Freedom Song

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Dipen Mandal was a singer and the youngest of that group. He wouldn’t have been more than twenty-one years old, and still had no moustache or beard. His mother had died when he was a child, and he had been brought up by his father and aunt; he loved new clothes, and today he was wearing a white shirt with broad collars and light blue trousers with narrow flares. He was just a boy, really, and couldn’t keep his eyes off the two sisters in saris who stood on the balcony of the house on the other side of the road. His father, who always wore clean, starched dhotis and kurtas, was a singer too, but perhaps better known as a revolutionary poet who had published two volumes of verse in his youth; both father and son had been present in that long, winding procession pledging support to Cuba and Castro that had gone down from Tollygunge to BBD Baag in September. Dipen was the only one among this group who didn’t like tea and didn’t smoke because of his voice. He was serious about his singing; he took lessons in classical music from a guru; he practised in the mornings. Sometimes it seemed that he was more interested in singing revolutionary songs than in Party work, but the others in the group were indulgent towards him and treated him like a younger brother and called him Deepu. Standing on the pavement, keeping at an arm’s length from the rest, he was humming a vocal exercise, ‘Sa re ga, re ga ma, ga ma pa . . .’ Deeply engrossed, peacock-proud, he uttered the first line of a patriotic song: ‘O unlock this, unlock this, unlock this door of darkness!’

  What happy times they had together! There were dress rehearsals, processions, demonstrations, street-plays, adult education for the illiterate, Dipen Mandal breaking into ‘Sing Cominternational’ on May Day to the accompaniment of his single-reed harmonium. They had all grown up on the border that separated middle-classness from a fathomless darkness, on the border where a street of middle-class houses ran out to the railway lines and the makeshift huts beyond, the fathomless cricket- and firefly-haunted darkness in which paraffin lanterns were lit; all their lives they had barely managed not to slip off from their haven of school-books and exams. Samaresh Hajra had a younger sister, two brothers in school, and his mother was a widow; for the last two months he had had no job. He was the one who had spoken today of the International Monetary Fund. Only Bhaskar, perhaps, among them, could be said to have come from a family that was properly middle class; thus, there was an ineffable aura about his ordinariness—he was held in respect.

  There was an old bicycle shop across the road, with mournful floppy tyres hanging like festoons at the entrance. Further on, the road bifurcated, and at that point there was a triangular island of green barricaded by iron railings, some of them missing, in which there was a bust of Swami Vivekananda, painted white. What eyes Vivekananda had—eyes of deep unwavering calm which remained untroubled by the insistent hooting of the state transport buses going past. The grass that grew around the bust had become coarse and dry, and seemed more so in the winter. Cows, spent, unworldly, idol-like, sometimes reclined before that statue. Girls and boys knelt enquiringly on the pavement, searching endlessly for souvenirs, emitting urgent cries in the dusk, snot dried around their noses. At five o’clock in January it would become dark, and the small lights glowing in windows would serve as a human counterpoint to the sunlight that scattered and spread at the turning of the road. In the tea-shop, shawls would cover the tops of the timid and cold-fearing Narayan’s and Narayan’s uncle’s heads, two Bihari expatriates, while tea continued to brew and swirl in the blackened kettle. But now it was bright, and Sumanta Saha, who had finished his bhaad of tea, threw it on the pavement and crushed it underfoot like an egg-shell.

  ‘Bhaskar!’ he called to the one who was still unsmilingly smoking. ‘Are we meeting on Friday, then?’

  Bhaskar was in a dark recalcitrant mood, possessed by the kind of lethargy that people usually succumb to in the summer, or just before the monsoons, in June. He lifted his large black long-lashed eyes.

  ‘Hu.’

  ‘Have you xeroxed the script for the play?’ asked the large Sumanta in his thin childlike voice.

  He was speaking of the street-play they were to perform in Behala, an allegorical tale about life in capitalist Russia, called The Fall of Ashoka, written by the talented young man whose mind engendered almost all their plays, Arjun Dastidar.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bhaskar, opening his mouth a little.

  ‘Then I’ll see you on Friday,’ said the big man, reassured. ‘I’m going home now—you know why. I forgot to bring money with me—just pay my twenty-five paisa to Narayan, Bhaskar, I’ll give it to you on Friday.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ said Bhaskar.

