Freedom Song Read online

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  His mother put this question to him a few days later, deliberately absent-minded, as if she were questioning the air. A mongrel’s bark followed the silence.

  She had this evasive way of putting things. Bhaskar knew the question did not need to be answered; that it was a way of postponing what was to and must happen.

  ‘Um,’ he said.

  Sometimes, when she and Piyu stood together, they, though unconscious of the fact, almost looked as if they came from different families. Piyu was fair; her eyes and forehead were larger than her mother’s; but her mother’s nose was thinner, sharper, like something she had kept to herself—Piyu’s ended in a sort of pleasant, slightly extroverted roundness; light and shade, the future and past, a family’s destiny and its inescapable inevitabilities and individualities played around their features, as fate often lights up the moment of a photograph. Manik’s face was dominated by his father’s, not so much by his features as by the vestiges of his personality. Only with Bhaskar, of whom she was now asking this question, was there a noticeable, fragile similarity of appearance.

  Winter was about to end now. The trees were in leaf. The winter had made it seem possible that loud choruses and a few clenched fists raised together in the air would delay, perhaps even permanently remove, the prospect of liberalization; would punish the fundamentalists. But as time passed, distractions arose; as February approached March members of the band of players began to drift apart; one person had passed his medical entrance examination; another had got a job; the more serious of the members got more involved in professional theatre and joined professional theatre troupes; the small band broke up.

  Now, instructions were issued at the local unit of the Party that cadres must get down to other business: assessing the needs of the locality; assessing its problems; preparing slowly for the next local elections. Whenever Bhaskar thought he would go for a rehearsal he was pressed by some senior cadre to attend a more pressing matter at hand. The streets that used to see the erratic and unexpected outbreak of street-plays were temporarily quieter and bereft of their message, at least as far as one group was concerned. There was also a contradictory rumour in circulation these days that the ‘higher-ups’ in the Party had, in secret conferences, been forced to reconsider their attitude to liberalization and that at the source of this change was the highest authority himself; reluctantly they began thinking about China on the one hand and Russia on the other.

  And the large damp white quilt that had been taken out from a cupboard in the second storey in Vidyasagar Road every November was now, as it grew warmer, folded and laid to rest on the shelf it stayed on in darkness for the rest of the year.

  When Mini returned home in the afternoon she found Shantidi in bed in a somewhat odd position, while Anjali the maidservant was sitting and fanning her, shaking her head. As she had come to the staircase she had encountered the familiar damp silence, almost a presence, unkindled by sunlight, but as she had climbed she had sensed subtle signs of disorder she could not quite identify.

  ‘She fell down the stairs, mashima,’ she said. ‘I had to help her upstairs.’

  ‘But how did you fall?’ asked Mini.

  Shantidi had slipped two months ago when getting down from a rickshaw in a lane near Chitpur Road but hadn’t seriously hurt herself.

  ‘There was something on the stairs,’ muttered Shantidi. ‘I think it was water . . .’ Later, she fell asleep.

  I knew this would happen, thought Mini.

  Mini thought of the dark stairs and of Shantidi always hurrying, hurrying, towards an unspecified destination.

  Next day the pain remained; she woke up with it, found it difficult to move. The pain, just above the thigh and below the hip, distracted Shantidi, but the drama of the situation appeared to amuse her. The drama almost anaesthetized the pain. But soon she grew impatient with her circumscribed condition and struggled briefly with herself, with undescribable movements, because she wanted to resume the daily routine with which she occupied herself, but whose nature very little was really known about. Mini propped her up on the bed and gave her a cup of tea and a Marie biscuit which she dipped cautiously in the tea for it to become soft and red.

  It was the flat really, or perhaps just her nature: she could not stand being in one place for too long.

  Later, Dr Chakrabarty came and said it could quite possibly be a fracture and that an X-ray would have to be taken.

  ‘Will I have to go to hospital?’ said Shantidi. She was like a child about to be shown a new place.

  ‘I think so,’ said Dr Chakrabarty. ‘Is there no one to help?’

