Freedom Song (8 page)

T
wice a week, they’d go to a nursing home in Dhakuria. It was a new place, built on a field that had once been empty. A by-lane of two-storeyed houses and trees led to it. Because the building itself was new, with a flat white façade that had red borders, it looked like a mirage, as all new things do in Calcutta. And then it had those tinted glass doors at the entrance that kept its interior a secret and imaged the world outside, and those new, flourishing money-plants on the porch that shone so, that they seemed to be made of plastic. Not to speak of the watchman in khaki, like a large ragged doll, the winter light falling on the stubble on his face.

‘Ma Sharada Devi nursing home,’ said Khuku to Mritunjoy, the driver.

The words were enough to please Mini. She was something of a devotee of Ramakrishna and Swami
Vivekananda; had long been one; not a formal one, but one who’d read their books, life stories, and sayings.

‘Who built the nursing home, re?’ asked Mini.

‘I don’t know,’ said Khuku, who’d never had much interest in facts. She relied on instinct. ‘It’s a good, clean place,’ she said.

Some doctor had recommended it to her when she’d needed a check-up (both check-ups and age had nudged Khuku, who felt so inwardly young, and surprised her into disbelief), and she had recommended it to Mini when she realized she required treatment. In her mind, the place had become associated with healing and a certain stage in her and Mini’s life, and afternoons when her husband was at work.

Her husband at work—seventy years old, hair half grey; yet the five thousand rupees coming in per month from a ‘sick’ company was useful in all kinds of small ways. It needn’t
remain
sick, now that her husband was in it. But lately Shib had said, sombre in his sleeveless slip-over, ‘I don’t know why they’ve taken me.’ He’d shaken his head. ‘The government isn’t interested in putting money into the company. I don’t know if they expect me to perform some miracle and put it on the right course again.’ He was unlikely to make any miracles happen, presiding over in his active old age this company he’d known since childhood. ‘I’ve heard that there are some
people who resent that money’s being diverted from a loss-making firm to pay my salary—so it’s best not have any expectations.’

Here, at the entrance of the lane, was a sprawling rubbish-heap of an unimaginable colour—but the two women in the car wouldn’t notice it. Mini was wearing a white tangail sari with a slender green border, and a dark cardigan; bent forward slightly, she was a mixture of light and dark this afternoon. Many times Khuku had persuaded her to wear brighter colours, but she had always refused; not saying why, but on the unspoken grounds of her age, and being single; it was just a preference and a belief she had.

Through traffic jams, bursts of exhaust fumes, a mad chorus of car horns, they’d come, passing the ‘boulevard’ in Gariahat, with its tinsel and Christmas caps hanging from the stalls, and its portraits of Ramakrishna and imitation Rembrandts, empty exercise books and jars of spices and generators; then the roundabout at Gol Park. Through all this they’d come.

The nursing home rose before them like a mirage. All the doctors attending to Mini had come to know both of them well—and addressed them as ‘mashima’. There was Dr Sarkar and Dr Majumdar, both of them young enough to be Khuku’s sons; both most courteous, and attentive to Mini, saying, ‘Mashima, sit here,’ and, ‘Tell me, how is the
problem now?’ Khuku remembered her son when she saw these two young doctors, and then she told them about him; and they seemed interested and always had five minutes to spare to have a relaxed chat with her. They’d got to know how Bablu was in America, doing a doctorate in economics, and how her husband was still working in a company. ‘That’s good,’ Dr Sarkar had said. ‘Men age quickly if they don’t work.’ Khuku had been pleased with this; she’d thought, Then it doesn’t matter that it’s not a good company, at least he’s doing a job. When they examined Mini, Khuku either sat in one of the chairs in the hall, or stood in the corridor outside which received weak sunshine from the frosted window on the door at its end, the door that opened onto a dusty space at the back where the cars were parked. She thought how strange life was, that she was here and Bablu was in America and her husband in the office, and that there was a clean nursing home in Calcutta with good doctors; she was full of wonder at how one person ended up in one place and someone else in quite another.

