Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Amit Chaudhuri is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including The Immortals, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag and A New World which – between them – have won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Sahitya Akademi Award. His most recent novel is Odysseus Abroad. He is also a poet, an acclaimed musician, a highly regarded critic, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was awarded the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to the humanities in literary studies. He lives in Calcutta and Norwich.

  PRAISE FOR FREEDOM SONG

  ‘Chaudhuri writes about India like no one else.’

  Robert McCrum, Observer

  ‘Amit Chaudhuri evokes the background noises of Calcutta so effectively that even for a reader who has never set foot on the sub-continent there is an eerily realistic effect.’

  Penelope Lively, Spectator

  ‘The narrative flits from mind to mind, flashes forward and back, finding a great and casual beauty at the edge of the haphazard.’

  Adam Mars-Jones, Observer

  ‘Fiction very different from the kind being written by other Indians … Chaudhuri is interested in the life each of us leads that no one else knows about.’

  London Review of Books

  ‘It takes us further “towards a home in the heart” than Chaudhuri has before. Its final, subtly elegiac section reveals Chaudhuri’s overriding concern: the slow unfolding of personal trajectories around the pages of national narrative.’

  Independent

  ‘Chaudhuri is a poet’s novelist, not just in the sensibility but in technique. All this, employing a language that is balletic – slow and artful, and at the same time, arresting and precise.’

  Guardian

  ‘Breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations, comic set pieces and melancholy grace notes.’

  New York Times Book Review

  Amit

  Chaudhuri

  Freedom

  Song

  A Oneworld Book

  First published in the United Kingdom by Picador in 1998

  Published in paperback in Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2015

  This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2015

  Copyright © Amit Chaudhuri 1998

  The moral right of Amit Chaudhuri to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78074-629-6

  ISBN 978-1-78074-630-2 (eBook)

  Typeset by Eleven Arts, Delhi

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Oneworld Publications

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  London WC1B 3SR

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  It was a solitary voice, saying Allah-hu-akbar and other familiar but incomprehensible syllables. Though it was coming from quite far away, for the nearest mosque was a mile northward, she could hear it clearly, as if it were being recited in this very lane, and its presence filled the grey area between her sleep and waking. The singer, if one could call him such, seemed absolutely absorbed, wherever he was, in the unearthly lift of the melody, in his indecision between repetition and progression, and in the delicate business of now prolonging and now shortening a syllable. The city was still—the trams, the trees whose leaves were covered with a film of dust, the junctions, Lower Circular and Lansdowne roads, the three-storeyed houses on Southern Avenue, the ten-storeyed buildings on Ballygunge Circular Road. Soon that machinery would start working again, not out of any sense of purpose, but like a watch that is wound daily by someone’s hand. Almost without any choice in the matter, people would embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their lives. It was in this moment of postponement that the azaan was heard, neither announcing the day nor keeping it a secret.

  She got up, as she had been getting up for fifty years, ever since she was fifteen years old and became serious about her singing, going out into the drawing room in the house in Shillong to practise, so as not to wake up her sleeping brothers or suffer their cheerful mockery. The morning today was almost as cold as the mornings in Shillong used to be; she was slower now, her hips wider, as those of a woman who has borne children are said to be, and, at this moment, a little unsteady on her feet. Solemnly, she put a shawl around herself and disappeared into the darkness of the bathroom, as if she had a rendezvous there, and, ten minutes later, emerged again. Her husband was asleep, his outlines barely distinguishable from the quilt. Her own quilt had become a bunched-up, higgledy-piggledy mess, and seemed to have a small child hiding underneath it.

  When she came out of her room, she found the door to the guest room open. The curtains had been parted, and the single bed already made. As she was looking around, the knob on the bathroom door turned and Mini came out, her spectacles misted, patches of wet on her blouse and petticoat. She had always been a clumsy girl. The bathroom, whose window faced east, was flooded with light.

  ‘What, Khuku!’ she said with great surprise. ‘You’re up already?’ Then, a note of both respect and affection entering her voice, she said, half to herself, ‘Shib must be asleep.’

  ‘I was woken by the azaan,’ complained Khuku. ‘And, believe me, Mini, I had no sleep last night, I began to think about Bablu and I lay wide awake with my head feeling hot.’

  ‘Really!’ said Mini, feeling outraged on her behalf, and seeming to speak of a group of absolutely tiresome schoolchildren (for she was a schoolteacher), ‘They are going too far! And,’ she said, ‘it isn’t really Indian, it sounds like Bedouins.’ With a look of satisfaction on having said this, she began to comb her hair, which was wavy, not very long, and still all black. Then, hobbling towards the dressing-table, she stood opposite her reflection, exactly as dark and stocky as herself, and began to sort out, with both hands, the folds of a white sari with a green border, tucking it in first into the petticoat that had been tied not only above stomach-level, but almost approaching the chest; chin lowered, she drew the layers of the sari around herself till she was almost completely ensconced in it. ‘Bas!’ she said when it was done. ‘Now we can go outside.’ But Khuku had already slipped out silently to the hall and was telling Nando to get up.

