Freedom Song (2 page)

The doorbell rang, and Bhaskar’s mother wiped her brow with her sari and proceeded towards the veranda. Looking past the branches of the shajana tree, she saw Mohit between their gaps, no longer wearing shorts, but trousers, standing with his bicycle on the pavement. Four days ago he had completed his end-of-term exams, for which he used to study alone early in the mornings. Today, he had woken up at five as usual, had a bath, wished his mother goodbye, and come cycling to Vidyasagar Road.

‘Ei, Mohit! What do you want?’

‘What do you mean, what do I want?’

‘You want to come in?’

Mohit stood with one hand on the bicycle. The road was misty behind him.

‘Yes, I want to come in,’ he said sternly.

‘Wait there,’ said his great-aunt, and wandered inside, smiling. ‘Haridasi!’ she called.

‘Yes ma,’ came the small, childish voice from the kitchen.

‘Open the door outside for Mohit.’

A minute later, coming up the stairs, Mohit found Piyu standing on the first-floor landing.

‘How was the ride?’ she asked. After Mohit had grown an inch last year he was as tall as her and could look her in the eye.

‘Fantastic! I came through the lake.’

His great-aunt began to follow him around like a mendicant.

‘Will you have luchi, Mohit?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Omelette?’

‘No.’

‘Pithha? Have a pithha. I made them yesterday.’

‘No,’ said Mohit firmly, as if he were used to warding off such requests. ‘In fact, I just had something before I came here.’ His hair was still gleaming from the bath he had had half an hour ago.

‘What did you have?’

‘Oof! What a question,’ said Mohit, looking ashamed. ‘Milk and toast and roshogolla,’ he admitted with a mixture of bravado and embarrassment.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Piyu.

Mohit hesitated; for it was a sign of adulthood to drink tea, and he was tempted, in his great-uncle’s house, to partake of a pleasure denied him by his mother.

‘All right!’ he said impatiently, not looking at anyone in particular. ‘All right, I’ll have tea!’

When Bhaskar came into the dining-room in his jeans and pink kurta, tea was still brewing in the pan. Mohit was discussing irrelevancies with his great-aunt and Piyu, his elbows resting on the table, his legs locked around one of
the legs of the dining-table. So secure did he look that it seemed no buffeting of fate could move him from his place. Pigeons, in a mire of feathers and excrement, had begun to make crowded noises in a dark foot-wide corridor by the water tank of the next house, which was perpetually visible from the window next to Mohit. But Bhaskar first entered the kitchen and said resentfully:

‘Half an hour and you still haven’t made it! Dhur—now I don’t want it.’

Poor eleven-year-old Haridasi, she took everything literally; her mouth curved downward. She stood on tiptoe and strained to gaze at the pan.

‘What could I do?’ she said softly. ‘I had to open the door for Mohitda.’ She said, ‘Don’t go, Bhaskarda, it’ll be ready in a minute.’ The smell of tea, strong and bitter-sweet and a little rancid, like sweat, had begun to waft through the kitchen.

But Bhaskar had, without pause, already walked out of the dining-room, saying, ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’ Piyu, still hurt from his retort ten minutes ago, decided she had not heard this. ‘What about your tea?’ called out his mother. When he did not answer she said to the table, ‘Let him do what he likes.’ Piyu lifted herself from this scene as if it did not matter. Then Mohit disrupted the small dining-table community further by getting up and shouting, ‘Bhaskarmama, wait for me, I’m coming.’ ‘Ei, where are
you
going?’ asked Piyu in astonishment. Deserting them, he revealed, ‘With Bhaskarmama!’ Bhaskar’s father had emerged absent-mindedly from the toilet and was washing his hands with a piece of Lifebuoy soap. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. Running down the stairs, Mohit said, ‘With Bhaskarmama!’

When Mohit caught up with him on the pavement, he said: ‘Bhaskarmama, I’m coming too.’

Bhaskar put an arm around the boy, who was a little out of breath, and said, ‘Then come; I don’t mind.’ Two pigeons, making rapid pistol-like sounds with their wings, took off over their heads.

