Freedom Song (12 page)

For she was something of an enthusiast of the arts herself; taught Tagore songs rather tunelessly but insistently to small children who lived in her block. The children, whom she gave lessons at no fixed time of the day, quite adored her singing. Her surname was Mitra, a word that had come to have sad, paradoxical music to it (she had decided not to change her husband’s name, from whom she
had separated eleven years ago). Fortunately she earned a small salary teaching at the primary level at an orphanage in which she taught English to thirty destitute children in a class. In her more lonely and sentimental moments she often felt that these children were like the children she didn’t have; but who, having seen her as a young woman of twenty, would have suspected that her life would take this particular shape when she was forty-five? Bhaskar’s own cousin, Khuku’s and Bhola’s niece, she was no longer noticed, a shadow, like other shadows, enfolded within this city.

T
he sound of the radio came from outside; and from a side-table Mini picked up her spectacles; it was morning and the moment of waking; the consciousness which meant a return to these sounds of the building and further away the noises of Chitpur Road.

Splashes of water fell upon the hard floor; Shantidi was in the bath; they fell, again, and again. And here was the day’s paper, lying on the floor, by the door. And in the cupboard next to the door was a small container with plastic boards with dates upon them which had to be reshuffled every day; Mini would pause and change the date by hand as if not entirely convinced that it was another day until she had done so; then she would bend to pick the paper up.

Five sisters and brothers in that family: Mini and Shantidi, and the three brothers, Shyamal, Chanchal, and the eldest,
whom they used to call Dadamoni. They had grown up in a place called Puran Lane in Sylhet, a flat area with a longish lane of houses, not a great distance from a market, and which must have been in the East of the town since the sun seemed to rise on that side.

Their father had been a soft-spoken nondescript man; where he came from was no more clear; the circumstances of his marriage to Mini’s mother too were now forgotten. What was remembered was his conversation and his uprightness, and the walks he used to take to Khuku’s mother’s house from time to time, and how she, widowed, would turn to this gentle man for advice. He—there were thousands like him—had died at the age of fifty-eight, which at that time was considered an acceptable age for death; Mini was sixteen years old. Their mother had gone back to the village a few years later and died there. Their lives existed only in their surviving children’s memories and sometimes not even there; it was as if they had been banished into some darker place or retreated there of their own will; and their presence had been so subtle in life, so unremarkable, that words could no longer translate them into existence. They were gone, but would return, without questions, to their children’s minds repeatedly. Then, after the mother’s death, Mini’s elder brother had taken on the responsibilities of the family in an ordinary but godlike way. He, ‘Dadamoni’, had looked after them as
if they were his children; like Shyamal and Mini, he wore spectacles, and like them he had a hoarse voice.

Then the upheaval came, and friends, brothers, teachers, magistrates, servants, shopkeepers were all uprooted, as if released slowly, sadly, by the gravity that had tied them to the places they had known all their lives, released from an old orbit. They had awaited it with more than apprehension; but when it came they hardly noticed it. The votes were counted after the referendum; their country was gone; first they went back to the village where their mother had died. After two months they packed their things and took a train to Guwahati and then a bus to Shillong, the landscape, over six hours, changing slowly from plains to hills.

Later, Dadamoni came to Calcutta with his brothers and sisters and rented a flat not far from where they were now; and took a job as a sales representative in a chemicals company. They’d lost their home; but there was the silent, incommunicable excitement of beginning anew in what was now their own country. When they walked down the road and saw a large hoarding advertising Dutta Chemicals, they felt proud as if at a secret knowledge. (They hardly remarked later on the demise of Dutta Chemicals; it had gone out of business in the Seventies, but their lives were so different by then they had hardly noticed it.)

When Khuku spent three days in Calcutta on her way to England in 1955, to marry Shib, Mini’d been living in a
lane with Dadamoni, Shantidi, Chanchal, and Shyamal in the rented flat. Khuku then told Mini how beautiful the city seemed to her, for this was her first visit here; and urged Mini to marry. She had someone in mind, she said, a young man called Kalidas Sengupta who worked in an advertising firm. For those three days she pursued the subject of Mini’s marriage, to Mini’s slight embarrassment. Then she was gone for six years.

