Freedom Song (7 page)

‘BJP,’ said Khuku, her eyes larger than usual. ‘I might even vote for the BJP. Why not?’

They spoke defiantly and conspiratorially, as if they were playing a prohibited game. They would stop once Shib arrived at the house.

‘In fact, it was no bad thing that they toppled that mosque,’ said Mini. She looked small and powerful, as if she had unsuspected energies within, and could have gone up to the mosque and toppled it herself, alone. She had quite forgotten about the pain in her leg.

‘No bad thing,’ said Khuku, who agreed with everything that Mini said.

But Khuku and Mini did not believe in Ram or Krishna; Khuku’s personal deity, which she might have created herself, or which had possibly been created by her mother, was one she called Bipad Nashini, or Destroyer of Distress, whom she saw as a maternal figure who watched over her and her family, and whose name she muttered whenever she was worried: ‘Hé bipad nashini, hé bipad nashini.’ This mysterious female divinity resided, it seemed, in Khuku’s heart, there she had her home in the world, and from there she sprang to life when her name was uttered in that worried, childlike way by Khuku.

Long before she either disbelieved or believed in things, Khuku had heard of the Muslims, or the Musholmaan, as a child. Her world was then populated by her mother, her brothers, and by a huge family of ghosts and spirits. It became dark soon, there was no electricity, and she could scarcely keep her eyes open; in the next room, her elder brothers and elder sister and mother kept on talking. In that world, her closest companions were her younger brother,
Bhola, who was then no more than an idiot who had barely learnt to speak, and Pulu, who was older than her by a year. Pulu believed in the next life, and in other worlds, where daylight was a soft purple, and he was always getting cuffed on the head by his elder sister for asking so many questions and being such a nuisance. He was brilliant at arithmetic and a great crammer and knew all the tables by heart. Khuku loved him very much, and one of the first words she had ever spoken, ‘Dada,’ referred to him. It was he who first told her of the Hindoos, who were a fierce wandering tribe with swords who cut up everything in their path, as their very name, ‘Hin-doo’, suggested, and Musholmaans, he explained, were ghosts who haunted the dark and hilly regions of Sylhet.

I
n the afternoon, Bhaskar reclined on the bed; his back had been troubling him again. He had not made the long journey to the factory because of it; instead, he had had a full meal, and now he sought the most appropriate position for his head on the pillow. In the morning, he had woken up with limbs quite frozen, and had had to ask his mother for help to get off the bed; he had hopped about like a huge injured bird. Now he lay back and sighed, with a book on yoga in one hand. The pages were light and wispy, and the paper was peppered and flecked with impurities; the Bengali print was faded. Almost each page had another page with a photograph facing it, smoky black and white photographs that were really blue-grey, with figures in them doing various asanas, the first two pages of photos being occupied by Surjomukhi Maharaj, who had written the text, a fat, fair, bearded holy man with small eyes and
a smile on his face. The rest of the photos were of thin unnamed men in brief white jangias, immortalized in that blue and white world in dozens of strange postures, straining, as it were, to become something else, to fly, to be transmogrified. The text made unexpected revelations in a deadpan way:
‘Muktabayu-asana:
This is good for the digestion. Those who do this daily will not suffer from gas or stomach problems. First lie on your back and breathe in, then slowly raise both your knees . . .’ Bhaskar must have read the book more than twenty times, for he had bought it from the Dakkhinee bookshop when he was fifteen. He could only just remember the shopkeeper taking it out of the window, slapping the powdery dust off it, and handing it to him. Bhaskar had at that time been passing through a long phase of interest in yogis and Mr Universes, an interest he had passed on to Manik as well, and their hero and idea of perfection had then been Monohar Aich, the great Bengali body-builder, who had muscles swelling and hardening on every part of his body. Since he had acquired the book, Bhaskar had been much stirred by the importance of the names of the exercises—padmasana, virasana, muktasana—and had interred them as a kind of knowledge. In those days, his mother was always asking him, ‘Have you done your schoolwork?’ and a great lethargy and reluctance filled him as he dragged himself to his textbooks. But, whenever he could, he read the articles in
Sportsweek
and
Sportsworld
about Shyam Thapa or Pelé, or flicked through the pages of the yoga book till he had become familiar with the descriptions of the asanas and those thin, bare-chested men in their state of arrested transport, with the pale luminous white wall behind them. When their mother looked at Bhaskar and Manik, she saw two wiry, restive boys, but she also saw, in their eyes, in the way they walked, in the way they spoke occasionally, what they saw themselves as—Tarzan and Hercules—and, vividly, she could see them increasing and filling out to their imaginary proportions, to their ideal, while, at the same time, being able to see them for the two thin boys they were.

