Freedom Song Read online

  The change in the weather from late January to early February was small but palpable, a fractional abatement of the dawn’s and evening’s chill. The winter, crystalline at dawn, smoke-filled in memory, was ending. Then there were the other changes, the larger ones; as the country altered, gradually and almost imperceptibly, from one kind of place to another. Memories died and new ways of life came into being.

  Then, in February, Bhaskar’s parents began to look for a bride for him in earnest, surreptitiously almost, neither advertising in newspapers nor telling relatives, but sending out signals discreetly.

  Although he knew now that they wouldn’t make his plan for Little’s work, Shib kept going as if nothing had happened. Once he was in his office, accountants came into his room to ask him to clear up some problem they were having or simply for some advice, and he would help them out—almost minister to them wondering what his role here was supposed to be. But no real work had been done for days.

  His youthfulness (though they knew he was a retired man) had moved the rest of the staff from apathy to something approaching constructiveness. He had come in like a spirit in transit. And he still walked more quickly than most men forty years younger than him.

  Again the feeling of peace returned. He could pick up his telephone and ring Khuku if he wanted, but he didn’t feel the need to.

  He sorted out his files gravely. He was used to being alone, inhabiting his own world: for he was an only child whose mother had died when he was two. Moreover, he had completed a lifetime of looking after others and fending for himself; even Khuku, when he’d first married her, was in many ways helpless; and he had been a sort of shade-giving umbrella to his son, who’d had a happy and extended childhood.

  When he’d first come to Calcutta he’d been a young man, twenty years old, and he’d put his name down, Shib Purakayastha, in a register in Calcutta University.

  He smiled. Is there an alchemy for making the old new?

  ‘Tea, sir?’

  He smiled and shook his head at the man who had asked the question.

  The man withdrew.

  Two months ago it was that he’d considered with an employee, a marketing manager in this company whose products seldom infiltrated the market, the idea of putting in a fresh advertisement for the company. ‘But where?’ There was, for instance, a seven-year-old poster with Little’s printed upon it in large letters under a railway bridge in the South—day and night the trains rumbled above it and the bridge shuddered—whose paper had peeled off almost entirely, leaving behind, miraculously, only the ‘Little’s’ at the top.

  Sometimes this man, who had just asked him if he would have tea, brought him lozenges in their new wrappers with Little’s printed on both sides. He had ceased to wonder about this company, or what he really did here, or where his salary came from. And Shib had asked to see the lozenges because he was interested in assessing the ‘standard’ of the product; he’d taken them home to his wife, surprising her by giving her a small full packet. For the story of a working life is also the story of a marriage. She’d put one to the test immediately.

  ‘But it’s wonderful!’ Khuku had said, absorbed in the flavour of the lozenge; it reminded her of when she was a child, for the flavour, as it was then, came back to her unchanged; she’d tasted them in Shillong as a girl; and she grew puzzled and anxious trying to understand the reasons for Little’s decline.

  Each time a state- or government-supported company closed down, it was like a death-knell that no one heard. And Shib heard it these days.

  It was only after months that people realized that a company was gone. A product disappeared from the market, or it might be bought over by a Marwari businessman and sold as if nothing had happened. And as if removed from all this, in a constricted space, the office window looked out onto the stunted outgrowth of Dum Dum.

  But in his spare time, Khuku’s husband had decided to put aside some money in shares; he had a premonition that there was a change at hand. All his life, he had worked in a company, and had had no taste for business or speculation; he had been a cautious and qualified professional. But now, four years after retirement, some demon seemed to have seized him; when he was not watching television, he wore small, focused reading glasses that sat low on the bridge of his nose, and fussed over papers and forms. Now, with economic deregulation and a freedom that, in theory, had never existed before, there was the prospect of a rainbow-deluge of collaborations and all kind of opportunities coming to the surface. And Little’s would then be a thing of yesterday.

  Cautiously he decided to invest some money in the Mutual Fund and uncharacteristically to buy a few shares in a company that made biscuits, and in another one that made shoes. Now, in the last quarter of his life, a business acumen and speculative curiosity, long suppressed in the interests of his managerial skills, began to come into play, and also a silent, watchful interest in political issues, and he began to peruse the papers with more than usual thoroughness. His gaze and concentration as he absorbed the curve and emerging shape of the time were intent.

  All was silence around him. At odd moments lost in thoughts on these matters he could be found humming to himself. No one but Khuku, and Bablu, who was not here, knew that he sang. From what little could be heard of that singing voice it would seem that it was a small, high-pitched one, at variance with the quiet dignity of his persona, not very sure of itself. It skirted around the difficult portions and paraphrased the tune rather than sang it; but it was a strange, lonely rehearsal to itself (often in response to a song that Khuku had just sung) rather than meant for others to hear. When Khuku overheard him, she would say to her husband—‘What? what? are you singing? I see you’re not lacking in courage!’—and, discouraged, he would stop.

