Freedom Song Read online

  Mr Seal of the department had been instrumental in employing Shib, indeed tempting him to employment. ‘We’ll see if it can be done, sir,’ he had said six months ago. He was referring to the task—not always mentioned—of reviving the company. ‘If anyone can, you can.’ He had wiped his forehead and Shib had sympathized with him inwardly. ‘If it can’t be done, we’ll let it go.’ ‘How can you just let it go?’ said Shib. ‘That is what I was coming to,’ said Mr Seal. ‘Because we don’t want to take a “negative attitude” at the outset.’

  However, after the meeting last week—if one could call that conversation in the warmth of a late January morning across a stack of files a meeting—it had begun to become clearer to Shib that Seal could not back up his words. Perhaps Seal was beholden to someone else; there was always someone invisible in the background who tied your hands down; at any rate, there was always someone to pass the buck on to; Mr Seal seemed reluctant now, and a commitment could be drawn out of him only with great persuasion. But he would not let Shib go; ‘Mr Purakayastha, be patient with us,’ he said; it was as if he were waiting for an intervention to set things right.

  For now what he had suspected all along became apparent to Shib, that there had been no change of heart, that the government would rather pay the salaries of the employees of Little’s until they ran out of spare money than allow the company to stand on its own feet, for which of course funds were necessary. And as for Seal and himself, they were divided by a common language; they spoke reasonably enough with each other, but seemingly without any intention of arriving at an understanding. It was the sort of dialogue he’d never taken part in in all his working life.

  Later, these meetings depressed him; left him a little tired. He waited outside the Writers’ Building for the longhaired driver to spot him and pick him up.

  In Little’s history, in fact, the history of Calcutta could be seen to have been written. First the company created by the Englishman of the same name eighty-five years ago; then the buying over of the company by an enterprising Bengali businessman of the name of Poddar; then the death of Poddar after Independence; quarrels and disputes between his sons; the company gradually going to seed; the take-over of the company by the state government in 1974; and what it was now, something that had a kind of life and breath, an existence, but not a real one.

  School had begun again, the first troubles were behind them, and, in addition to the faint moustache that had formed on Mohit’s upper lip and proclaimed his gradual farewell to childhood, the educational system had thrown further responsibility on his young shoulders, forcing him to study each day for the finals one and a half years away, giving him a seriousness beyond his years. After that, a brief respite, and then the upper matriculation, the Joint Entrance . . . Only ten days ago he’d been cycling from house to relative’s house in the morning. Now his eyes were a little red, because he’d been studying late into the night the past few days. All that had happened before—the end of the tests, the curfew, the troubles far away in Ayodhya, the visit to Bhaskar’s house—seemed vague and dreamlike, and the days now, taken up with work and preparation, seemed like a world of perpetual wakefulness.

  He was an only child; as was his cousin Sameer. That was neither an accident nor coincidence. Their parents had planned it this way. No more large untidy families like Bhola’s; they would devote all their attention to their one child.

  Khuku said to Mini: ‘I’ve never seen anyone who studies quite so hard as Mohit. He wakes up at five in the morning . . .’ She shuddered, because she’d hated studies at school; but Mini, being a schoolteacher, looked impressed.

  Puti would converse with Mohit as if he were a grown-up. And in some ways, he was—with his father away on tours he often substituted as the ‘man’ in the house. And yet he was shorter than he should be at his age, and was any day expected to shoot up.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Do I have to answer that? You know that next year is your “final” year.’

  The year of the ‘final’—it had been waiting for him, it seemed, like a mythical mountain, always there, but coming nearer and nearer; and now it was in sight.

  ‘And time will fly.’

  ‘I couldn’t study the way he does,’ said Khuku to Mini after a few moments. ‘That boy is ambitious and knows how to look after himself. Unlike that other idiot, Sameer . . .’