  Two sweepers were hired, to their reluctance, from the building (but made more eager by a promise of twenty rupees), to put Shantidi into a chair and then carry her downstairs into a taxi. The two men in khaki shorts proceeded delicately, their knees trembling with the strain, while Shantidi gripped the chair with both hands; and Mini waited to take out twenty rupees from her purse.

  That month was spent in journeys to an X-ray clinic, a small hospital with a garden not far away, and in bed rest in the house. Shantidi had taken the chaos almost jubilantly; then, as naturally and inevitably as a seasonal moon passing into a different phase, but unnoticed, she slipped into a deep depression. Mini did not sense it; all her life, Shantidi had been excitable, easily irritable, but intrinsically detached from the frustrations of existence.

  She’d retired fifteen years ago for, it appeared to Mini, no good reason. While Mini went to school, Shantidi travelled around most of Calcutta and did not restrict herself to the North. She would turn up at the most unexpected time of the day at people’s houses. She’d sat in buses and looked at the workers on Central Avenue and Chowringhee; she’d dozed in traffic jams. Sometimes it was because she had an impulse to see someone; sometimes some child had passed an exam. This was what her early seventies had been like, a simple time of unimpeded, almost incorporeal, mobility.

  One day, she said to Mini:

  ‘You’re going through a lot of trouble because of my accident.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Mini, keeping her exercise books on the table. ‘I’m going through a lot of trouble!’

  Then, another day, she said:

  ‘Who’s going to look after us, Mini?’

  Mini sighed. ‘Who’s looked after us so far?’ she said. ‘If you look at the way some other people . . .’

  ‘But things don’t always stay . . .’

  ‘What is it you’re trying to say?’ said Mini. ‘If we have problems,’ she said very practically, ‘we’ll have to see about them when they come.’

  She stayed in school till the afternoon.

  ‘It must be very hot outside,’ said Shantidi, ten minutes after Mini had come back. For the door to the small balcony had been shut to protect the room from the heat.

  ‘It is hot,’ agreed Mini.

  ‘You must be working very hard, Mini,’ said Shantidi. ‘Especially after I fell.’

  ‘What nonsense!’

  Sometimes Mini would come back from standing in a queue at the bank, or from the market, and find Shantidi staring, as if she had quite forgotten the numberless tiny routines that made up each day and each week, and as if the world had ceased to exist outside the parameters of her home. Mini counted silently the years since her elder sister had retired, and then how many years it had been since she’d had that liver problem—three—but could come up with no solution. A few days later Shantidi observed, ‘I’ve become a burden on you, Mini.’ ‘In what way?’ Shantidi looked at Mini reproachfully, as if she’d been deceived. ‘Because I do nothing. And now I’ve been laid up in bed,’ she said. ‘You have to work for both of us, and you’re not even well. It would be easier for you, I think, without me,’ she said.

  Within the flat the heat was bearable. Sometimes a breeze entered the room, but intermittently, because of the block of flats opposite; that building was an obstruction. Yet the walls were c
ool; it was a flat that became damp during the monsoons.

  The bombs exploded in Bombay.

  The day after the explosions no one wanted to go out but found themselves at work anyway, the usual noises surrounding them.

  Mini phoned Khuku.

  ‘Mini?’ said Khuku. ‘You’ve come to school?’

  ‘What was I to do? I felt I had nothing to do at home.’ She began to laugh, then.

  ‘Nothing to do at home!’ said Khuku. ‘Here was a chance for you to take a day off.’

  She herself was planning to leave shortly for the market with two hundred rupees in her purse. There was a pleasurable and wholly fictitious feeling of doom around this simple expedition; it touched everything about her life at the moment.

  ‘Let’s see what they do!’ she said. ‘They won’t be able to harm me,’ as if she were speaking of a gang of half-wit miscreants to whom it would soon be proved that she was unassailable.

  She said then, conspiratorially:

  ‘Suleiman came yesterday . . . He looked quite pleased.’

  This mood lasted all day.

  There, near Mini’s house, near the sweetshop with its heavy smell and the decrepit landlords’ houses, birds rose almost peacefully into the air.

  Thus they would rise habitually from this most ancient part of Calcutta, shriek, and then return a few moments later to balconies and cornices.

