s really like someone once said to him one hundred times the number of people in his village could fit easily into a single floor of such a building he never gets to see what it’s like once it’s finished with people living in there people not like him yet it is he or mazdoors like him who built it not they if he turns his head a little he knows it is going to look like a box of stone and glass some giant bird dropped on its flight and he thinks if anyone standing at one of the hundreds of windows can see him what does he look like to them can they even see him an ant on the side of a huge hill
while he can look at the air-lashed world only from the corner of his eye otherwise he feels that strange funnelling feeling that begins in his rectum and moves up how is he ever going to move along the ledge hardly wide enough for a bird to perch on to fix the bamboo and cloth rigging around the corner because it cannot be reached by any other way and then paint the outside of the window frames how is he ever going to do that moving on the pliable bamboo ribs inch by inch on his bare feet the world spread out far below and so much air between him and the world how is he ever going to do that he has heard that in buildings this high it is required by law that the mazdoors work on planks built as wide platforms outside the facade on each level and there are machines to take you up and down and you wear a helmet but where is all this he has never seen any where are the laws and who thinks of laws when the mazdoors are nothing their lives less than nothing
he is not going to look down he is not
he stands there shivering the sun is on the other side he cannot tell if it’s the fever again he has to finish it no one else is going to do it and they’ve promised him two hundred rupees today his fingers against the wall and behind and below him air those cloths flapping what were they doing he inches sideways the bamboo sways the next his fingers can get a grip is a foot away maybe two he cannot tell his head is so close to the wall he has to reach that point is he shivering with fear he cannot think that two hundred rupees if he can do five days of this being a bird then that’s a thousand he can send half of it home then that effervescing inside him again no he cannot he cannot not before he reaches that point one or two feet away but there’s no stopping maybe if he lets one cough out it’ll appease the rising creature inside the one who eats the inside of his chest which has become like keema he can feel it one cough he has to there’s no choice he lets out one cough and his chest explodes
in one breath all of his life in one breath because everything is air everything pouring up around the rushing arrow that he cuts through the unimpeded air its short embrace he is husk of course he is at last
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without a five-week residency at the MacDowell Colony. To that ‘haven-heaven’ (Maureen McLane’s words), I am profoundly grateful.
Alexander Cappelen and Bertil Tungodden arranged for a three-week stint in beautiful Bergen, where I did the final stretch of writing. I would like to thank them for their generosity and kindness.
Jean Drèze, sine qua non.
Devashri Mukherjee.
Poppy Hampson, Penny Hoare.
Clara Farmer, Peter Straus.
Ellen Barry, Rohini Pande.
Kartick Satyanarayan & Geeta Seshamani at Wildlife SOS India, Lis Key at International Animal Rescue.
Jill Bialosky, Meru Gokhale, Mandy Greenfield, Dominic Leggett, Vestal McIntyre, Fran Owen, Mrinal Pande, Aakar Patel, Tushita Patel, Sharmila Sen, Tarini Uppal, Edmund White, Anumeha Yadav, Mari Yamazaki.
For giving me a home-away-from-home, again: Arpita Bhattacharjee & Archishman Chakraborty, Devashri & Udayan Mukherjee, Mrinal & Arvind Pande, Matthew Rabin.
Suzanne Dean.
M. John Harrison and Sjón, for showing how it is done.
Matt Phillips, for his beautiful paintings.
Renu Jena, Mili Kerketta.
Without Matthew Rabin, this book could not have been finished. I am grateful to him for many things, but mostly for cleverly getting me to do all his modelling for the last ten years.
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Copyright © Neel Mukherjee 2017
Cover illustration and design © Suzanne Dean
Neel Mukherjee has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Chatto & Windus in 2017
Parts of this novel were previously published in Granta 130 and the Harvard Review 50
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A State of Freedom Page 27