Bhaskar had never been, although he was a great shirker of studies, and also a great day-dreamer, a particularly rebellious boy. If his feet ever accidentally brushed against a book, for instance, he immediately and swiftly touched his forehead and chest with his index finger in quick, absent-minded repentance, and as, in those days, books and magazines that were being read by Bhaskar, Manik, or their mother would always be lying by pillows or on the middle of the bed, because the bed served as floor and bed and table at once, and because Bhaskar’s normal mode of locomotion in the room was quick skips, jumps, and runs from bed to floor and floor to bed, his feet were always grazing books, and he, at least five or six times a day, was engaged in making that brief, absent-minded gesture. His
day-dreams were the usual ones dreamt by Bengali boys of his age: of alternative lives that were much like the lives of Swami Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose. At the age of seven, he had been given a thin book with broad, flapping pages called
We Are Bengalis,
with small biographical tales about Vivekananda and Vidyasagar and Tagore, each prefaced by a portrait of a serene and grave face; and some of the stories fired him with pride, and others made him cry. Once he understood what a wonderful thing it was to be a Bengali, and that he was Bengali himself, he went around the house chanting, ‘We are Bengalis! We are Bengalis!’ and this echo, predictably, was taken up by Manik, who had no inkling of what it meant.

He had read the book on afternoons much like this one many years ago, lying on his stomach and flicking the pages. The story he liked the best was the one about Swami Vivekananda, who was once an ordinary man called Narendranath Dutta. Narendranath wanted a simple answer to a question he had asked men of several religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism—and the question was: have you seen God? Only Ramakrishna said, ‘Yes: yes, I have seen Ma Kali!’ Testing Ramakrishna, Narendranath placed a picture of Kali under his mattress, and the saint leapt up in agony as if he had been burnt. Ramakrishna, seeing Narendranath was a great disciple, gave him the name Vivekananda, and Vivekananda,
journeying to America, homeless in Chicago, and then put up by a kindly old lady, brought glory to India by addressing the Parliament of World Religions with his speech: ‘Brothers and sisters of America . . .’ For a long time after, Bhaskar remembered every detail of this story, and he seemed to be there with Vivekananda when he was Narendranath and wandering from temple to church, and he entered the strange world where, with Narendranath, he met Ramakrishna, and he was there with Ramakrishna as well, when he sat in a trance and saw Kali before him, appearing little by little, her blue skin, the pink of her tongue, the black of her hair, and then becoming whole, and he came back to the real world with a little of the smoke and incense and terror still upon him. Through those days, as he walked from one room to the other in the afternoon, or came out from the toilet, he wondered if it was possible to see Saraswati or Durga or any divinity by chance, for a minute, for no reason. Then, one day, he asked an older, fifteen-year-old cousin who lived in North Calcutta, ‘What would happen if you saw a god? Is it possible?’ ‘A god?’ said the cousin. ‘Yes, like Kali or Durga. Does it ever happen?’ The cousin’s face became suddenly sad. ‘Yes it does,’ he said. ‘But those who see a god invariably die.’

In Bhaskar’s mother’s handbag lay two photographs in a white envelope. There they lay, removed from the sunlight,
unless they were taken out and subjected to curious scrutiny. One was a girl from Jodhpur Park, twenty-four years old, in a printed sari, with a small smile on her face, her body in profile, and the other was in black and white, from Dum Dum, with studio lighting falling on her hair. Although her features were not perfect, it was the first girl for whom Bhaskar’s mother had a slight preference, and had let enter into her heart a tiny emotion, a small attachment, though it could not really be called emotion or attachment for these are things you feel for people you know. Perhaps it was because her face had a patience and tolerance, and her personality a seriousness that was emphasized, rather than diminished, by that small smile, the gaily printed sari denoting a kind of openness—but these were things she said to no one, not even to herself. The photographs were really for Bhaskar to look at, though he never did so properly, but glanced at them for a moment and put them away, as if they hurt his eyes. Then they had been carefully and judiciously considered by Piyu, and laughingly and embarrassedly gazed at by Bhaskar’s father, and very seriously, and not without excitement, looked at by Puti, and now they lay in the handbag again, two ordinary objects that had unexpectedly entered their lives, two paper-thin cards, called photographs, with human faces upon them.

