Freedom Song Page 10

  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.

  As she approached the corner of the small lane, she passed the sweet shop in which business would swell noticeably in the afternoon, before four o’clock, before tea-time, when the daily cargo of sweets and savouries came in. And then their vivid smell would overwhelm the other smells in the immediate proximity of the shop.

  Beena had gone to see the play being en
acted; Khuku couldn’t go. That evening, it was suddenly done. With the performance of the street-play over, however it might have been tangential or in the background, and the set dismantled, the larger family shattered and became, temporarily, little islands, each with its own memories and pastimes. All that joined them tenuously in their different places were the rumours of something like war. They read the headlines each day, in newspapers that were already old when they’d finished reading them, of a country that had turned upon itself, without really being able to take them in: ‘Where hate comes in a communal garb’; then the smaller headings: ‘Seven killed in violence’; or the same sentence, with eight substituting for seven. Was it really as bad as that? There were these small eruptions and they would hear of them and feel an almost unseemly thrill. There would be a photograph sometimes, of people sitting in a railway station, under a roof like an immense tent with their children and possessions, a child half asleep, looking like the nomads of old, suddenly uprooted, without an address, waiting to depart from the city.

  Sleepy-eyed sometimes, sometimes wide awake, they, especially Khuku, would spend the morning reading. They did not know what the appropriate reaction should be: shock; a certain sense of being vindicated; or a lingering sense of unpleasantness. At times Khuku would surprise herself by thinking of Mini and wonder how she was.

  Here, a Muslim butcher had been found near the bypass with his skull shattered, blood on his forehead and face. No one knew why he had been killed; there had been a quarrel, a group of people. There was silence while the police looked into it. The man’s face appeared in a photograph, dead, his eyes closed and lips parted, part of his eye and cheekbone obscured by blood.

  He seemed to sleep uncomfortably, his lips parted and eyes closed.

  But there were always minor surprises. In the personal column, under Death, next to Choudhuri, Mrinalini, was: Passed away peacefully on 19th January, at the age of 77, mourned by two daughters, Priya and Tuktuk, son, Bimal, and daughter-in-law, Soumya, as well as grandchildren Joy and Sharmistha. Ceremony on Tuesday 22nd. All welcome.

  Khuku hadn’t noticed this; but Shib saw it. The little obituary, meaningless to almost everyone, a coded message to the few it would nudge towards recognition, signified a pause before the year set off confusedly again in a predetermined direction.

  ‘Mrinalini Choudhuri—that name sounds familiar,’ said Shib, ordinarily so bad with names.

  ‘Obviously it’s familiar,’ said Khuku, preoccupied but peremptory. ‘It’s Banidi, that’s who it is, Didi’s friend in college; oh, Banidi, don’t you remember!’ becoming impatient.

  Names; one name suggesting another. As the mist began to clear the shock sank in. Mrinalini Choudhuri was Banidi; she had come to their house last year with her younger daughter who was in her forties, saying to Khuku, as if it were a great joke, ‘Khuku! I haven’t seen you in years!’ No doubt a little pleased that she’d outlived her friend, she was still lovely like a long-living creeper that had coiled itself around the earth and thrown up in the evening a new blossom. And she spoke to Khuku, her friend’s younger sister, about ten years younger than her, as if she was a girl: ‘No, no, I won’t hear of it, let’s hear that song, Khuku.’ Inexplicably they’d lost touch for twenty years and thus there was that breathlessness on seeing each other again.

  ‘It must be Banidi; who else would it be? We used to think she was quite pretty when she was young, you know; dark, but pretty. Why do you ask?’

  ‘What will it be today, Didi?’ Suleiman asked, as he sat down to tune the tabla. Yet something about his manner always made her impatient.

  She decided to sing a love-song she had learnt as a child.

  The moon smiles without a hindrance,

  Light overflows.

  O flower, O tuberose,

  Pour forth the nectar of your fragrance.

  The nectar of your fragrance—the swooning perfume of an imaginary tuberose! But the song and its words had the innocence of an alphabet, learnt when only sound, and before meaning, had entered the consciousness. She no longer remembered who had taught her this song (the tabla rang, bell-like, as Suleiman struck it with his fingertips); it might have been one of her elder brothers, or a relative, or she might have picked it up from a record. Songs were common currency in the small towns, and in Sylhet they travelled from radios into the interiors of houses and they used to learn them by whatever means possible. Sometimes they would hear a visiting relative singing them in the bath and they had the gift, almost a desperate one, of remembering a tune from these audible snatches. Songs were meant to be stored and collected; people had a large or small ‘stock’ of songs.

  The blue sky’s forehead

  Is smeared with sandal,

  And the pair of swans that belong to the forest

  Of words have spread their wings.

  She sang these lines again, for she hadn’t got them quite right the first time. After their father’s death, their mother had sold the gramophone while she was selling other things that belonged to them. Later, whenever they wanted to listen to the gramophone, they would borrow it from Shib’s family, who were rich landowners who did not keep too close a track on their belongings, and they would keep it and a stack of records with them for days.

  It had been a strange, an impossible childhood. Their father dead, their mother trying to look after them all, and they—the three youngest ones, Pulu, Bhola, and Khuku—brought up, in effect, by the older sister, who had died last year, an older brother, who had died in Shillong two years ago, another older brother, who had died more than sixty years ago, when he was only thirty years old, of an incurable heart disease—three tyrants—and Borda.