Now, at half-past six, two state transport buses went down Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Road, blowing their loud hooting horns; they were half empty, an unusual sight. There was a small encampment of rickshaws along part of the pavement, their extended arms planted on the ground, their collapsible roofs raised, their wheels at rest; rickshaw-wallahs, heads and shoulders covered with a piece of cloth, were slapping their hands in imitation of applause and hurling tobacco into their mouths. Retired men, as free as children, all of them dressed for some reason in white dhoti and kurta, were either creeping out of their houses or returning from a walk, with or without a walking-stick. The first to go about their business were
the crows, clamorous, a little neurotic, turning up, as usual, by the tea-shop entrance (if one could call that absence in the wall an entrance), by the lane’s rubbish dump, on the pavement, upon the roofs. Fog, a compound of charcoal smoke, exhaust fumes, and mist, hung in the lanes; you did not notice it at close quarters, but, a little distance away, you saw it loitering by balconies and doorways. The colours of the houses on Vidyasagar Road, pink, or moss green, or light yellow or blue, were dimmed by the mist, till they looked like the colour of old cotton saris that have been worn for many years and still not thrown away.

They came to a house. An old man was sitting on the balcony of the first floor upon a wicker stool and eating from a bowl. A woman in a cardigan leaned over the banister and looked over her shoulder and cried, ‘Hurry up, Mira, do you want to miss your bus?’ The old man dipped his spoon into the bowl and said, ‘Don’t scold her, ma, she’s a little slow.’ The mother said, ‘Mira—Mira? I can see the bus coming now,’ although the lane was still empty. The door to the room on the ground floor was open, separated from the courtyard by a porch which was a little stage that accommodated a coir mat and two or three pairs of rubber slippers. There was a message on the wall outside: C.P.I.(M.) FOR UNITY AND HARMONY AMONG ALL COMMUNITIES. A man, wearing pyjamas, a shirt, and a sleeveless pullover, came to the door and said: ‘You’re late.’ ‘Give it to me, don’t
waste time,’ said Bhaskar. As they were waiting, Bhaskar lit a cigarette, and Mohit, still a little awed and shocked by this act, began to pace up and down the porch, stopping only to inspect a fern that had grown on one side. A small girl had arrived at the pavement in uniform, a blue skirt, white shirt, and blue pullover, accompanied by a servant girl who would herself have been no more than ten years old. She was swinging her plastic water bottle upon its infinitely co-operative strap and standing a little way from the servant girl and talking to herself. Occasionally, she looked up at where her mother and possibly her grandfather were standing, ignoring the rest of the world, as if her imminent farewell were meant only for them. The man in the sleeveless pullover emerged with a pile of
Ganashakti
and transferred it from his arms to Bhaskar’s. ‘Did you sleep well last night?’ he said sourly. Bhaskar ground the cigarette underfoot and kicked it into the courtyard among the mournful plants and ash-grey earth. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he replied. He walked out of the gate, followed hotly by Mohit.

Each newspaper was folded and tied with a jute string. ‘You take half,’ said Bhaskar. ‘Here.’ ‘What are you going to do with them?’ asked Mohit, cradling them and laughing. ‘Distribute some,’ revealed Bhaskar very seriously, ‘and sell the others later.’ Bundled up, they were slim and surprisingly hard, and each paper could be held in the fist like a baton. They began to walk back the way they
had come, to an increasing accompaniment of noise from motorcycles and cars. As they passed the houses, Bhaskar aimed his paper at one or two of the porches, where it fell on the floor with a sharp sound, or sent it flying at a first-storey balcony, a swift journey in the course of which the paper arched in mid air and finally landed just beyond the flower-pots. There was a special purpose in these throws, for the readers of
Ganashakti
were fellow-travellers of the Communist Party, they believed in its necessity and its vision, and an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house. Mohit glanced back to see if the houses in which the readers of
Ganashakti
lived were any different from the others, but they were the same, with the fronts of balconies and doors painted in white or green, and other parts chipping away to reveal a structure of stone and iron that was as intricate and fragile as a honeycomb. The two went on until Bhaskar had completed the round and they had come to the end of Vidyasagar Road. By now Bhaskar had acquired a small limp; Mohit said: ‘You’re growing old, Bhaskarmama. The Party must be in a bad way if they’re taking members like you.’ ‘What do you think I should do?’ ‘I think you should do yoga,’ said Mohit. ‘Buy a book and learn the asanas. Or you won’t be selling newspapers for long.’ ‘I want to have some tea,’ said Bhaskar.

