Freedom Song Read online

  Bhaskar’s father-in-law began to visit late in the morning.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Bhaskar’s mother would say from the veranda when he rang the bell. She would feel strangely embarrassed, as if she wanted to keep something hidden from him. During the wedding, under the artificial canopy, the world shut out, she’d had trouble recognizing him; there they were, like two actors from separate plays, having met in a strange place, hot now at the end of it, he poised, she uncomfortable and glowing with the heat. Twice since the wedding she had seen him in dreams, in the first one arriving at their house bearing gifts and in the second inexplicably displeased about something. Ever since then her vision of him had been oddly prejudiced, as if she, to her discomfort, knew something about him that no one else did.

  Sandhya would race down the stairs barefoot from the second storey.

  ‘It’s terrible out there,’ he would say, coming up.

  Bhaskar’s mother did not quite know how to take him. And she was wearing a green sari which she wore when doing housework.

  He didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘It is easy to see,’ he would say, ‘that this is a house which a lady takes pleasure in keeping tidy.’

  From his second visit onward he would go straight up to the second storey; there he would sit talking with his daughter for an hour. On his way out he would shout a farewell to Bhaskar’s mother.

  He would come at all times of the day, but mainly in the morning.

  What do they talk about? she would think.

  ‘Are those your parents, ma?’ asked Sandhya. There were two pictures on the wall on this side of the room, one of Bhaskar’s mother’s father, another of her mother. Like them, she too, the new bride, did not feel that she as yet fully existed in this house. They considered this world from the hereafter with a certain immediacy; they both had daubs of vermilion on their foreheads that looked like they still hadn’t quite dried. Outside, a summer that distributed, unequally, shadows and heat had settled down on Vidyasagar Road.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bhaskar’s mother. ‘And those are baba’s mother and father.’

  A smell of cooking drifted up stealthily from downstairs. And she, the newly married one, turned her eyes towards a large framed black and white photograph of an old woman in a white sari, sitting on what looked like a chair, and another of Bhola’s father wearing a moustache. The tops of the frames had become brown with a kind of fine powder as if they hadn’t been dusted for weeks. These photographs had been hanging there for almost twenty years now; and now their eyes gazed upon this couple each morning. She—the grandmother—had come to Bhola’s father as his second wife, after the death of his first one, sixteen years old at the time of marriage and only thirty-two when her husband died. Only her children remembered now that she had had a gift for mathematics and had won a gold medal at school, but had forfeited her studies after marriage, much to the disappointment of her schoolteacher, an Englishwoman, a disappointment that the sixteen-year-old herself couldn’t understand. Along the wall, all the parents were joined together in eternal life, and a peripatetic gecko was known to live behind these portraits, curved, alone, arbitrarily moving from one frame to another. And Bhola’s father was a mystery; no one in this house had set eyes upon him because he had died a few months before Bhola’s birth. In that death lay the key to this family’s early misery, and their subsequent search for order and balance.

  And now they said he had been a King’s Commission Engineer, one of the ‘heaven-born’. But, after he died, the family had been left with nothing; and later he had become this portrait in this house on Vidyasagar Road gifted to Bhola by his father-in-law, now confronted by Sandhya. Something of his aptitude and perhaps the romance of engineering had been inherited by the family, shaping and influencing lives that were generations removed from him; generations to come that had never known him; for Borda’s younger son was an engineer; Bhola had tried to cast himself in his father’s mould and become a civil engineer, and created Goodforce Literod Ltd.; even Manik was studying engineering in Germany. In this way the grandfather that no one knew had lived on in his children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

  Summer was everywhere. Meanwhile, Sandhya began to embroider a piece of cloth and make a doll’s dress inside her room. She was always making things; now a bangled hand pushed a thread through a needle. One shoulder leaning on an elbow, her sari’s aanchal falling abstractedly from her back, she pursued her handiwork.