When they’d finished they headed back the same way, but going down the by-lane Khuku was always tempted to visit the house, in one of the lanes nearby in Jodhpur Park, her elder sister had lived in. Of course, her elder sister was dead; but her daughter, Puti—Khuku’s niece—and Manas, her son, were still there, living in different flats in the same house; as were her grandchildren, Khuku’s
grand-nephews, Puti’s son, Mohit, and Manas’s, Sameer. Both were fond of Khuku, their ‘Didimoni’, but of the two it was the younger, Sameer, less hard-working and mindful of his studies than Mohit, who was the more openly demonstrative of his affection towards his grand-aunt, ready to melt in her arms, and who always had a kiss for her. Puti, too, after the death of her mother, had begun to see Khuku, her only aunt, in another light (although both sisters had been different in every way, including appearance, Puti’s mother fair skinned with fine thinning hair, and ten years older than her sister, almost everything about Khuku these days reminded Puti of her mother). She—whom Khuku had called, simply, Didi—had died just over a year ago of Parkinson’s disease. Her brain hadn’t been affected, thank God; but her movements had been reduced to a minimum until, finally, she hadn’t been able to get up from the bed without the help of nurses. At least she hadn’t suffered terribly; anyway, it had seemed to Khuku, there was nothing Didi had liked better than lying in bed with a magazine; and this it had been possible for her to do till a few months before she had died; in this sense, it had been a happy ending. When Khuku visited her, she’d find that Didi was still eager to take part in conversations. She’d open her mouth and form a few words to ask a question, and Khuku would have a clear view of her betel-stained upper teeth, which
protruded slightly; and when the others gossiped, she’d listen, her eyes moving and registering surprise, disbelief, and amusement. Thank God she had had hired nurses always attending to her—not everyone had a rich son in America to pay for their medical expenses; she might have died much earlier had she not been so well looked after.

N
ow and then, their voices could be heard; not the voices in which they spoke to Khuku, but those that they reserved for themselves. They did not bother to speak softly; there was no one else in the flat. It had not been so silent since the days of the curfew.

Khuku often thought that three servants were too many to have in the house; there was only herself and Shib; and these three, for large stretches of time in the day, had nothing to do. Then they reigned like angels or demons without another habitation. They were itinerants, of course; three months later, they might not be here. Only Nando, even when he left, returned again and again.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

It was Uma. Nando had reached forward and transferred an egg from his plate to hers. The egg was more than an olive branch; it was a testimony of his intentions
towards her. Love, or something like it, had possessed him.

Uma had stopped eating; her right arm was poised in mid air.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ she asked again. ‘You’re lucky I’m not going to throw the egg into that corner’—she gestured with her head—‘because I don’t want to dirty the kitchen and upset mashima. But I’ll tell mashima about you.’

Nando stared at his plate. Of late their quarrels always came to these exchanges. Nando was allowed an extra egg daily by Khuku, not because of favouritism but because not long ago he’d been suffering from tuberculosis. He’d contracted it during a spell of unemployment—after being sacked by Khuku—which he’d spent at home, in a basti near Tollygunge, before a reconciliation brought him back to the job.

During the curfew a month ago, all had been disorder and silence. Jochna, who was becoming increasingly pretty, had not been able to come to work for two days; there had been tension in her area and fear of violence. It was at such times that the sketchy unfencedness of their existence became palpable, that they must lead lives perpetually and nakedly open to duress. The Muslims had taken out a procession; at night, when usually an owl—Lakshmi’s ancient companion and carrier—hooted near the railway crossing, with a
tremulous sense of something about to happen, Jochna and her family and other Hindus in the basti had been moved to a nearby Christian school, while the furious Muslims apparently congregated and went about shouting and protesting. So Jochna did not come to work for two days. Ordinarily this would have irritated Khuku, but this time the atmosphere, distant but palpable, of strife precluded any response, unfortunately, except sympathy.

