A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  Something behind the house catches Lakshman’s eye, he doesn’t know what, but it creates a moment’s tense haze for him and lifts as swiftly. He walks back a few steps, scouring the ground with his eyes, trying to pin down what it is. It keeps eluding him, even though some sense tells him that it’s staring him in the face. Stones of ber fruit, scrunched-up plastic, vegetable peelings, crumpled paper, grass, earth … then he has it. Eggshells. Small white fragments of eggshells. There’s a large piece with the curvature of either the top or the bottom end intact. He stands very still for a while, the next moment almost felled by the swell of pity that buffets him: pity for his children, who need the eggs, who perhaps look forward to the days when an egg might appear, and pity for Geeta, for persisting stealthily in defying him. The thought of her defiance disperses the sympathy as if it was so much dust held out on a palm to the wind.

  Over the next few days he watches, silently and secretly. He goes out, bides his time somewhere out of sight until Geeta goes out to clean, then returns home to hunt for hidden eggs. He wants to know if Radha is in on the plan, but decides it will be unwise to confront her – it will be so much more effective if Geeta doesn’t get wind of his strategy and is caught red-handed. For the same reason, he doesn’t ask any of the children a straightforward question. She must be boiling the eggs and giving them to the children to take to school. But when does she do it?

  He waits by the hedges next to the old bungalow, waiting for her to finish the day’s job and come out. He does not reveal himself. He crouches behind a hedge as she passes by, counts to twenty, then peeps out. She is carrying a plastic bag. He lets her walk towards their house until he is certain that she is no more than a few paces from their front door. He sprints like a man possessed and enters his home before Geeta has had a chance to hide the plastic bag. She looks as if she has seen a ghost; her face goes slack and bloodless.

  – Give me that bag, he pants.

  She doesn’t – cannot – move.

  – Give me that bag, he thunders.

  He snatches it out of her hands. Inside, there are four white eggs, one of them just broken from the force with which he has taken the bag. There are some stale chapattis in it, too, and a small plastic tub of leftover rice and another one of some sabzi, probably cabbage; crumbs from the rich people’s table.

  Geeta tries to run into the kitchen, in a foredoomed, pitiable attempt to get away; a mistake. He holds one of her wrists and, with his free hand, takes out an egg and smashes it against her face. He takes out the second egg, she turns her face away, he catches hold of her hair and twists her head to face his. He smashes the second egg on her nose with so much force that he can see a thin trickle of blood coming out of her nostrils, under the slimy drip of the transparent albumen and the opaque yellow splatter of the yolk. The tears and the twisted mouth add to the ugly mess that is her face.

  Her wailing brings out Radha, who shouts – Stop it! Stop it now! Don’t you have any shame?

  Her relational seniority to Lakshman insulates her from being in any danger of receiving similar treatment, but this doesn’t prevent him from threatening – If you don’t stop screeching, it’s going to be you next.

  – How dare you? she retorts – Don’t you have any shame?

  Lakshman effortlessly modulates from rage to acid contempt. He says – What will you do? Complain to your absent husband? He fled the coop a long time ago, leaving me to deal with this zoo.

  Radha has no answer. Geeta, too, has stopped her loud crying. His mention of Ramlal, however, has the effect of turning Lakshman’s anger to ashes. A bitterness fills him, and a desolation. He has to force himself to complete what he has begun, but his heart is no longer in it. He says to Geeta – If this happens again … He doesn’t have the energy to finish it. He goes out to wash his hands of eggs and the disgusting smell.

  By the time spring is giving way to summer, Raju has mastered a sustained dance to the playing of the damru. Lakshman had already worked out that all he has to do is pull on the rope through Raju’s nose to make him leap up instantly and prance about as if red ants were biting his arse, but the trick has been to make him learn to hold that for five, ten, twelve minutes.