  Women’s memories of their husbands’ working life are radically but subtly different from their husbands’ own, and the same must be true of their retirement. It’s like seeing something from the other side. Of course, Khuku felt lonely when Shib was in his office; and always had done. But, then, during the curfew, when shops and offices and everything else had been closed—ten days of nothing happening—she’d had her wish come true, and Shib at home with her for twenty-four hours of the day.

  It had been a mixed blessing, this enforced, artificial reunion. It was as if a train they’d been on had halted somewhere unexpectedly and they’d been forced to take a holiday. She’d found that he wasn’t interested in discussing what was happening at all—the riots, the anger; more interested in re-reading old copies of the Statesman which he’d accumulated during the last week in a drawer. How little concerned he was about the silence outside, in which the sound of a single car horn became disconcerting, as he sat all morning reading! Neglecting to shave, even; a grey stubble appearing on his cheeks.

  The truth is, he was not used to being at home. And with Bablu away they were less like a couple than a pair of lodgers.

  Then, gradually, the heap of newspapers by his side of the bed had grown, the small alley by the bed littered with papers, as if he were undertaking some sort of research. And his going to the toilet three times in the silence of the night, the sound of the flush nudging her deep in her sleep; she’d begun to worry whether there was anything wrong with his prostate. Any sign of abnormality made her worry and wonder, and this new silence outside and proximity within brought to her awareness what she probably hadn’t noticed before. She listened to him breathe at night. Many nights she spent not sleeping, but thinking and awake.

  Once the curfew had ended he’d gone out into the world and bought oranges. But it had been a great blunder. On returning home, Khuku pointed out that they were, from the way they peeled and tasted, those terrible sour mutations that resembled oranges, kinoos. She derided him for his lack of discrimination. ‘What!’ Shib said. ‘But I told him I want oranges!’ Indignation, however, could not change the kinoos into oranges. Life had begun again.

  And then there were only two days left for that performance.
/>   ‘No, it’s not a famous group; I’ve never heard of them before. But it’s a nice name. You feel you must have heard of them.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The two, aunt and niece, were desultorily discussing that frayed but bright entity, Bhaskar’s theatre troupe; for this late manifestation of the artistic bent was worth commenting on. Yet one of Khuku’s elder brothers, now dead, had written poetry, in rhyme and in blank verse, in twelve-line sonnets, in a marvellous phase between the age of eighteen and twenty, and had even had one poem published in Desh, and that copy had been circulated in at least five houses.

  Another brother, Pulu, had done a stage adaptation of an unadaptable Sukumar Ray poem when he was a young man in Shillong, using all his four- and five-year-old nieces and nephews and his sisters-in-law in the cast (that was when Khuku was in London, rainswept and with six hours of sunlight, with Shib, who was still a student, and it had been described to her in a letter; and she’d known the strangeness of being in another country that she could not recognize if she looked out of the window and have the sense of her own country return to her from a description).

  And it was now, a few days before this street-play, that it occurred to Khuku that her family had always been full of ne’er-do-wells, each one doing exactly what he pleased, and if Pulu hadn’t been brought to England in 1959 with Shib’s help he’d still be wheeling and dealing in secondhand cars in Shillong (which is what he’d been doing when he’d had that play enacted—a major success when her nephew and niece Moni and Beena—Borda’s children—and India itself had been ridiculously, helplessly young). These ne’er-do-wells were somehow provided for by Providence. And she thought of that family and realized that the bonds of relations surrounding it, radiating across and scattered through this city and elsewhere, was finally coming to an end, and she unexpectedly grew absorbed in its memories.

  ‘And they’re just a handful of boys,’ said Puti. ‘I wonder how Bhola mama copes with them.’

  ‘He’s indulgent—towards all his children, I’d say.’

  ‘But too much indulgence isn’t good, is it?’ said Puti, mother of a son, Mohit, who was so responsible at fourteen that he sometimes even gave advice to his parents.

  At this moment, Bhaskar was witnessing the construction of a stage in a by-lane off Vidyasagar Road.

  They’d arranged about seventy-five chairs, in rows.

  Borda’s elder daughter in Golf Green was among those that had heard of the performance. She, Beena, lived with her parents, and went to work each morning with the air of one about to perform, once again, an indispensable task. The rest of the family almost forgot about her at times, as they forgot those with less than ordinary fortunes; until they thought about her again in a wave of passing sympathy. She was planning to go—‘Dear Bhaskar’s play’: she could not miss it.

  For she was something of an enthusiast of the arts herself; taught Tagore songs rather tunelessly but insistently to small children who lived in her block. The children, whom she gave lessons at no fixed time of the day, quite adored her singing. Her surname was Mitra, a word that had come to have sad, paradoxical music to it (she had decided not to change her husband’s name, from whom she had separated eleven years ago). Fortunately she earned a small salary teaching at the primary level at an orphanage in which she taught English to thirty destitute children in a class. In her more lonely and sentimental moments she often felt that these children were like the children she didn’t have; but who, having seen her as a young woman of twenty, would have suspected that her life would take this particular shape when she was forty-five? Bhaskar’s own cousin, Khuku’s and Bhola’s niece, she was no longer noticed, a shadow, like other shadows, enfolded within this city.