Shantidi came out now, half-blind with the bath. She was cold.

When he was only forty-two years old, Dadamoni died. The day before he died of a heart attack, he’d had a meal of ilish fish, a noble specimen caught from the Ganga whose virtues he commended as he slowly sorted the bones in his mouth. Later, when the pains had started, he’d thought, at first, that it was indigestion. And in less than two years, Chanchal, who was running a catering business, contracted tuberculosis; and tuberculosis was still incurable in those days. With Dadamoni’s death (his photograph hung on the wall in the smaller room) everything changed with a slow momentum that they did not fully grasp; and their destinies turned out to be different from what even a year ago they believed they might have been. The possibility of Shantidi’s and Mini’s marriage became more remote; and then, they did not know exactly when, it no longer remained a possibility. In a way they were left innocent, like children, never
to know what one part of life was, not particularly worried by their ignorance, with an inexhaustible core of freshness and even romance, touched and changed only by time’s attrition and the uncontainability of their own affections. They gradually stopped thinking and talking about it as one stops thinking about things whose meaning one outgrows or transcends. Meanwhile, Khuku and Shib returned to Calcutta from England as, strangely, touchingly, husband and wife, Shib armed with rare and desirable qualifications of which Khuku was proud as if she had taken the exams; and their first and only child was born in a nursing home in South Calcutta. Everything had happened in Khuku’s life at an abnormally slow pace: married at the age of thirty, she was giving birth to this son after years of trying. Khuku was thirty-seven years old, and Shib forty, his hair already half grey, but his face strikingly young.

A sound from outside, like something beating against metal. There it was, again and again.

Mini would sometimes remember the two years they’d spent in Calcutta after returning from England. Bablu learning to walk, taking his first steps in the courtyard of their house in New Alipore; Khuku become plump and motherly compared to the thin woman she’d been before leaving for England, her hair dark and thick, fanning out behind her unmanageably; proud of her husband’s new job in a company that made bread. She was still singing of
course; she was looking for a music teacher to teach her new songs not in her repertoire. And Mini was working in the school. She still wore almost the same kind of saris as she did now, pale, with a thin coloured border, and tied her hair in a bun.

Other noises flowed in, between the metal being beaten, as if all material things in the neighbourhood were gradually being transformed into sound.

Then Khuku and Shib had moved to Delhi, and, for twenty-five years, Mini would see Khuku only when she visited Calcutta once a year, usually in the summer.

Not long after Dadamoni’s death, they’d been allocated this flat in the New Municipal Corporation Building.

Mini walked towards the table in front of the fridge and poured herself a glass of water.

At one end was the small kitchen. In the centre was a space where the table was kept, and a clothes-line hung from one end to another; and to the left was a window covered by a wire gauze. The walls enclosed a medium-sized space that was partially filled with light.

The obscure lines of the gauze had become dark and sometimes a feather which had been stuck there might remain there until it had been worn away. That window opened onto the intricate jumble of lanes and terraces of North Calcutta, receding and approaching, mirroring and leading towards each other, and towards Girish Park and
Vivekananda Road. Although Mini’s age was reduced by five years in her documents she was due to retire in about two years.

The two sisters were tenants here, although there had been talk for some time (always listened to with interest, always exciting a small ripple of speculation) that people who had lived in their flats for more than fifteen years would be given ownership. Among the tenants themselves there had been a tentative self-appraisal: ‘Yes, I’ve been here for seventeen years’; or ‘It’s nineteen years this year.’ The numbers were like a revelation. Time suddenly seemed to have passed quickly, even forgivingly. Each year for the last five years an official said: ‘It’ll be this year.’