  He waits for the big festival of Golu. There is bunting strung out here and there, and three different amplifiers, positioned in different parts of the village, blare out Hindi film songs throughout the day and evening. At night, the mountains seem to distort the sound in such a way that it’s here one minute, gone the next, only to reappear from an unexpected direction, as if the sound had been torn into tiny paper fragments and scattered from the sky and dispersed helter-skelter by the breeze.

  He feels lucky to have an unobstructed view of the high point of the worship – the sacrifice of fifty-three goats. He has waited outside the temple overnight to secure this prize position. The crowd is so vast that had he left it until morning, he would have been no nearer than the arches leading to the front courtyard of the temple. The saffron, yellow and orange of the low pillared structure and the sea of marigolds wherever he looks – marigolds in garlands and festoons and baskets and strewn about everywhere around the temple – meld into a blinding sun. All of life is here, with all its noise and colours and suffocation. Lakshman has a fractional view of the enclosure behind the temple in which the goats are penned. A whole field of black goats, a sea of goats, like the sea of people around him. He can smell them from here. The animals look docile, resigned, as if they have sensed what’s coming. They have bright vermilion marks smeared on their foreheads, between their eyes, and marigold flowers around their necks or horns. Golu is almost hidden from his view, behind columns and the press of human bodies and heads in front of him. He can catch the occasional flash of the god’s enormous white turban, or a segment of his white, squat body on the white horse, if there is a chink in the wall of people in his line of vision, or if he leans his head at a difficult angle, but there is no space to do even that.

  A man leads the first goat, the biggest, fattest of the lot, reared for twenty-one days only on the fruit of the baanj and glossy jackfruit leaves, to the forked iron peg that has been permanently staked into the front courtyard, directly in front of the small, orange-framed door to the sanctum. What a blessing to be the first animal to be sacrificed, and what blessings will accrue to the young man who has been selected to bring the animals to the point where they will give up their life for Golu. Lakshman has long coveted this post, believing that such a service every year will make the god smile on him and remove all the giant boulders that sit in the middle of his life, obstructing its free flow. But, as in everything else, he has been unlucky. One chance at something, anything, just one chance – is that too much to ask? There is no getting away from Fate, but there is also no way of telling whether the story of his life is bound to continue in the same groove that it has run so far. What if there is a change? Is the god reading his thoughts?

  The fattened goat, its head down, comes obligingly almost up to the peg, then seems to understand something and wants to turn back. Lakshman can tell this, because the man has to drag it for the last few feet. The drums are loud in the foreground, and the manically ringing bells, hundreds and hundreds of them, strung out on the red arches that mark the long approach to the front courtyard and on the red-painted wooden beams at the edge where the roof meets the columns, some rung by devotees and worshippers, other, lighter ones set off by the brisk breeze, mingle with the purohit’s mantras, the shouts from the gathering, ‘Jai, Golu Devta ki jai’, the smoke from the incense, and Lakshman finds himself at once a part of this ocean and removed far from it, weightless, tiny, watching from above. When the feeling of suspension takes hold, there is a faint tingling in his fingers, accompanied by the sensation of every limb becoming thin and long like sticks and his head ballooning to a huge bubble while losing every weight it has, every mooring. He has to touch something, the shoulder or arm of the person nearest him, and clench and unclench his fists in order to remind him
self of his tethered corporeality. Then he is back in the ocean again until the weightlessness tolls back and untethers him.

  The man pushes the goat’s neck in the space between the two tines of the peg. The animal has stopped thrashing. It doesn’t even kick back with its hind legs. That perfect balance of absolute contraries again: in the thickness of the chanting, the drums, the bells, a stilled heart of hush. Waiting at the iron fork is the man from the Nath sect who will bring his sharpened khukri down on the goat’s neck and sever it. The purohit is in a trance of chanting. The worshippers hold their breath – the blow has to decapitate in one stroke, otherwise thirteen years of bad luck will be sent down by Golu upon the village. The drums are now the aggregated percussion of the heart of every human gathered.