  In the South, a rather mournful-looking red flag went up by an excavated ditch in the middle of the road. There was no breeze these days, except the slightest one, which caused the flag to flutter.

  Towards the end of March, Bhaskar went to see a girl who lived in Jodhpur Park. This meeting was reported to Khuku by Puti, her niece.

  ‘She sings, mashi,’ came Puti’s voice on the ear-piece. ‘So of course Bhola mama asked her to sing. Then he sang a couple of songs himself.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ Puti’s laughter filled the space of the ear-piece momentarily. ‘But you know Bhola mama, mashi.’

  Apparently they had liked the family—it was strange how all the families had been likeable; this particular father occupied a respectable position in a fairly well-known company; and the daughter, ‘although no beauty’, had ‘personality’.

  ‘Is she not good-looking?’ asked Khuku.

  ‘Mm.’ She thought for an instant. ‘They said she has sharp features—a little too sharp, said Abha mami. She’s neither dark nor fair.’

  ‘What does Bhaskar think?’

  ‘Bhaskar wants to marry her,’ said Puti. ‘He liked her very much.’

  ‘But I thought he was going to marry the other girl—the one whose mother died of cancer?’

  Puti lowered her voice thoughtfully.

  ‘I think Bhaskar likes whoever he meets,’ she said. ‘Now the first girl is too quiet for him. This one is more talkative.’

  Three days after the meeting, the father rang up Bhola: ‘Mr Biswas, she’s our only daughter; our only child I mean. And to tell you the truth, it’s my wife who’s a little unsure . . .’ The wife, who’d been so welcoming, so enthusiastic! And was the telephone the right place to vent these misgivings? ‘No, I can see why, Mr Lahiri,’ said Bhola. He had half expected it. ‘But,’ said Mr Lahiri, ‘if it’s not a serious thing—his commitments, I mean—because we liked the boy very much . . .’ But Bhola could give the gentleman no such assurance. ‘Mr Lahiri,’ he said, suddenly moved, ‘my son is concerned about things affecting each one of us today . . . But I can say that his political ideals don’t affect his work or his family life.’ ‘I quite understand,’ said Mr Lahiri.

  A decision just had to be made; would Bhaskar marry, or would he wait? He’d come to set his heart in secret on the last girl, but that now seemed out of the question and the desire almost faded. He had waited; he had waited for a reply that did not come. Then he thought impulsively, ‘I must not prolong indefinitely what is after all a wearisome business.’ Yet he couldn’t bring himself to utter the final syllable. The second girl was what remained; he couldn’t recall her face for the moment; but did that matter? ‘Say yes,’ he said in his own darkness, addressing himself, ‘we cannot control our own fate.’

  After a few days, Bhaskar agreed to marry the second girl he’d met.

  So it was that the match was decided with hardly any of the other relatives knowing about it; they went, ignorant and happy, about their own ways; and even Puti who had a way of hearing about things long before others did remained ignorant. The others who would have heard were kept from this news for about a week; of this union between Vidyasagar Road and a lane off Lansdowne Road.

  The girl was two years younger than her son; she’s dark, but so am I, thought Bhaskar’s mother.

  And it’ll do him good, she thought, to have some responsibility on his shoulders at last; for I think he still depends too much on his father. His father’s growing old; it had hardly occurred to them, because time seems not to affect the people one is closest to; they have a living but transcendental existence in those who love them. He needs to grow up; he’s still such a boy; and she thought of him tenderly, in her mind’s eye, with a Ganashakti in one hand. They all had dreams, but Bhaskar’s mother’s was practical rather than grandiose; for she hoped, no, she believed, rather calculatingly, that the marriage would divide Bhaskar’s energies and weaken his attachment to politics; while Bhaskar’s dreams, they were another matter, they were the nation’s dreams, or so he believed . . .

  There was a plan in her mind, quite cunning, and probably all the more effective because she wasn’t entirely conscious of it. She had expected, in truth, it would be a year, even more, before Bhaskar found a girl. But it had happened uncommonly quickly, as if fate itself had decided it should be so and that the problem should be dispensed with. She herself—Bhaskar’s mother—remembered when she’d seen her husband’s photograph for the first time when she was eighteen and hadn’t liked him particularly because he was balding.