  That night, after Haridasi, wordlessly and systematically, had beaten the mattresses with a jhata, and laid out the soft damp white quilts on the bed, and lit the Tortoise mosquito coils in the rooms, while Bhaskar and Piyu watched the English film on television downstairs, Bhaskar’s father turned the knobs for the medium and short wave on the radio—to listen to who knows what—producing a curious but characteristic mélange of noises, strange haunting voices that would be interrupted by fading frequencies, desperate snatches of the Oriya and Assamese news, the spiritual monotonous faraway sound of a raag being sung, then being swallowed up by a whistling, humming vacuum, strains of Greek music, the nasal lisping of Arab voices: it was after eleven, and India seemed to come alive on the air-waves in ghostly manifestations, and beyond it, the world. And it was an old habit of his, going back to the first months of his marriage, to stand thus at this hour turning the knobs, allowing his soul to plunge into the vast uncharted territory that the radio so mysteriously tuned into at night. He had missed the news on television, and the English, Bengali, and Hindi news on the radio; now he was hoping that some mysterious nocturnal station would tell him what the new Indian cricket team was. ‘Foolish to have left Gower out,’ he told himself.

  ‘We should go somewhere on a trip,’ said Bhaskar’s mother slowly, lying on the bed. ‘Maybe Darjeeling.’

  ‘At this time of the year?’ said her husband. ‘No! Do you know how cold it will be there now?’

  ‘Somewhere, then. Somewhere in the South.’

  She lay there, thinking. She went on pilgrimages with her sister or with Piyu to Gopalpur, or to Nabadweep where Chaitanya had preached; they all went for picnics in the winter with oranges and flasks of tea to Diamond Harbour or Digha; and, once, over the last three years, with Mohit and Puti and others they had taken a plane—a great event—to Kathmandu, and once to the hills of Kalimpong. They had gone during the Pujas, in September, when it was hot and humid and the insects named after the goddess herself—Shyama—sought out the light bulbs and lay dead on the floor in the morning. It gave them great pleasure, in that heat, to pack up jackets and cardigans and caps, and return a week later with photographs in colour with themselves—recognizably themselves, but subtly changed as if by a magic spell—standing against a blue and green back-drop of hills, embarrassed or jubilant smiles on their faces, Bhaskar slouching, Piyu sullen and self-conscious, Puti glorious and histrionic, and a little frown always, always residing between Bhaskar’s father’s eyebrows, all of them having donned those woollen caps and cardigans. There, among those misty hills, waking to early sunrises, they made friends with other Bengalis like themselves, who too were visiting from Calcutta, and whose names they forgot once they had returned to the city. Perhaps Bhaskar’s mother loved these excursions more than anyone else. For three-quarters of her life, she had never been able to leave this house and go anywhere, except for those brief pilgrimages to Gopalpur and Nabadweep. But now she wanted to go to Haridwar and Kashi on the banks of the Ganga, to the long swinging bridge in Lakshmanjhula, all the sacred places she had heard of, hidden in mountains or in repose by rivers; she wanted to go south to Kerala, and to Cochin, and Kovalam, and Kanyakumari, the tip of India. Perhaps even to Manik, across the seas . . . She had a black spot on the sole of her right foot—she had had it since childhood—which meant that she would travel widely. She had always treated it as a kind of
joke, but lately, without her realizing it, it seemed to have released its powers, and her feet were planting themselves on strange grounds she had never thought of visiting.