  Khuku had longed to sing as a child; but it was Bhola who was always singing when they were children. So Khuku waited shyly in the background as a girl should. Their elder sister bought Bhola a harmonium, but Bhola was too impatient to sit and play it; and it was Khuku, not Bhola, who learnt how to play.

  It was an L-shaped house, whose inner and outer dark declivities were indelibly etched within her, to which they’d moved a year after their father had died, their mother taking charge of everything, and there she would often practise on the veranda. But she began practising seriously only when she was in Shillong, sometimes early in the morning, going into another room so as not to wake the others, and her brothers would tease her and call her ‘Bijonbala Ghosh Dastidar!’ after the famous classical singer. Yet she had an intent and determination that seemed to see far into the future.

  Almost no one had the privilege of listening to her these days except her husband and Suleiman or those who happened to be near, including Jochna and Nando. Not infrequently her old records were played on the radio, and that voice ringing as it used to be would fill the air.

  When she finished the song, she began another one immediately, almost impatiently. And all at once she noticed Suleiman before her.

  All of last month had been an embarrassment to him; as if he’d been transformed into a creature of peculiar and noticeable appearance. And it was as if he was surprised that he was still here, leading the same life he’d led before in Park Circus two months ago.

  As for Khuku, she was often in a state of irritation. Only recently she’d been woken up again by the azaan, and at first she had thought it was a mosquito humming near her ear. It grew louder, and then faded, and then grew louder again; its note swelled faintly and then diminished, just as when a mosquito hovers above one in indecision. Then she realized what it was. Where is it coming from? she wondered. It must be Park Circus, from one of those lanes above which the minarets rose. It reminded her that there were altogether too many Muslims around her. Sometimes, in the afternoon, the sound hovered in the middle air, and, if she were passing by in the car, she could sometimes hear two different voices at different pitches; as one came closer, they filled the air.

  ‘Is it necessary for all the world to hear it?’ she had asked later.

  Suleiman had explained himse
lf and his faith apologetically, the tablas balefully silent before him. ‘It is the word of God,’ he said, shamefaced and tender about this perpetual nuisance.

  See how stubborn they are, she thought; and just the other day they were quaking with fear.

  It was more than three weeks since that conversation had taken place.

  ‘Which song, Didi?’ he asked.

  She did not answer; not because she did not mean to, but because she was asking precisely the same question of herself, and thus had not heard him. She began a familiar song:

  Lost heart

  On a verdant road

  I gather strewn flowers

  By myself

  Park Circus; Shamsul Huda Haq Road. A pharmacy and a sweet shop at its entrance. Only a twenty minutes’ walk from Khuku’s house.

  During their festivals, sweets made of semolina were left in platters and distributed; they prayed here; marriages were made; they had their own butchers’ and tailors’ shops. They had their own school for the blind and their madrassas. Children and women in saris and in burkhas, maulvis and music teachers and private tutors and businessmen all mingling under storeys that were heaped one on top of the other.

  It was not many days after the performance and already a meeting was arranged between Bhola’s family and the Duttas. ‘The Duttas are a good family,’ said Bhaskar’s mother, though she did not know the Duttas. The Duttas had a daughter. When, at the end of the month, the meeting with the ‘girl’ and her parents was set to take place at an open-air café near Salt Lake, Bhaskar, oddly, seemed both indifferent and co-operative and full of nimble self-assurance.

  That very day, however, he’d said he’d have to go to a meeting. Bhaskar’s mother had met this observation with coolness. ‘Go, then. We’ll be able to make another arrangement.’ The café was new and appeared largely unfrequented and lit by large lanterns and set against a lake. Had it been designed in its flickering anonymity specifically with meetings such as this one in mind? Bhaskar wondered. The bypass leading to the airport ran next to it; and at this time the bypass was illuminated principally by headlights. Bhaskar’s mother, her sari drawn around her to protect herself from the breeze that blew towards them from the dark, asked for Gold Spot (because it was a fairly long time since she’d had a soft drink); so did Piyu; but Bhola and the girl’s parents said ‘Thums Up’ to the waiter. The darkness that surrounded them had in the morning been water and land and a fragment of sky. The drinks eventually came towards them on a tray and gravitated above the table. There were no other customers except a couple in the distance, who had no doubt come here for their own reasons, looked recently married, and kept glancing, whether with curiosity or displeasure it was difficult to tell, at the two families. Suddenly, taking Bhaskar aback, Bhola offered that Bhaskar and Anusuya, for whose sake this rendezvous had been arranged, sit at another table so that they could ‘talk amongst themselves’. Heavily Bhaskar got up; lightly Anusuya, though she was overweight, got up; and made for the neighbouring table, as if they would become invisible to the others once they sat there. Bhaskar had decided that he would not, could not marry this girl. She reminded him of a schoolfriend he used to have, a boy called Anilesh. But he was determined to be polite, as polite as he ever was; and he almost felt a surge of affection for her when she asked the waiter for ice-cream. Bhaskar sipped Thums Up non-committally from a straw. They must have grown up simultaneously, in schools not far from each other; and now they were both in the twilight world of being unmarried. They seemed resigned and happy to be enjoying their orders.