Freedom Song (17 page)

But it was difficult to come to terms with how ordinary it was. The new dhoti was already crumpled; and Bhaskar was wearing his kurta again, shyly.

A bed had been made for them, and complex garlands and tassels of flowers, painstakingly created, hung on all sides around it to enclose the two, at some future moment, in privacy. When they would go, eventually, to Vidyasagar Road, this bed would go with them and climb lightly up all the stairs to Bhaskar’s room.

And after another three days, when Bhaskar had brought his bride to his house and promised, at a ceremony, to provide her with food and clothes for the rest of her life, he grew drowsy; he had spent three days eating.

In the evening, Sandhya took off her wedding sari and went into the bathroom—an interval passed in which her absence was not noticed—and she emerged wearing a red cotton sari, her hair wet. She folded the Benarasi she had been wearing and asked Bhaskar’s mother, ‘Where should I keep this?’

T
hey were in the large room on the second floor, where Bhaskar used to sleep alone. That night they sat on the bed, with gifts on every side.

She seemed reticent.

‘That light is so bare,’ she said, pointing to a light attached to the wall, ‘it should have a lamp-shade.’ He looked at the light.

‘Were you tired today?’ he asked without sincerity.

‘No—were you?’ she asked, folding handkerchiefs that had been received as a gift.

‘Not really,’ he said, suppressing a yawn. ‘Though I
am
feeling a little sleepy.’ They spoke as if they’d known each other for years, while Vidyasagar Road unfolded before them, invisibly, as if it had never changed. He immediately regretted saying this, because he wanted to talk to her; but his eyes were red and tired.

Later, he went and changed into his kurta and pyjamas and returned and lay upon the bed. Sandhya came out of the bathroom wearing a nightie, tying her hair into a plait. Her shadow hovered upon the wall, trying to find its home here.

‘Where does Piyu sleep?’ she asked thoughtfully.

‘Downstairs,’ he replied.

She considered this silently. Entire childhoods had passed in this room, like a light going out, that she could only sense unclearly. He didn’t know what to do next. As she sat on the bed, he turned around again; he glanced at her narrow back, at the dark skin above the neck of her nightie, the colour of her shoulders. And he wondered why she had decided to marry him; it was probably some entirely trivial reason, something he should be able to imagine but couldn’t. Plausibly, almost touchingly, there might be no good reason: how mysterious the world was at every moment, the birth of love and generations. The nightie, starched cotton, was a pattern of pink flowers with white borders, almost like a curtain, probably made recently by some tailor or chosen from ten nighties that looked nearly the same at some shop; and when she lay down beside him, he scratched his arm and pretended to be tired. But he also felt the guilty, obtrusive stirring of desire; he kept it to himself, instinct or some genetically inherited knowledge instructing him that there was a decorum about these things he must observe. They still had a few of the
ornamental marks that had been made along their faces and foreheads, which hadn’t come off with soap; Sandhya’s having been made by an aunt, widowed, forty-two years old, watched by her two twelve-year-old daughters (they were twins). But Sandhya had never known before now, the eve of her wedding, the minor artistic accomplishments this aunt, who lived on Vivekananda Road, possessed; actually, she did not know her very well; but she had, with a clove dipped repeatedly in sandalwood paste, made, with every tiny pin-prick impress, those subtle marks on her forehead. If there was one thing she would have liked to keep from that day it would have been these patterns.

‘I have to wake up early tomorrow,’ he muttered, waiting to see what she would say. But she didn’t protest; she had wavy hair; he saw that she had dark lips; the calm sound of the fan repeatedly filled the silence. ‘Are you missing home?’ he said, turning on his side and letting his hand fall near her shoulder; he had acquired a small belly, and she seemed thin in comparison to him. This morning, she had cried when leaving her house. ‘No, not really,’ she said, quite gravely, like a child who has had a new experience. It was strange; they’d spoken with each other at length two nights ago in the rented room in that house in which they’d been married; and they had forgotten, for the time being, what they had talked about and would almost have to be reacquainted with each other. Bhaskar switched off
the light and they tried to fall asleep. He had not known before how shy he was with the opposite sex. It was an uncomfortable night; whenever a car passed through the lane, its headlights lit up the wall of the room, and towards dawn, a kitten mewed and sounded like a child crying. Each sound set the tympanum in the inner ear vibrating.