  Bhaskar was still something of an enigma in her life; she hardly knew him at all; and he reappeared in the evenings after his long journey from Howrah, tired. Then he would wash his face and feet beneath the tap in the small bathroom and there would be a far-away rush of running water. Emerging, he would quickly survey his reflection hovering darkly in the bedside mirror. One evening, lying on the bed in the glare of the electric light, he asked her:

  ‘What’s this?’

  For he had picked up the small shiny blue dress that had been left inadvertently next to a pillow. It was as if some tiny, subtle spirit that had perhaps visited this room had divested herself of her clothing before disappearing.

  ‘Oh, that . . . that’s something I made over the last two days when I had nothing else to do,’ she said, raising her face briefly.

  He lifted it nakedly up to the light.

  ‘It’s a little small for you,’ he said, indifferent.

  She knew very little about the company, too little; nothing but seeing Bhaskar become each morning a person who wore pleated trousers and a shirt and shoes before disappearing to a factory that made cranes. ‘Take me to it one day,’ she said without meaning it.

  And he knew nothing about her. In marrying each other they had in effect embraced the unknown and the inconsequential. To look at, she might have been anyone; sometimes he would notice how her shoulders looked tenderly hunched and rounded when she was sitting down; the next day he checked to see if it was still true, as if reality could not be relied upon not to change at short intervals; during this time everything he saw in her he saw with a child’s guilty and inquisitive eye.

  But she and her husband hardly had any time together. They met in the morning at the dining-table as acquaintances would, the reverberations of night-time already having faded and left them almost more distant from each other. Bhaskar did not look at her in the presence of others; he as good as pretended she wasn’t there; and then he was gone for most of the day. The first days of their marriage was a time of trust in the unproven and of unspoken longing.

  Having grown up elsewhere, she had no friends in Calcutta. A few relatives lived on the outskirts of Calcutta, and others even further away. Now and then her brother appeared, dark and bespectacled and much like her to look at, and then disappeared again. And for the first month and a half of their marriage, Bhaskar took her quite for granted.

  At night their fingers and hands crept towards each other, in the greed for closeness, and for those sensations, only incompletely experienced so far, of something between pain and satisfaction, concealment, and happiness.

  Upstairs was where their new life began, beneath the photographs of late and ever-present grandparents. Where Bhaskar’s and Manik’s and Piyu’s childhood had begun and evolved and come to a conclusion, where they’d slept together on the bed in often anarchic and filial positions, played between and under the beds and bruised themselves, another existence began at last.

  She had become used to the lane which, at first, had kept her from sleep.

  Early in the morning, when it was not quite light, she sometimes sensed him going out; it was inexplicable; she sighed; and then once or twice she saw him return with a pile of newspapers, the Ganashakti. It was a paper she’d never read; but Bhaskar insisted to her, with what seemed to her an excessive and uncomfortable advocacy, that it contained all the real and important news and all that was really worth reading. She didn’t believe him; for Ganashakti was a paper that no one she knew read; it was, as far as she knew, used to make
cartons and containers in the market; and its pages were swept away in lanes and alleys. These early morning excursions of his became indistinguishable to her sometimes from the intense dreams she had before waking.

  She kept herself to herself and still hadn’t quite made friends with the family. During her solitary explorations, she found old comic books, toys, beneath the staircase to the terrace. And she discovered near a doll with an arm missing and a Ludo board a set of tiny pots and pans—kitchen utensils. Though they were old now, they must have once been used by Piyu to cook make-believe meals for an imaginary husband and family, or probably just for the sake of imitating the motions of cooking. How possessive children are about their imaginary homes!—almost as proprietorial as they are when they grow up and have real ones. Sandhya found them when clearing away piles of other things that had been dumped beneath the stairs to the terrace (she was beginning to rearrange this floor which would be her household), their small but exact shapes lying overturned, but still intact.

  And then she put artificial flowers and leaves, imitations of tulips, roses, in two vases. She had loved these so much, almost as if they were alive—she had bought them from a small stall in Gariahat and carried them back crowded in her arms. They, however, turned out to be a less than perfect replica, the edge of the leaf frayed, with a few short strands of loose thread hanging from it.