  ‘Get up, you lazy man!’ she commanded him. ‘Give us tea!’

  Nando went on sleeping. She went around the hall aimlessly, like an insect exploring a window-pane, and then entered the room her son stayed in when he came back from America; the beds were perfectly made, all his books were standing on the shelves, and in the cupboards lay piled his old comic books and Tintins, and a pair of sandals. She pulled back the curtains which were drawn at night for no particular reason by Jochna before she went home. Meanwhile, Mini had settled into an arm-chair in the hall, and was already studying a very funny book by Bonophul, peering hard at the print through her glasses. As if out of some vestigial survival of embarrassment, Nando rose from the carpet, dragging his blanket behind him, a dark four-foot-ten-inch demon, and walked dolefully towards the kitchen.


  Khuku sat down on the arm-chair next to Mini, who closed her book and looked up.

  ‘How are you feeling, Mini?’ asked Khuku. ‘Did you sleep well last night?’

  ‘I’m much better already,’ she said. ‘Your house is so beautiful and comfortable that I have no choice but to feel better!’ She laughed as she always did, her dark brown lips parting to reveal her uneven white teeth, her head and shoulders and chest shaking together. Then, almost immediately, the sides of her eyes crinkled shyly, because she was one of those who had grown up in an age when it was believed that to laugh too hard was not proper for a woman. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘the moment I’m better I’ll be going back. There will be a lot of school-work this term.’

  ‘Quiet!’ said Khuku. ‘I can’t ask you something without you talking about going back! Will you let yourself rest for a while?’

  ‘There is Shantidi,’ murmured Mini.

  ‘Shantidi is capable of taking care of herself!’ said Khuku. ‘She travels from one end of the city to the other!’

  ‘She might get into a bad mood . . .’ said Mini softly, staring at the carpet.

  ‘Shantidi,’ said Khuku gently, ‘is very anxious that you get better. She’ll be unhappy if you go back before you are perfectly all right.’

  Mini began to laugh again, this time pursing her lips and nodding her head slowly backward and forward. It was not clear why—probably at Khuku’s childish insistence, or probably because she could not picture Shantidi unhappy; a little bad tempered, yes, if she could not find her sandesh mould or a hairpin. Only five days ago, when Khuku had arrived in her Ambassador to pick up Mini from where she and her older sister lived in North Calcutta, in the New Municipal Corporation Building, which was, in fact, twenty-five years old, Shantidi had been away at an acquaintance’s funeral. Three years ago, recovering from hepatitis, she had gone about, somewhat tardily, with a torch and a walking-stick. Now she did not fear even trams and buses, and pushed her way inside and pushed her way outside. When Khuku was helping Mini down the dark stairs towards her car, Shantidi, after expressing her grief to a relative, and saying with all conviction what a wonderful person was the departed, a simple and pure-hearted woman who had never harmed anyone, was eating jilepi and shingara from a paper plate, and talking about her favourite subject, politics. The caterers, in another room, were heating food in drums over open fires, and stirring the hot and bubbling mass with long black khuntis. The dead one had led a long and peaceful life, and how wonderful it was, thought Shantidi to herself, that the eyes of her daughter, who was smilingly welcoming guests, followed everywhere by her small inquisitive son, should still be a little red with weeping.

  Now, at six in the morning, in a house on Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Road, a very dark twenty-eight-year-old man was hiding, terrified, beneath his blankets. What he was terrified of was not clear, but he had slipped under the blanket as far as he could, and only his frowning eyes, his forehead, and his hair, the shorter ones of which stuck out like rays and stings in every direction, were visible. Almost everyone was awake, moving in that dreary somnolent state from wash-basin to toilet to wash-basin, except the young man. His father—Khuku’s brother who, wearing a pullover and tennis shoes, had just returned from a walk by the lake, was now climbing the stairs, singing, and hesitating between one step and the next to repeat a particular note till he rendered it as he desired. With a grunt of finality, Bhaskar threw off, in a storm, the blanket and sat upright. Then, as if he were some kind of new-born animal, he propelled himself on his bottom to the edge of the bed, his legs sticking out before him like two huge talons. ‘Haridasi,’ he shouted. ‘Bring tea!’ Is that Bhaskar? thought his mother, downstairs. Though fourteen years had passed since his voice had changed to a man’s voice, a tenth of a moment always elapsed before his mother adjusted herself to her son’s grown-upness. Without a word, standing by the edge of the bed, Bhaskar began to do a quick, abbreviated version of his exercises, recommended to him by a physiotherapist for his back-ache, breathing in quickly, bending hurriedly to clutch his knees, as if they were about to desert him, and then expiring in relief. Piyu, his sister, supporting her weight on one leg, was brushing her teeth furiously and rhythmically, and observing him closely; she had been standing there and brushing for a full minute, till her teeth had been lost for the Colgate foam forming at her mouth.

  ‘Dash oh do yoo ayi goo,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Bhaskar, looking sideways from his ostrich posture, his head hanging between his knees.