Towards dawn he awoke and gazed unsurprised at her as she slept, her eyelids momentarily parted to reveal the blue-grey light in her eyeball. But she was not awake, and everywhere there were only the merest signs of life; the blue dawn; a reticent vibration from the tramline; the early insistent cry of a shalik; her breath; in each of these life resided on the edge of itself. Meanwhile the fan lulled them.

When Bhaskar woke up again, he found she was not there. He was surrounded by the sound of crows and buses and rickshaws and the tube-well and schoolchildren, all things apparently in perpetual transit. Going down, he was startled to see that she had joined his parents and Piyu for breakfast in the room where they all ate.

‘W
here should I put these?’

Sandhya was holding a chain from which a golden locket hung. She held it, weightless, in her palm.

‘Let’s put this one back in its box,’ said Bhaskar’s mother. They bent forward like two conspirators. Light glinted and scattered.

It was one of the things she had given her. Last month she had taken a bus and gone to the jeweller’s and had had a necklace and a pair of earrings ‘broken’ and converted into this longer, this more beautiful piece. And she felt a strange tenderness towards it that was not unconnected to loss, for what was once hers had become something else and someone else’s.

Her youth lived on in the forms these jewels took. And whenever Bhaskar’s mother felt that familiar boredom coming on with a piece of jewellery, she would take the
piece, like a child with a toy, to the jeweller who had first made it and describe in words the new design, and leave the piece with him as if she were lending it to him; and he would give it back to her made ‘new’ in five days. Sometimes, when the piece was not very old, one suffered a small loss, for the jeweller subtracted about a tenth of the gold as part of his fee.

When she was young gold had been cheap, and she remembered those beloved thick bangles and that floral necklace she’d got when she was married.

After Bhola had left his job and embarked upon his business, Bhaskar’s mother had been protective and uncompromising about one thing: her jewellery. She was wise; for it was instinct rather than experience that told her that once he started using her gold to cover his business losses, it would happen again and again. But it had to be admitted that he had never made such a request. And this disinterested emblem of beauty and desire, the soul’s continual yearning for celebration, so removed from the everyday, which would one day belong entirely to her children, to Piyu or to her sons’ wives, remained untouched.

Two days later they stripped the bed of its floral covering; some of the flowers had dried and fallen to the floor, from where they were swept away by Haridasi. For Haridasi, Bhaskar’s wedding and the bride’s arrival had been events
touched with wonder. It had certainly been the biggest change in the household since she’d come to work here. She had looked carefully at the bride, and thought she was graceful, if not beautiful. And the bride too had glanced at her once or twice.

Bhaskar’s father-in-law began to visit late in the morning.

‘Come in, come in,’ Bhaskar’s mother would say from the veranda when he rang the bell. She would feel strangely embarrassed, as if she wanted to keep something hidden from him. During the wedding, under the artificial canopy, the world shut out, she’d had trouble recognizing him; there they were, like two actors from separate plays, having met in a strange place, hot now at the end of it, he poised, she uncomfortable and glowing with the heat. Twice since the wedding she had seen him in dreams, in the first one arriving at their house bearing gifts and in the second inexplicably displeased about something. Ever since then her vision of him had been oddly prejudiced, as if she, to her discomfort, knew something about him that no one else did.

Sandhya would race down the stairs barefoot from the second storey.

‘It’s terrible out there,’ he would say, coming up.

Bhaskar’s mother did not quite know how to take him. And she was wearing a green sari which she wore when doing housework.

He didn’t seem to notice.

‘It is easy to see,’ he would say, ‘that this is a house which a lady takes pleasure in keeping tidy.’

From his second visit onward he would go straight up to the second storey; there he would sit talking with his daughter for an hour. On his way out he would shout a farewell to Bhaskar’s mother.