A
fternoon saw Khuku and Mini fall asleep on the double bed, Mini on the side on which Shib slept at night. These days the fan was not switched on, and the women hugged their own bodies, a light shawl lying casually upon their feet, taking on their tender, ghostly shape, while now and then Khuku complained of the cold and shivered. She had had all the windows closed except one, which let in a smell of smoke that must have drifted, unmoored, from a distance. Because the room, without the hum and movement of the fan, was so still, the world outside seemed proportionately larger, with more space having come into existence to accommodate the different afternoon noises, of bird call and bird chatter, and vendors, hammering, and taxis. Somewhere below, cars arrived, people got out, doors were slammed one by one, or almost together: not everyone was asleep. Next to Khuku, Mini,
very softly, was snoring, and on another floor, someone coughed, the little angry explosions seeming to go off just outside the window. Khuku clasped her throat with her hand and warmed it. How pleasing that sensation was, warmth, so rarely known for most of the year! Khuku began to fall asleep.

Outside, Jochna, sitting on the veranda at the end of the hall, combed her loose wet hair and considered the city. Uma, leaning over the banister and looking unconsciously upon the tiny heads of the watchmen far below, hung clothes to dry from different-coloured plastic clips. In a slow, imperceptible way, the city swam around her, the temple with its pseudo-classical shape that was being ‘completed’ for fifteen years, which they thought of simply as ‘the temple’, the vacant white perfect terraces of decaying ancestral mansions, surrounded by the enigmatic tops of masses of trees, the solitary, invisible factory chimney, with its waving plume of smoke the colour of pigeon feathers, the weathered white marble dome of an ancient princely house now given out to wedding parties, shining as coldly and beautifully as a planet, and, at large intervals, the famous multi-storeyed buildings with mythical Sanskrit names, all this swam around the two maidservants, Uma and Jochna, the first, who did not know her age, but looked thirty years old, abandoned by her husband, but vermilion still fresh and bright and new each day in the parting of
her hair, and the other, fourteen years old, short, dark, with intelligent eyes, and slow to smile. Uma was telling her the story yet again:

‘He begins to go for weeks to the other village, until I ask him, “What do you do there?” and he tells me, “I’m living with my wife,” and I say to him, “If she is your wife then who am I, eh?” He was like that from the first day, I can touch you and say that. He said, “I never wanted to marry you, it was my people who made me.”’

Jochna had other stories to tell, of her elder sister who was learning to make clothes in a tailoring class, and her nine-year-old brother who went to a municipal school. Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. In the lawn before it, a mali in khaki shorts, alone, unaware of being watched, fussed over a row of potted plants. In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion—both the master’s house
and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried—a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.

For a long time, neither of them seemed to move from where they were sitting. Then, burrowing into the hall, they lay down on the carpet between two chairs, a sofa, and a centre table, their feet, or Uma’s shoulder, visible depending from where one saw them, leaving empty the place where they had been, a veranda framing a winter sky, and light, an occasional sweep of birds, and grey, thinning smoke. Now only the sounds remained, giving a sense of the city outside, caught in the light, and a mosquito, like a lost aeroplane, that had wandered in; the sound of the two voices, Jochna’s and Uma’s, fell like drops of water, again, and again, deep, sounding muffled underneath the sofa. The colour of Jochna’s dress, with red and black flowers, reminded one of the interiors of pavement stalls on Rashbehari Avenue, with dresses folded or hung up in the afternoon, and a fist clutching forty rupees. It could have been worn by a small plastic doll. There was something of a cat’s secrecy about the two figures.

In the kitchen, the blue fluorescent light was suddenly extinguished, leaving its doorway dark until a pale, undecided patch of colour appeared in it—Nando, in his white pyjamas and shirt. On his black face, the eyebrows were knitted, either because he could not see well these
days, or out of concern or puzzlement over some elusive thing.