  She went to the wash-basin and spat, and then rinsed her mouth thoroughly, blowing her left cheek first and then her right. Returning, she repeated:

  ‘That won’t do you any good.’

  ‘You mind your own business,’ said Bhaskar, and bent down again.

  She went away, hurt. And when his conscience was satisfied, Bhaskar rushed to the alna and began to look for his jeans among the silently hanging clothes. ‘Where is it, where is it?’ but the clothes would give no answer. Then he found them and wore them hurriedly, clamping his lower lip with his teeth as he strove to push a button through a button-hole, but zipping the fly effortlessly. He slipped off his crumpled kurta and put on a pink one. A children’s song was coming from the radio in the next house: ‘Sajalpurer kaajal meye naite nemechhe,’ sung in a ringing, girlish voice. From the walls above the faces of his mother’s parents gazed at him, she with the sari’s aanchal draped about her head and smiling slightly, he serious and patriarchal in a white kurta, his skin even darker than Bhaskar’s. Morning came to the house through the windows at the back of the second storey, via a school in a field and a doctor’s house; when a shutter was opened, the light found its way straight to one’s eye. By this time mynahs, shaliks, sparrows, crows, had begun to echo on parapets and window-sills, and a cat had woken up and fallen asleep again.

  The doorbell rang, and Bhaskar’s mother wiped her brow with her sari and proceeded towards the veranda. Looking past the branches of the shajana tree, she saw Mohit between their gaps, no longer wearing shorts, but trousers, standing with his bicycle on the pavement. Four days ago he had completed his end-of-term exams, for which he used to study alone early in the mornings. Today, he had woken up at five as usual, had a bath, wished his mother goodbye, and come cycling to Vidyasagar Road.

  ‘Ei, Mohit! What do you want?’

  ‘What do you mean, what do I want?’

  ‘You want to come in?’

  Mohit stood with one hand on the bicycle. The road was misty behind him.

  ‘Yes, I want to come in,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Wait there,’ said his great-aunt, and wandered inside, smiling. ‘Haridasi!’ she called.

  ‘Yes ma,’ came the small, childish voice from the kitchen.

  ‘Open the door outside for Mohit.’

  A minute later, coming up the stairs, Mohit found Piyu standing on the first-floor landing.

  ‘How was the ride?’ she asked. After Mohit had grown an inch last year he was as tall as her and could look her in the eye.

  ‘Fantastic! I came through the lake.’

  His great-aunt began to follow him around like a mendicant.

  ‘Will you have luchi, Mohit?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Omelette?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pithha? Have a pithha. I made them yesterday.’

  ‘No,’ said Mohit firmly, as if he were used to warding off such requests. ‘In fact, I just had something before I came here.’ His hair was still gleaming from the bath he had had half an hour ago.

  ‘What did you have?’

  ‘Oof! What a question,’ said Mohit, looking ashamed. ‘Milk and toast and roshogolla,’ he admitted with a mixture of bravado and embarrassment.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Piyu.

  Mohit hesitated; for it was a sign of adulthood to drink tea, and he was tempted, in his great-uncle’s house, to partake of a pleasure denied him by his mother. />
  ‘All right!’ he said impatiently, not looking at anyone in particular. ‘All right, I’ll have tea!’

  When Bhaskar came into the dining-room in his jeans and pink kurta, tea was still brewing in the pan. Mohit was discussing irrelevancies with his great-aunt and Piyu, his elbows resting on the table, his legs locked around one of the legs of the dining-table. So secure did he look that it seemed no buffeting of fate could move him from his place. Pigeons, in a mire of feathers and excrement, had begun to make crowded noises in a dark foot-wide corridor by the water tank of the next house, which was perpetually visible from the window next to Mohit. But Bhaskar first entered the kitchen and said resentfully:

  ‘Half an hour and you still haven’t made it! Dhur—now I don’t want it.’

  Poor eleven-year-old Haridasi, she took everything literally; her mouth curved downward. She stood on tiptoe and strained to gaze at the pan.

  ‘What could I do?’ she said softly. ‘I had to open the door for Mohitda.’ She said, ‘Don’t go, Bhaskarda, it’ll be ready in a minute.’ The smell of tea, strong and bitter-sweet and a little rancid, like sweat, had begun to waft through the kitchen.

  But Bhaskar had, without pause, already walked out of the dining-room, saying, ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’ Piyu, still hurt from his retort ten minutes ago, decided she had not heard this. ‘What about your tea?’ called out his mother. When he did not answer she said to the table, ‘Let him do what he likes.’ Piyu lifted herself from this scene as if it did not matter. Then Mohit disrupted the small dining-table community further by getting up and shouting, ‘Bhaskarmama, wait for me, I’m coming.’ ‘Ei, where are you going?’ asked Piyu in astonishment. Deserting them, he revealed, ‘With Bhaskarmama!’ Bhaskar’s father had emerged absent-mindedly from the toilet and was washing his hands with a piece of Lifebuoy soap. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. Running down the stairs, Mohit said, ‘With Bhaskarmama!’

  When Mohit caught up with him on the pavement, he said: ‘Bhaskarmama, I’m coming too.’