  Last year his grandmother—Khuku’s elder sister—had died. (That had been a few months after Bhaskar, to the bemusement of all, had joined the Party and even Mohit’s grandmother had heard and whispered her disbelief.) There had been a sleepless air at home as she had lapsed into a coma, then passed away, then been taken away to the crematorium. It had been something like it was now, with the exams coming up—the confusion of a proper sense of time, the feeling that someone familiar had suddenly gone away, the strange sense that the absence was temporary. It was still strange that his grandmother, who had hardly moved for the last two years of her life, should have left and never returned. Meanwhile, he swotted for his exams and his eyes hurt. A year ago, his mother’s eyes had become red with a brief but intense burst of weeping when his grandmother had died, but he had been unable to shed a tear.

  But now he was bargaining for something else, something of possible interest; his Bhaskarmama had asked him to come to a rehearsal, probably give them a hand; ‘We’re busy and we need some help,’ he’d said in a way that made Mohit feel an old tenderness towards him, ‘and we need to get a message across.’ And of course it was a message of great and pressing importance. This feeling of tenderness, which might turn into something more serious, even a commitment, was precisely what his mother wanted to preclude; moreover, there was no time now for anything but studies; secondly, there is no doubt that the young are impressionable at certain moments in their lives, although his mother had every confidence in her son’s essential, practicable level-headedness.

  Yet this city that Mohit had been born into seemed sometimes like a bad dream to Puti, with posters, and endless peeling political messages on the walls.

  He was still awkward with girls. But he would not be here long. Little did he know that two years from now he would be in America. Around him, the city decayed. This boyhood, of private tutorials, practising maths questions from past question papers, of being in the school quiz team (only the other day he’d represented his school, with three others, at Don Bosco), of playing football in the parking lot in the corner, of visiting Bhola dadu’s house and eating pithha, none of it would last long. It would give way to a brief adolescence and then he would be gone to America, where his uncle was. Before long he’d sit for his Scholastic Aptitude Test.

  Childhoods were terribly brief these days.

  Often, when Mini sat late in the afternoon on one corner of the sofa, and she shut her book and looked up, facing the veranda, she would see the sun setting in the right-hand corner. The sky glowed red, as if at the slow aftermath of a conflagration. These, the last days in Khuku’s house.

  Almost as if she were exploring a house she did not know very well, she got up and began to walk—she came out into the space of the dining-room, and went past the table.

  Khuku must be sleeping inside. Any moment she would be out here.

  The doctor at the nursing home (what was his name—Sarkar?—he wouldn’t be over thirty) had told her, without force, but not without a doctor-like gravity, she should begin to do some exercises immediately (‘Just once or twice a day, mashima,’ he’d said). It was a matter of how best to treat this leg, newly healing: it was almost as bewildered, tentative, and over-confident as a child, and she must give it rest but it must learn to walk again as well. She was going nowhere—just turning round the dining-table and returning to where she had started.

  The pain was gone; she noticed this. It was almost gone. She was lulled by a vortex of calm, the familiarity and spaciousness of Khuku’s flat. And yet this flat, full of pretty things and tinkling curios, was both a second home and a cave
of wonder to her, so unlike any other place in Calcutta, so that sometimes it seemed to her she’d suddenly woken up to it, to a brief sojourn, had been borne here in her sleep without being conscious of the journey.

  She continued walking, as the sun ebbed outside.

  Mini had suddenly come to Khuku’s mind last month, in December; like a sudden pressure on Khuku’s conscience; a few days, as it happened, after the troubles in Ayodhya. Mini had explained to her on the phone that she hadn’t been able to go to school for two days because of the pain from her arthritis.

  And she’d temporarily become preoccupied with the idea of bringing her to her house; till in a few days she succumbed to the pull that her friend was exerting on her unconsciously.

  ‘Let me bring Mini here,’ Khuku had said to Shib. ‘And then I can look for a doctor. I think the main problem is that she doesn’t get a moment’s rest and,’ she smiled slightly, ‘she’s really past retirement age despite what it says in her documents. She’s younger than her real age by five years in her documents.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Shib couldn’t remember what her real age was.