  Her husband loved this city. He loved its fish, rui and katla and koi with black oily scales, and during the monsoons he would cry out a truism that he repeated with great ardour at this time every year: ‘Ilish is the king of fishes!’ He was a tense man, it was difficult to discuss anything with him without getting into a serious argument—all his life he had been like that. But take him out of Calcutta, and one could imagine him becoming unhappy and quiet. Thirty years ago, he had come to this city and got married. Since then, its air had changed, till now a nimbus of smoke and dust and fumes surrounded it always. But he loved it as one who had come here and made his life here. Here he had launched his small business, here he had had his children, Bhaskar, Manik, and Piyu; they had gone to the same school and read Bengali and English and read the same subjects, and in them, in the way they spoke and in what they spoke of, he saw Calcutta more truly than in himself; they were the children of this city. As they grew up, from dark helpless bundles to two thin boys who loved cricket and feared insects, and a tongue-tied girl who made orange squash by herself with a spoon and a tumbler, to the three different beings they were now, he seemed to have seen them changing as rapidly and miraculously as if he had been witnessing a plant growing over a month, and as they grew a sense of loss came to him, a sense of distance from the Bhaskar and Piyu and Manik that twenty years ago he had dreamed vividly they would be, though he was not sure what the dream was. But three children had become ghosts as three children had grown up, and only he, it seemed, had remained the same. Who was he? Time and Calcutta seemed to pass through him like water. He had come here and fallen in love with Gariahat, its fish and vegetable market with its shouting community of vendors and darting basket-boys. That was Calcutta. Then, in 1971, not far away, Bangladesh was created, and the refugees who had come to the city set up their small stalls in Gariahat. It was his life; no one else would know it.

  Khuku and Mini sat side by side on two arm-chairs in the hall, facing the veranda.

  Each day, at some point, they talked of the Muslims. They talked of how, by the next century, there would be more Muslims than Hindus in the country. Mini, being the teacher, had the facts and figures. She told Khuku that ‘population control’ was meant for Hindus alone, and Khuku, listening to Mini, began to see Muslims everywhere. They grew excited about the azaan on the loudspeakers, and about Muslim festivals in which people beat themselves with whips and cords. Once, when talking thus, and saying, ‘They should change as well, not just the Hindus,’ they had forgotten that Abdullah the tailor, who had come to take measurements, was sitting, only a small distance away, self-consciously on the sofa, more self-conscious about sitting on the sofa than about anything the two might have said. Khuku had bit her tongue and indicated Abdullah with her eyes to Mini, and said quietly, ‘He didn’t hear us,’ and then, ‘Even if he did, so what?’

  They were both in old age, though they did not feel it. Khuku’s face had a few noticeable wrinkles; and these only appeared, emphasized, when she had not slept for two nights. Her grey hairs were camouflaged by the black, and the obvious ones ‘touched up’ with mehndi or dye. There were days when she wandered around the house with mehndi in her hair, which smelled like mud or manure till she had washed it off. And her small body, loved in its present incarnation by her husband and child, had remained constant over the last twenty years. And Mini’s even smaller body, dark skinned, the forehead glowing with the hair pulled back in a small bun, the eyes upon the face not large but frank, as Khuku remembered them from girlhood, now hidden by spectacles—she was the same Mini. The only difference between them were the marks on Khuku’s belly from the Caesarean operation, for she had once borne a child, while Mini’s belly, bulging with a natural plumpness, was smooth and untouched.

  ‘BJP,’ said Khuku, her eyes larger than usual. ‘I might even vote for the BJP. Why not?’

  They spoke defiantly and conspiratorially, as if they were playing a prohibited game. They would stop once Shib arrived at the house.

  ‘In fact, it was no bad thing that they toppled that mosque,’ said Mini. She looked small and powerful, as if she had unsuspected energies within, and could have gone up to the mosque and toppled it herself, alone. She had quite forgotten about the pain in her leg.

  ‘No bad thing,’ said Khuku, who agreed with everything that Mini said.

  But Khuku and Mini did not believe in Ram or Krishna; Khuku’s personal deity, which she might have created herself, or which had possibly been created by her mother, was one she called Bipad Nashini, or Destroyer of Distress, whom she saw as a maternal figure who watched over her and her family, and whose name she muttered whenever she was worried: ‘Hé bipad nashini, hé bipad nashini.’ This mysterious female divinity resided, it seemed, in Khuku’s heart, there she had her home in the world, and from there she sprang to life when her name was uttered in that worried, childlike way by Khuku.

  Long before she either disbelieved or believed in things, Khuku had heard of the Muslims, or the Musholmaan, as a child. Her world was then populated by her mother, her brothers, and by a huge family of ghosts and spirits. It became dark soon, there was no electricity, and she could scarcely keep her eyes open; in the next room, her elder brothers and elder sister and mother kept on talking. In that world, her closest companions were her younger brother, Bhola, who was then no more than an idiot who had barely learnt to speak, and Pulu, who was older than her by a year. Pulu believed in the next life, and in other worlds, where daylight was a soft purple, and he was always getting cuffed on the head by his elder sister for asking so many questions and being such a nuisance. He was brilliant at arithmetic and a great crammer and knew all the tables by heart. Khuku loved him very much, and one of the first words she had ever spoken, ‘Dada,’ referred to him. It was he who first told her of the Hindoos, who were a fierce wandering tribe with swords who cut up everything in their path, as their very name, ‘Hin-doo’, suggested, and Musholmaans, he explained, were ghosts who haunted the dark and hilly regions of Sylhet.