Until nine years ago Mini and Shantidi used to live in this flat with their younger brother Shyamal and his family. He used to work as a junior manager in a small company; all three of them going out each day to work; reuniting at tea-time in the afternoon; Shantidi and Mini beginning to cook a meal in the kitchen at seven o’clock. That was their life after Dadamoni’s and Chanchal’s death. Then his sisters began looking for someone for him to marry; they discovered Lalita, younger daughter of a Professor Hiren Shome of Sylhet, who was beginning life as a schoolteacher herself. Shyamal and Lalita were married, and she moved into the tiny flat, and the second room on the right, near
the kitchen, became their bedroom. A few months later, a trivial incident caused a misunderstanding between her and Mini and Shantidi. There was nothing unnatural about that: for they had to live, eat, cook, and breathe and the newly-weds lead their married life in the same small space. Yet that was Calcutta then, and everything was possible and probable in their lives; and they were grateful for the flat. While Mini went out to work, Shantidi made sweets, boiling and condensing milk, frying things. Then Lalita had two children, both boys; but the quarrels between their mother and their aunts continued. The quarrels did not affect the boys’ relations with Mini and Shantidi; they loved and harassed and disconcerted the two women who were gradually ageing. And it was lovely to have children growing up in the flat, with tricycles and Ludo boards coming in the way, and rubber balls bouncing off beneath the bed.

Nevertheless things seemed to go on indefinitely with their portion of affection and unpleasantness and joy.

But what was begun in a certain way never arrived at its expected conclusion. So there was almost no surprise when nine years ago Shyamal and his family moved to a house in a different part of the city. And the two sisters were left to lead their lives in this building.

‘Didi, I’m off,’ said Mini, before setting out for the school—matter-of-factly, as if she was off to attend a political rally.

She was wearing a fresh sari; her small handbag and a cloth bag hung from her shoulder.

‘I might go out myself,’ called Shantidi. ‘I’m waiting for that girl.’ A part-time maidservant came every day at about eleven o’clock to cook meals.

Mini went down the badly lit stairs and emerged then into the bright compound and faced the old building opposite hers, such a faithful mirror-image of her own and yet strangely different; the small first-floor flats with clothes-lines by their windows, the windows covered with a wire gauze, the pipe running down one corner of the wall. It took her about two minutes to get to the main gates and leave the buildings behind her. As she approached the gates she was greeted from behind a gauze net by a woman with a child in her arms on a ground-floor veranda.

‘Minidi, when did you come back?’ Her smile was partly obscured by the gauze, and then she emerged into the open part of the veranda, almost becoming another person, the baby unconcerned in her arms, staring tranquilly at the sky between the tops of the buildings.

‘How is little Bijon?’ asked Mini, her slight smile echoing the woman’s.

She had held so many children in her arms, here, in these buildings, and they had gone. This, these buildings, was home and not home; the country she’d left behind in her youth was home and not home; where you went later
was not home either; the baby, though it did not know it, must end up making a journey, must end up somewhere else. Her feelings about home must remain painful and blurred to the end of her life. She took the child in her arms, unprotesting, then gave it back. ‘It seems longer than it has been really. But,’ her voice half-concealed by sounds around her, as if all you could do was become a voice among other voices, ‘I had a rest and lost track of time.’

‘We were wondering,’ said the woman, ‘but I can now see it’s done you good. There’s a shine on your face; I know.’

Pigeons rose suddenly into the sky between the buildings; their conversation evaporated rather than ended; the child began to make sounds as if it had had enough.

And now, with enough time still on her hands, she stepped into the lane.

Hindustani and Bihari tradesmen lived here, on the left of the gates. They did not notice Mini as she walked past. They were like a tribe that clung to its own impenetrable rituals, curiously unconcerned by the public gaze; their forefathers must have moved here a hundred years ago; it seemed they hardly slept; late into the night, sometimes, one could hear the men singing devotionals, and they must be the first humans to be woken by the sunlight at dawn. The lane moved on to the right of the gates of the New
Municipal Corporation Buildings and after dissecting, at right angles, the narrow lane that led out to Central Avenue, proceeded towards an old ‘palace’. Between shops there were landlords’ houses, ornate husks, in which no one lived. But no, someone did live in there, for there, across the enclosure of the courtyard, surrounded by the theatre of balconies, doors, and rather beautiful, shadowy stairwells, was the mundane parabola of a clothesline with washing left out to dry. There were little goats in the lane, and, by the side of families, children who were older than babies but not quite teenagers sometimes turned erratic cartwheels, as if they were celebrating something.