  ‘Why don’t you get real flowers?’ asked Bhaskar one day.

  ‘If I have real flowers,’ said Sandhya, ‘they’ll die in a couple of days—and then who’ll give me the money to buy new ones: you?’

  ‘But these will get dirty in a week,’ he said.

  ‘They won’t,’ said Sandhya, aware of some protective magic which would keep the dust from getting to the flowers; and with such conviction did she say it that for a moment Bhaskar was convinced as well. Thus the perennially blooming flowers, cheap, bright, immortal blossoms, remained.

  They had still not been on their ‘honeymoon’; and the crows made an unbroken, troubled din outside and hopped about relentlessly. But they’d put all the cheques they’d got as wedding presents into a bank account; part of it they’d use for their trip. And as they spoke, weighing the size of their budget against their expected expenditure, India, in their imaginations, became a series of small hotels, connecting routes, different climates existing at once, peculiarities of cuisine.

  She’d always wanted to go to Kashmir. And yet that paradise had been poisoned. How wonderful it was to wander through India with your parents as a child (she blurredly remembered travelling to strange places—this was such a large country—when her mother was alive; there was no death then, nor destiny), then to forget most of it, except a stomach upset that had made you sick or a sari being bought by your mother in a shop or the paleness of a white hotel façade, and then have a sense of it come back to you many years later as you prepared to make the journey with another person, almost a stranger.

  For a few days, they—Bhaskar’s relatives—had been waiting to see if Bhaskar, upon getting married, would gradually relinquish his commitment to the Party and take up a more respectable form of existence. The Party was spoken of as an illicit but persistent liaison.

  ‘But I don’t think Sandhya will allow him to continue for long.’

  Someone else said: ‘She’s a hard-headed sensible girl after all.’

  ‘Let us see.’

  They waited. But married life and its responsibilities seemed to leave Bhaskar unchanged. He was still selling Ganashakti; and, even now, he would, vociferously if necessary, and for as long as he could, marshalling an array of facts and arguments, criticize the new and sinister global order, the present government that was governing shamelessly from the centre, illegal bargains between nations and business houses, and every relative, cousin, or uncle who happened to disagree with him.

  CRPF soldiers; three months ago, and before then, they’d appeared when the roads were silent, waiting for riots to break out in the city though they eventually hadn’t. Sleepy-eyed, waving at the children. As if they were passing through, a peacekeeping force on their way elsewhere.

  And yesterday, going through Ballygunge and Park Circus, a truckload that not everyone noticed. These sleepy, sometimes smiling men. Although they were so still now, they could be cruel. Waiting patiently in the traffic jam like the others, their job probably long done . . .

  They—Bhaskar and the wife he hardly knew—made preparations for the journey, preparations to be absent from the house for five days. From responsibilities and business partners, parents and parents-in-law, the meetings in the evening, they decided to take a train to Siliguri, and from there a bus to Darjeeling. People had taken the route many times before and many had it by heart; it was like a well-known line of poetry.

  They passed roads that had been made by the British, connecting Bengal to the rest of the country, and which were still more or less unchanged, passing the dirty ponds and warm villages of Bengal, hungry children and women with their heads lowered, bulls sunning themselves; INDIA IS GREAT said the message that disappeared between two places; Bhaskar saw these things as a husband and a holiday-maker rather than one who’d become involved in the struggle; they were accompanied in the train by a Bengali family, by old women, and children with colds; they had with them two suitcases, a flask, and a tiffin carrier.

  Street-theatre, old forlorn papers: rummaging upstairs for something else, Bhaskar’s mother discovered, grown damp with moisture, photocopied manuscripts among a heap of discarded desiderata and wondered what they were.

  ‘When he’s back,’ she said when two days had passed, ‘I want him to see the doctor again.’

  ‘Why? Does he still have that backache?’ asked Bhola.

  ‘I think so. It’s the way he bends at times. He does it slowly and hesitantly, as if it’s a luxury.’