N
ando had spent most of his life in Calcutta; he had started out when he was a young man as an assistant to a cook in a sweet-shop. He could not read a single word in any alphabet. In his own home, this small swaggering man would behave like a patriarch and a pest, something between a monarch and hapless vermin, and was considered a nuisance by his wife and even beaten by his son when he drank. He had a grandson, not much shorter than him, who was his only well-wisher; but being at home wrecked his health. Not long after she had taken him back, Khuku had heard him coughing, and saw him lying about like a sack on the carpet, utterly tired. Dr Mitra, who lived nearby, had come down to take a look at this fatigued specimen, and had advised that a test be done, for TB. Apparently it was still widespread in the bastis and areas these people lived in. ‘The only difference is that it’s
as curable as toothache today,’ said Dr Mitra. When Khuku had had his sputum tested, the bacillus had been found in it; but, as good as Dr Mitra’s word, he was cured now (that had happened two years ago).

H
alf in her sleep, Bhaskar’s mother had been seeing them going up, the collapsible gate opening, shutting, opening, shutting, the voices in Vidyasagar Road coming down the narrow passage way by the house, and then coalescing and coming up the stairs. She needed her sleep; or else she had migraines. From outside came the sound of the occasional bus or car passing down the road; long deafening horns. But nothing frightened the crows.

The boys went straight up to the second storey, and there began their rehearsals. Bhaskar’s mother could hear their voices, far away; she was half dreaming and half listening. Upstairs, they were practising their lines between the bed and cupboards and dressing-table; from time to time, one or two of them wandering to look out at the street and the houses on the opposite side. ‘Whose house is that, Bhaskarda?’ asked Dipen, clutching a mullion and pushing
aside a fragment of a curtain and pointing to the house that the window looked out upon. ‘That’s the advocate’s house,’ said Bhaskar. ‘The advocate died when I was ten, but we still call it the advocate’s house.’ ‘Bhaskarda! Tell Deepu to shut up so that I can say my lines!’ said Dhruba, standing in front of the bed. His ‘lines’ were really an inarticulate roar. A man called Mahesh in a rather dirty dhoti was sitting on the floor with a dholak on his lap; he’d brought it to beat out a rhythm during the chants. But the sounds they made were always being overpowered by the single-minded, protracted hooting of state transport buses. ‘We can use my house for rehearsals,’ Bhaskar had offered generously; and this explained their presence here.

‘OK, let’s repeat the lines!’

‘Dhiren, stand in place!’

‘Allah-hu-akbar!’

‘Allah-hu-akbar!’

And then:

‘Let’s have a tea break . . .’

They tried their best to simulate the feeling of performing on the streets, and the atmosphere of the street-play they were preparing for, which was two weeks away. They went over their rudimentary but voluble roles with enthusiasm. They loved the freedom and heat of performing on the streets, of being uncircumscribed by the proscenium, the proximity and palpability of the houses
that bordered their performance, their gestures spilling over onto the pulse of the ragged audience, the nearness of the street-sky; and they loved the exaggerated sketchiness of their own rehearsals, the lines never wholly or faithfully committed to memory.

‘Haridasi!’ sighed Bhaskar’s mother downstairs, still lying in bed. ‘Haridasi!’ When the girl had finally appeared, she said, her voice a decibel lower and deeper after her nap, ‘Take them tea upstairs.’ As Haridasi was turning to go, she said, ‘And listen! Give them some biscuits—those biscuits we bought a few days ago.’

S
ometimes when Bhaskar’s mother heard them rehearsing she thought about Bhaskar worrying for the poor people in the world and she thought just how difficult a place to live in and understand the world was. Look after your own, was her own view.

And she was filled with an apprehension that couldn’t be put in words when she heard their voices.

Yet he wasn’t going to listen; he must give five hundred rupees of the two thousand he earned to the Party.

Unlike her husband, she had a sharp business sense; but her energies must be devoted to the housekeeping accounts. These she kept with great meticulousness, and zeal, little figures and computations inside a note-book. Meanwhile, it was left to her husband and now her son to preside over the business.

She thought, at times, of the family house in
Shyambazar. During her childhood she had not known what it meant to live anywhere but in a great mansion with many rooms, so prosperous that she had not had any idea of penury.

She had left the house when she’d been eighteen, after getting married, though she kept going back to it for this or that festival. But after her father died she didn’t feel the urge to visit it as frequently as she had before; it was as if her ties had been loosened a little; even her ties to the world had been loosened slightly, and, although her ambitions and concerns for her children were still in place, it was almost as if she’d let go.