Meanwhile, Bhaskar went each day to the factory; at other times attended his Party meetings; but most enjoyed
the numerous rehearsals in the evenings for plays that would be performed on streets and even in theatres. These one- or two-act compositions possessed solemn messages, each one a parable or political allegory set in medieval India, or in an unnamed land that was sufficiently fantastic, sufficiently unreal, the citizens of this twilit world enacting events that had taken place only recently—the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the fragmenting of the Soviet Union, and, lately, the violence done to Muslims by Hindus. These disparate images, that had colluded somehow in Arjun Dastidar’s head, were made material and brought alive in a small room with white walls in Tollygunge, with a 100-watt bulb shining from the ceiling. Like inquisitive and loyal visitors, the sound of trams clattering back and forth outside and the spun pink-white winter smoke surrounded the players in the room and listened to their every word and every recapitulation and revision. Tender, destitute noises, of a cat meowing, and maidservants chattering and laughing as they walked by, transfigured what was beyond the wall. To Bhaskar, as he tried on a costume, or cried out in literary Bengali, ‘Alas! What was my mistake?’ (for their plays were full of aggrieved shouts and excited exclamations), there came back his childhood world of intrigue and assassinations, courage and injustice, and so, utterly convinced, he clutched his breast with his hand and fell. For what was creation but a great theatre, with swarga, with its
deities in every mansion, and blue akaash, born of God’s breath, and pataal, the deep, dark, crouching abyss below, perpetually exhaling spumes of dark smoke and protesting with many voices, and, in between, man, a tiny, wonderful, living creature, travelling in his frail craft, facing, astonished but fearless, the endless, dramatic vicissitudes of pataal and swarga? Who would remember him? Blood-curdling cries emanated from the room, followed by laughter.

Confused moths wandered in from outside and settled, becoming invisible until you saw them, a small triangular patch on the wall. When they were disturbed for some inexplicable reason, they burst into life and floated hither and thither, casting shadows much larger than themselves. The wall was always full of the shadows of faces, of bodies, of the slope of shoulders, the liquid outlines of loose clothes, of shawls, of pyjamas, a play of pictures accompanying messages conveyed from one kingdom to another, and cunning murders being committed. And who were these shadows but Bhaskar, Samaresh, Sumanta, Nikhil, Dipen, robbed of their features and invested with a curious darkness and poignance, shadows where the bright white lime-painted wall became mysteriously blue? And the moths, when one noticed them, reminded one of the alleyways, of green shuttered windows with iron grilles behind them, and the perpetuity of habitation, where they lived with children, young men, fathers, mothers, resting
on a wall next to a calendar with a picture of Shiv or Durga, or behind cupboards with piles of old shirts and saris, or distracting two boys as they sat down to study at their table. Such tranquillity they possessed—not a wall existed in Calcutta that would not give them repose!

And now a link was sought to be made between one person and another, between Bhaskar and a girl, who had been growing up all the while in this city, secretly, while Bhaskar had been wearing half-pants, and buying
Sportsweek
and reading Mandrake comics, and going to Gariahat Market with Robida to buy a water bottle, and riding on trams, his shirt clinging to his back with sweat—someone, somewhere else, was growing up as well, in as random and unpredictable a way, in a little self-absorbed world of day-to-day desire. There were so many places it could have happened—in Mandeville Gardens, in one of the lanes that surrounded the South Point School; in a nook in Jadavpur; in the half-countryside, half-urban settlement of Tollygunge; in Jodhpur Park, past Dhakuria Bridge, by the daily swell of smoke and traffic. There she had grown up, dragging her feet in chappals, wandering indolently in the veranda, making friends with girls called Bapsi and Mintu. Now it was study time, and now it was evening, with the tube-light switched on, and, all through her growing up, the city, like a great arm, had protected her, and kept her hidden and nameless.