  And thus it happened that the date for the marriage was fixed after Bhola said yes to Dr Ghosh. The parents acted with undue haste, wanting to get it over with as soon as possible, before the two concerned had had a chance to change their minds. And the summer had only just begun to get unpleasantly hot.

  The venue for the reception had now to be fixed; they gravely consulted the calendar with Goodforce Literod printed on it; and they decided it would be convenient to have it in a house located five minutes away, across the main road and the tramlines, which had been renting out its ground floor for weddings ever since they could remember. Of course it was a house like any other, but noticeably at certain times of the year it was transformed and almost made unrecognizable by lights. Then, later, it returned to being just another house, but never completely lost its aura of being a house where weddings were held. Even dates in the summer for this house were in demand, for people were always getting married whenever there was an auspicious day in the almanac; thus the 17th was already booked, so was the 21st, and so was the 3rd, leaving only the 12th.

  They began writing names on envelopes, names of people who lived in other parts of Calcutta, and in Pennsylvania and California and England, people who wouldn’t be able to come to the wedding, and might have even forgotten what Bhaskar looked like; all their names were written in the heat, and the cards put inside the envelopes.

  ‘You haven’t called Minidi and Shantidi yet,’ said Bhaskar’s mother.

  Bhola looked up.

  ‘I will of course,’ he said, and admitted to himself that he’d forgotten. How could one possibly remember everyone? And this was a time that memory played tricks with you.

  Since moving to Calcutta, they had seen each other every year except this one. For Mini and Shantidi used to come religiously by bus once or twice a year to Bhola’s house with a pot of sweets from the North in their hands, their exultation far exceeding the occasion; and this was before the roads became bad and when they themselves were untroubled physically; before their broth
er had moved and they became overwhelmed by the weight and pressure of their sheer everyday existence. On those visits, they had seen Bhola struggle with his business; seen Bhaskar growing up and Piyu cram for her exams; seen Bhola’s mother as an old and absent woman, and then heard of her death; seen Manik go abroad; been present, in other words, in the semi-lit, casual backstage and dress rehearsals, the unconscious, helpless putting on and putting off of different selves and incarnations, of their lives.

  It was afternoon. And in a small lane, in front of a pavement, with the movement of a wrist, something like a curve began to appear, it was not clear what pattern was forming, then the letter D appeared upon the wall of a two-storey house, in black paint, and then U, and N, until DUNKEL had been formed, in the English language, which seemed to blazon itself for its curious purpose; then it began again, and I and M and F began to appear in another corner. Afternoon; no one saw them; it was too hot; on the main road cars went past, up and down; a few people rested; they had eaten; beggars dozed, blind to the heat and shadows, their heads bent to their stomachs. Others on the pavement on the main road, who lived near shop windows or facing tramlines, were still finishing their meals on their plates. Now a picture was forming that would multiply, like an ornate decoration, in different parts of the city, a decoration mirrored, yet seen by almost no one, glanced at perhaps as other thoughts occupied one’s head, background to people waiting for buses; yet it told a story. GATT had been ratified of course; the whole matter had been done with and it had left a wound; yet they went on with these slogans as if they knew something might still come of it. Gradually, on the perfectly good whitewashed wall, there appeared a tiger with the finance minister’s turbaned head, a man in coat-tails, a hat that had stars and stripes drawn on it, with a hoop in one hand. The minister, who was, after all, three-quarters tiger, seemed to be polite and full of pleasant intentions but compromised by some invisible fact; he hesitated a moment before he leapt. All else, the figures in the background, the man in the coat-tails, waited; the music had stopped. Only a crow, unseeing, inadvertent, unmindful of human beings, hopped on the pavement again and again, as the spectacle, frozen, unfolded; it appeared to be both searching for, and avoiding, something. Silence echoed all around; even the crow neglected to caw; what would the next action be? Again and again the human-headed tiger seemed to be about to jump but did not. Nikhil, standing and watching, wanted a cup of tea.