  ‘She told me herself, of course. It was done years ago. I think she’s forgotten herself that she’s older than she’s supposed to be.’

  ‘See if you can persuade her,’ he had replied at last. For he too was fond of Mini; he’d known her when she was a girl in a frock.

  Persuading Mini was never easy; it was like a gentle but strenuous tug of war.

  ‘No, Khuku.’

  ‘But I won’t hear of anything else.’

  For Khuku could be stubborn as well, and Mini discovered she had no answer to that stubbornness.

  That had been a particularly empty time. For the seven days of the curfew the country had been like a conch whose roar you could hear only if you put your ear to it.

  ‘Do you know that Sabita lives here in New Alipore?’ said Khuku, after they’d talked about her absent son for about twenty minutes. ‘I just spoke to her on the phone the other day. She’s put on a lot of weight. Hers is a sad story. Her only son is divorced.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Khuku, ‘his wife left him for his own cousin. Strange things happen these days.’

  ‘What of Anjali?’ asked Mini, ruminating.

  ‘I haven’t seen her myself. I heard she lives in an ashram in the South. You know she took to wearing saffron and became a sanyasini. Apparently she still remembers me.’

  ‘Of course she would,’ said Mini.

  In the afternoon, they’d begin discussing their school again, and their head mistress and deputy head mistress (the one who dressed strangely, because she’d been to England)—‘and the head mistress always loved me,’ said Khuku, ‘she was always throwing me out of class’—while their conversation meandered and began again. For the twenty-five years in Bombay and Delhi she’d lost touch with most of her school friends. Now, here they were, in Calcutta. And when the conversation went on for too long, and the plot grew too complex, Khuku would fall asleep. Sometimes Mini would doze off first, and Khuku would say, ‘You’re not listening!’ and she would wake up with a start, good-naturedly.

  After Vidyasagar Road had curved right and moved towards the house where Ganashakti arrived for distribution, and after the small barricaded grassy triangle there was a by-lane on the left.

  In this nameless thoroughfare the boys had begun to set up mikes and wiring, and often at different times of the day stealthy electronic static buzzed and disturbed the lane beneath the other noises. No one knew for certain yet that it was in this by-lane that the performance would take place. But they’d begun to make a stage.

  Then a voice said, ‘Hello, hello,’ and Bhaskar’s mother heard it as she was folding a sari. However, she paid it no heed, was not even conscious of it as a separate thing.

  This voice continued to say, ‘Hello, hello.’ The next day it began to say more words, too garbled to be understood from a distance: ‘Announce . . . country . . . a few days from now.’

  Two of the men, Jodu and Pyari, had remained silent throughout, notably shy unlike the others; they had been enlisted seemingly at random from the adult literacy class; one was a carpenter and the other worked in a cement factory. They looked quite tired. ‘Everyone must take part,’ they were told; for they were all in their way ranged against one nameless enemy. ‘What do you think?’ they’d been asked; they were approached with a mixture of admonishment and cajoling. ‘Dada, will we be able to remember our lines?’ said Jodu, the more vocal of the two.

  ‘It’s not Tagore you have to memorize,’ admonished Bhaskar, and went on to other things.

  Gradually they overcame their shyness; convinced themselves they didn’t mind at all as long as their wives weren’t there to watch them. Jodu was the short one, the one who had more confidence. He took the lead and Pyari followed. It didn’t bother them too much that they didn’t know what the play was about; these young men came one day, as if in a dream, and told them it was in a good cause, and they believed them. They told them that this letter was pronounced ‘kaw’, and this one ‘khaw’, and they repeated the letters after them.