  In the afternoon, Bhaskar reclined on the bed; his back had been troubling him again. He had not made the long journey to the factory because of it; instead, he had had a full meal, and now he sought the most appropriate position for his head on the pillow. In the morning, he had woken up with limbs quite frozen, and had had to ask his mother for help to get off the bed; he had hopped about like a huge injured bird. Now he lay back and sighed, with a book on yoga in one hand. The pages were light and wispy, and the paper was peppered and flecked with impurities; the Bengali print was faded. Almost each page had another page with a photograph facing it, smoky black and white photographs that were really blue-grey, with figures in them doing various asanas, the first two pages of photos being occupied by Surjomukhi Maharaj, who had written the text, a fat, fair, bearded holy man with small eyes and a smile on his face. The rest of the photos were of thin unnamed men in brief white jangias, immortalized in that blue and white world in dozens of strange postures, straining, as it were, to become something else, to fly, to be transmogrified. The text made unexpected revelations in a deadpan way: ‘Muktabayu-asana: This is good for the digestion. Those who do this daily will not suffer from gas or stomach problems. First lie on your back and breathe in, then slowly raise both your knees . . .’ Bhaskar must have read the book more than twenty times, for he had bought it from the Dakkhinee bookshop when he was fifteen. He could only just remember the shopkeeper taking it out of the window, slapping the powdery dust off it, and handing it to him. Bhaskar had at that time been passing through a long phase of interest in yogis and Mr Universes, an interest he had passed on to Manik as well, and their hero and idea of perfection had then been Monohar Aich, the great Bengali body-builder, who had muscles swelling and hardening on every part of his body. Since he had acquired the book, Bhaskar had been much st
irred by the importance of the names of the exercises—padmasana, virasana, muktasana—and had interred them as a kind of knowledge. In those days, his mother was always asking him, ‘Have you done your schoolwork?’ and a great lethargy and reluctance filled him as he dragged himself to his textbooks. But, whenever he could, he read the articles in Sportsweek and Sportsworld about Shyam Thapa or Pelé, or flicked through the pages of the yoga book till he had become familiar with the descriptions of the asanas and those thin, bare-chested men in their state of arrested transport, with the pale luminous white wall behind them. When their mother looked at Bhaskar and Manik, she saw two wiry, restive boys, but she also saw, in their eyes, in the way they walked, in the way they spoke occasionally, what they saw themselves as—Tarzan and Hercules—and, vividly, she could see them increasing and filling out to their imaginary proportions, to their ideal, while, at the same time, being able to see them for the two thin boys they were.

  Bhaskar had never been, although he was a great shirker of studies, and also a great day-dreamer, a particularly rebellious boy. If his feet ever accidentally brushed against a book, for instance, he immediately and swiftly touched his forehead and chest with his index finger in quick, absent-minded repentance, and as, in those days, books and magazines that were being read by Bhaskar, Manik, or their mother would always be lying by pillows or on the middle of the bed, because the bed served as floor and bed and table at once, and because Bhaskar’s normal mode of locomotion in the room was quick skips, jumps, and runs from bed to floor and floor to bed, his feet were always grazing books, and he, at least five or six times a day, was engaged in making that brief, absent-minded gesture. His day-dreams were the usual ones dreamt by Bengali boys of his age: of alternative lives that were much like the lives of Swami Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose. At the age of seven, he had been given a thin book with broad, flapping pages called We Are Bengalis, with small biographical tales about Vivekananda and Vidyasagar and Tagore, each prefaced by a portrait of a serene and grave face; and some of the stories fired him with pride, and others made him cry. Once he understood what a wonderful thing it was to be a Bengali, and that he was Bengali himself, he went around the house chanting, ‘We are Bengalis! We are Bengalis!’ and this echo, predictably, was taken up by Manik, who had no inkling of what it meant.