  And Khuku lay on her bed in the afternoon. Although her eyes were closed, she was wide awake, she could hear Nando quarrelling, and she wondered if it was good for Shib to be in that office in this heat at this age: she didn’t like it. Outside, in the blank heat, the sun pulsed like a star that could not be seen.

  Oh, men must work; nothing else makes them as happy. But she lay there, cross, unable to sleep.

  There was movement in the clouds outside, and lightning; it stirred the air. Shib came back to her as he used to be when he was a boy, when he visited their home so often that she was hardly aware of him, but unaware of him in a different way from her unawareness of him now; a different way of taking someone’s presence for granted. How like a ghost that boy was, both in his paleness and in the strangeness his memory had assumed. He was her brother Pulu’s best friend, a boy whose quietness was deceptive because he noticed more than he appeared to. He was wavy-haired, as he was now, and used to be unusually fair-skinned, more so then than he was at present. He had no mother; she had died when he was two years old, and he’d never had any memory of her. He used to be shy when he came to their house, and her own mother had a special fondness for him because he was motherless and an only child. Thus there was that lost quality about him, even though he belonged to one of the most well-to-do families in the town.

  Unanswerable, obsolete questions glimmered in the flashes of lightning. What would have happened to Khuku if Shib had not married her? After school, Khuku’s family had stopped her college education because they said they could not afford it; it was probably true. ‘But Khuku was never interested in schoolwork anyway,’ her brother said in explanation. She had cried for a week, for herself and in forgiveness. A vacancy opened up before her as one kind of life receded from her permanently, the world of exams and preparations and the panic of examination day, now only to be known in other people’s lives. Then she had stayed at home and practised on the harmonium. She had read new novels, and entered into an imaginary world. Characters in stories became as real to her as people; like Khenti who loved pui leaves, and tender-hearted Goshtho didi in Mahasthabir Jatak. Years passed. She read; she w
aited; she waited silently for some change. She knew, instinctively, she wouldn’t end in the place she’d begun in. They grew up—brothers, sisters, friends; Khuku, Bhola, Shib, Mini, not knowing where they would live, what their children would look like, who their spouses would be, in what way their lives would be different from each other’s, or what incarnation the world would take fifty years from now. At the beginning, they’d moved blindly from birth into the unknown, from darkness into the world; the passage into life, as the one through it, is a journey, and they, unlike the ones who had died in mid-life or as children, had been deemed to complete it, to live out their days in the world.

  She hadn’t even realized that Shib thought of her in a particular way. (Shib said that it was her singing that had decided him; and this alarmed her: what if she had not been able to sing?) But Khuku’s elder sister, that stern woman and tender romantic, would always say later, ‘I knew it. When Khuku pinched Shib once, and I saw Shib blush, I knew it.’ Khuku herself had had no idea. When he first proposed to her, in a roundabout way, through her mother, she refused without hesitation. ‘But I don’t think of him in that way!’ she said. ‘He’s more like a brother to me . . .’ Her mother had said, ‘Think again. You won’t find another like him.’ But Khuku hesitated; she was certain she was in love with someone else. How intense and chastening these emotions seemed now! On and on one goes, gradually to become a stranger to oneself, but never completely, and never knowing what it is that pushes us in one direction and not another . . . And how deeply they believed in romantic love in those days: it was all those long novels. She procrastinated; she neither said no nor yes. Then one day, after she had finished singing a song, she saw a kindness on Shib’s face she had not noticed before; it had always been there, but she had not seen it; it was as if she’d suddenly recognized who he was. Soon after they were engaged, and Shib went to England; and, after six years, she followed him there. It was a few years after Independence; Shib’s father had died; he knew he would never return home. Their marriage was thus a marriage of childhood acquaintances, of two people who had known each other when they had hardly mattered to one another and who had grown one day into their shared life without hardly being aware of it; only slightly embarrassed when that awareness came. And their new life, under some nameless star, began with each other.