  Inside a room on the ground floor of a house, Bhaskar and his friends—Sumanta, Nikhilesh, and Mahesh—went over their lines and actions; a few others were drinking tea. Outside, someone kept saying, ‘Hello hello check one—two—three—’ while inside the flame of Socialism burned and dimmed and burned brightly again; the last of the sunlight fell on the road through a congregation of roofs and solitary antennae; a dog ran swiftly across and crickets began to sing. The proximity of the houses and the little street weighed in on them; this was their poor, true theatre. But, alas, they did not have the ability to concentrate for very long; they drifted out of the play into their own lives. Someone said, ‘Bring me some tea,’ or ‘For God’s sake, light a cigarette!’

  They woke, slept, talked. They eked out the days with inconsequential chatter.

  Rumours of atrocities in other cities came and went around them. Meanwhile, Nando went out to the market and came back, having pocketed a rupee and fifty paisa for himself.

  Until one day Mini persuaded Khuku that she could no longer leave Shantidi by herself, and to reassure her she said, ‘As you can see I’m almost a hundred per cent better, Khuku, it’s true; I feel stronger than I have in months.’ And she gesticulated with an arm, emphatically, to convey what was an essentially incommunicable truth. She gazed at Khuku, to gauge her friend’s response from her face.

  Earlier that week, she’d been to the nursing home again. By now she had become familiar with the corridor that led to Osteopathy, and the waiting-room in which she and Khuku sat until she was called in. People milled around under the signs saying Osteopathy and Radiology and Cancer Detection for apparently no purpose, coming and going until they sat down on the chairs: middle-aged women in saris, men in spectacles.

  She and Khuku had grown used to its faint electric lights, its air of being cut off. And the treatment had cost Mini only thirty rupees a visit. Half an hour of the infrared had soothed her arthritis and numbed the leg into the sweetness of acceptance.

  Early in the afternoon on a Tuesday they set out for Madan Chatterjee Lane, where Mini’s house was. By half-past three Mini had worn a fresh sari for the journey; folded and put her things into her bag.

  Khuku was feeling drowsy because she hadn’t taken her nap. ‘I’ll make up for it in the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll doze off for twenty minutes.’ For no reason that could be clearly identified or named, Khuku felt the infinitely reticent and light touch of a sadness, something to do with journeys and roads and people, which she used to experience not infrequently when she was a girl, except that it, and life itself, was much more real then.

  No sooner was she in the car than she closed her eyes. She sat in the car, her chin drooping, while the car turned near the corner of a pavement. Fifteen minutes later the noise of the traffic woke her; she said: ‘We’re still in Beckb
agan!’

  It took them forty-five minutes to negotiate Lower Circular Road, Chowringhee, the junction before Bentinck Street and finally to pass Mahajati Sadan and to arrive at the small lane on the left. By then, they felt like they’d come to what was probably another city. Just on the right what looked like a deep ditch had been dug in Central Avenue, where actually unfinished work for the underground had been begun and then interrupted. Although the ditch looked almost fearsome, there were in fact two children playing and rushing into it, climbing from one side to the other and disappearing again.

  Narrowly the lane opened; only just enough space, like arms reluctantly parted, leaving no room for an embrace to the bosom. Yet the car moved forward into this narrow space, obstructed by handcarts and men, going more and more into the interior, towards the heart, towards a home in the heart.

  Much would change in the next few months in subtle ways, but much would seem to remain unchanged. And the change was probably only a phase, a development as short-lived as anything else; while what seemed to be in a condition of stasis might actually be shimmering with uncertainty and on the brink of extinction.

  And Mini’s departure created a gap, a hiatus, that would take time to be replenished again. She had left a vacancy in Khuku’s flat, a vague but living memory of her sitting upon a sofa, reading, and it would take time now for Khuku’s life to reassert itself. Later, Khuku would hear of Mini’s being restricted to her home because of Shantidi’s accident, a fall down the stairs and a minor but troublesome fracture. Winter would end, and Mini would be circumscribed by teaching during the day and returning home. It was as if life, or history, were a spirit that kept transforming its features, discontented to be one thing at one time.