  The sound of the radio came from outside; and from a side-table Mini picked up her spectacles; it was morning and the moment of waking; the consciousness which meant a return to these sounds of the building and further away the noises of Chitpur Road.

  Splashes of water fell upon the hard floor; Shantidi was in the bath; they fell, again, and again. And here was the day’s paper, lying on the floor, by the door. And in the cupboard next to the door was a small container with plastic boards with dates upon them which had to be reshuffled every day; Mini would pause and change the date by hand as if not entirely convinced that it was another day until she had done so; then she would bend to pick the paper up.

  Five sisters and brothers in that family: Mini and Shantidi, and the three brothers, Shyamal, Chanchal, and the eldest, whom they used to call Dadamoni. They had grown up in a place called Puran Lane in Sylhet, a flat area with a longish lane of houses, not a great distance from a market, and which must have been in the East of the town since the sun seemed to rise on that side.

  Their father had been a soft-spoken nondescript man; where he came from was no more clear; the circumstances of his marriage to Mini’s mother too were now forgotten. What was remembered was his conversation and his uprightness, and the walks he used to take to Khuku’s mother’s house from time to time, and how she, widowed, would turn to this gentle man for advice. He—there were thousands like him—had died at the age of fifty-eight, which at that time was considered an acceptable age for death; Mini was sixteen years old. Their mother had gone back to the village a few years later and died there. Their lives existed only in their surviving children’s memories and sometimes not even there; it was as if they had been banished into some darker place or retreated there of their own will; and their presence had been so subtle in life, so unremarkable, that words could no longer translate them into existence. They were gone, but would return, without questions, to their children’s minds repeatedly. Then, after the mother’s death, Mini’s elder brother had taken on the responsibilities of the family in an ordinary but godlike way. He, ‘Dadamoni’, had looked after them as if they were his children; like Shyamal and Mini, he wore spectacles, and like them he had a hoarse voice.

  Then the upheaval came, and friends, brothers, teachers, magistrates, servants, shopkeepers were all uprooted, as if released slowly, sadly, by the gravity that had tied them to the places they had known all their lives, released from an old orbit. They had awaited it with more than apprehension; but when it came they hardly noticed it. The votes were counted after the referendum; their country was gone; first they went back to the village where their mother had died. After two months they packed their things and took a train to Guwahati and then a bus to Shillong, the landscape, over six hours, changing slowly from plains to hills.

  Later, Dadamoni came to Calcutta with his brothers and sisters and rented a flat not far from where they were now; and took a job as a sales representative in a chemicals company. They’d lost their home; but there was the silent, incommunicable excitement of beginning anew in what was now their own country. When they walked down the road and saw a large hoarding advertising Dutta Chemicals, they felt proud as if at a secret knowledge. (They hardly remarked later on the demise of Dutta Chemicals; it had gone out of business in the Seventies, but their lives were so different by then they had hardly noticed it.)

  When Khuku spent three days in Calcutta on her way to England in 1955, to marry Shib, Mini’d been living in a lane with Dadamoni, Shantidi, Chanchal, and Shyamal in the rented flat. Khuku then told Mini how beautiful the city seemed to her, for this was her first visit here; and urged Mini to marry. She had someone in mind, she said, a young man called Kalidas Sengupta who worked in an advertising firm. For those three days she pursued the subject of Mini’s marriage, to Mini’s slight embarrassment. Then she was gone for six years.

  Shantidi came out now, half-blind with the bath. She was cold.

  When he was only forty-two years old, Dadamoni died. The day before he died of a heart attack, he’d had a meal of ilish fish, a noble specimen caught from the Ganga whose virtues he commended as he slowly sorted the bones in his mouth. Later, when the pains had started, he’d thought, at first, that it was indigestion. And in less than two years,
Chanchal, who was running a catering business, contracted tuberculosis; and tuberculosis was still incurable in those days. With Dadamoni’s death (his photograph hung on the wall in the smaller room) everything changed with a slow momentum that they did not fully grasp; and their destinies turned out to be different from what even a year ago they believed they might have been. The possibility of Shantidi’s and Mini’s marriage became more remote; and then, they did not know exactly when, it no longer remained a possibility. In a way they were left innocent, like children, never to know what one part of life was, not particularly worried by their ignorance, with an inexhaustible core of freshness and even romance, touched and changed only by time’s attrition and the uncontainability of their own affections. They gradually stopped thinking and talking about it as one stops thinking about things whose meaning one outgrows or transcends. Meanwhile, Khuku and Shib returned to Calcutta from England as, strangely, touchingly, husband and wife, Shib armed with rare and desirable qualifications of which Khuku was proud as if she had taken the exams; and their first and only child was born in a nursing home in South Calcutta. Everything had happened in Khuku’s life at an abnormally slow pace: married at the age of thirty, she was giving birth to this son after years of trying. Khuku was thirty-seven years old, and Shib forty, his hair already half grey, but his face strikingly young.