He would come at all times of the day, but mainly in the morning.

What do they talk about? she would think.

‘A
re those your parents, ma?’ asked Sandhya. There were two pictures on the wall on this side of the room, one of Bhaskar’s mother’s father, another of her mother. Like them, she too, the new bride, did not feel that she as yet fully existed in this house. They considered this world from the hereafter with a certain immediacy; they both had daubs of vermilion on their foreheads that looked like they still hadn’t quite dried. Outside, a summer that distributed, unequally, shadows and heat had settled down on Vidyasagar Road.

‘Yes,’ said Bhaskar’s mother. ‘And those are baba’s mother and father.’

A smell of cooking drifted up stealthily from downstairs. And she, the newly married one, turned her eyes towards a large framed black and white photograph of an old woman in a white sari, sitting on what looked like a
chair, and another of Bhola’s father wearing a moustache. The tops of the frames had become brown with a kind of fine powder as if they hadn’t been dusted for weeks. These photographs had been hanging there for almost twenty years now; and now their eyes gazed upon this couple each morning. She—the grandmother—had come to Bhola’s father as his second wife, after the death of his first one, sixteen years old at the time of marriage and only thirty-two when her husband died. Only her children remembered now that she had had a gift for mathematics and had won a gold medal at school, but had forfeited her studies after marriage, much to the disappointment of her schoolteacher, an Englishwoman, a disappointment that the sixteen-year-old herself couldn’t understand. Along the wall, all the parents were joined together in eternal life, and a peripatetic gecko was known to live behind these portraits, curved, alone, arbitrarily moving from one frame to another. And Bhola’s father was a mystery; no one in this house had set eyes upon him because he had died a few months before Bhola’s birth. In that death lay the key to this family’s early misery, and their subsequent search for order and balance.

And now they said he had been a King’s Commission Engineer, one of the ‘heaven-born’. But, after he died, the family had been left with nothing; and later he had become this portrait in this house on Vidyasagar Road
gifted to Bhola by his father-in-law, now confronted by Sandhya. Something of his aptitude and perhaps the romance of engineering had been inherited by the family, shaping and influencing lives that were generations removed from him; generations to come that had never known him; for Borda’s younger son was an engineer; Bhola had tried to cast himself in his father’s mould and become a civil engineer, and created Goodforce Literod Ltd.; even Manik was studying engineering in Germany. In this way the grandfather that no one knew had lived on in his children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

Summer was everywhere. Meanwhile, Sandhya began to embroider a piece of cloth and make a doll’s dress inside her room. She was always making things; now a bangled hand pushed a thread through a needle. One shoulder leaning on an elbow, her sari’s aanchal falling abstractedly from her back, she pursued her handiwork.

Bhaskar was still something of an enigma in her life; she hardly knew him at all; and he reappeared in the evenings after his long journey from Howrah, tired. Then he would wash his face and feet beneath the tap in the small bathroom and there would be a far-away rush of running water. Emerging, he would quickly survey his reflection hovering darkly in the bedside mirror. One
evening, lying on the bed in the glare of the electric light, he asked her:

‘What’s this?’

For he had picked up the small shiny blue dress that had been left inadvertently next to a pillow. It was as if some tiny, subtle spirit that had perhaps visited this room had divested herself of her clothing before disappearing.

‘Oh, that . . . that’s something I made over the last two days when I had nothing else to do,’ she said, raising her face briefly.

He lifted it nakedly up to the light.

‘It’s a little small for you,’ he said, indifferent.

S
he knew very little about the company, too little; nothing but seeing Bhaskar become each morning a person who wore pleated trousers and a shirt and shoes before disappearing to a factory that made cranes. ‘Take me to it one day,’ she said without meaning it.

And he knew nothing about her. In marrying each other they had in effect embraced the unknown and the inconsequential. To look at, she might have been anyone; sometimes he would notice how her shoulders looked tenderly hunched and rounded when she was sitting down; the next day he checked to see if it was still true, as if reality could not be relied upon not to change at short intervals; during this time everything he saw in her he saw with a child’s guilty and inquisitive eye.