  The khukri comes down in such a swift arc that there is no process, only the before and the after. The goat’s head is not severed in one clean cut but hangs at the neck, making it look like a toy animal that a clumsy child has broken during play. The spurting jet of blood, the purohit’s shout and the devotees’ collective exclamation of horror are all one in Lakshman’s senses. The man who had led the animal now brings the hind legs of the thrashing torso together, then the front legs, gathers it up as if it were an old mattress, hugs it to his own body and carries it out, his face and clothes sprinkled with blood. Lakshman sees his retreating back, as if he is fleeing a scene of crime, and the uncut head dangling from the crook of his arm like a dainty handbag picked up as an afterthought to the main spoils. A trail of shiny blood follows him.

  The man with the khukri has turned to stone, his weapon down, its blade almost black with the fresh blood, and a small colony of dark spots directly under it on the green-and-white tiled area on which he stands. A group of people on Lakshman’s right tries to move, jostling each other, and in the temporary space allowing some freedom of movement, he shifts, too, and catches a glimpse of Golu’s marble-white face and full lips the colour of kaafal. The god’s face, pleasant in its huge-eyed expressionlessness, is marked by something – Lakshman cannot tell what exactly – that makes him look offended. Then Lakshman is jostled too and he has to move with the segment of the crowd that he is in. The flash of vision is gone.

  The restless people are stilled as the young man leads another black goat to its slaying spot. This time the animal is refractory, straining to turn back, trying to dig its hooves into the unyielding tiles. It lets out a single bleat, then stops, as if realising that no amount of crying will save it. The sound conveys something to the other goats in the waiting area and is echoed by creatures that have remained strangely silent. But here, too, the responsive bleats are half-hearted, resigned, and after a dozen wavering and low ‘meeh-eh-eh-eeh’, the restiveness is extinguished. What survives, at least for Lakshman, is the much sharper presence of their suffocating odour.

  The second goat is dispatched in one go, and the third, and the fourth … A new smell begins to assert its metallic note, mild, almost evanescent compared with the cloud of goat-odour, but present nevertheless. Lakshman knows that this is the smell of blood. Years ago, when he was a boy, Ramlal had seen his twin’s eyes water at the overpowering stench at this annual sacrifice for Golu Devta and had explained the different smells to him.

  The lopped heads are quickly taken away and arranged in a circle at the feet of the god’s milk-white horse. They look deader than dead, separated from the bodies, with some of the bluish tongues sticking out slightly from a corner. A small wick is lit, between the horns, on each of the heads. Some of the wicks catch, others don’t; those that do burn with a small blue flame for a short while, then go out. The runnel, especially built around the tiled forecourt, is filling up with blood, but there’s more of it on the tiles and all around. The goat-usher skids more than once going about his work but manages to balance himself steady each time. The rising smell of blood brings back Ramlal to Lakshman’s mind. He feels close to suffocation. The flesh of the sacrificed goats will be cooked and served to everyone in the village. He tries to catch a final glimpse of the god’s face to check if his look of displeasure has been erased by all the blood that he has been offered. Some error of rhythm has occurred in the dance that had brought everything together, the flowers and blood and incense and bells and drums and chanting and people, people everywhere, their sounds and life. The slackness now unbinds all the component parts and sets them off in different directions.

  Lakshman turns round and pushes his way out, his back turned to the temple, until he reaches the thinning end of the crowd. He picks up his pace as he walks past the stragglers and latecomers, past the school-building with its grey doors and windows and the playground on three small terraces, until he arrives at the knoll on the edge of the wood behind Bhagwan’s house. Even at this elevated point, from which he can see the valleys fall away and roll into the distance under their cladding of forests, the lighter pine and darker oak coming together in a dense weave and, sometimes, a colony of human habitation that looks like a small cluster of doll’s houses, even at this height Lakshman cannot shake off his shortness of breath, his feeling that there isn’t enough air for him to breathe here. The mountains dazzle in the distance: he sees popping dark-and-coloured spots after staring at them for a while. He can’t find what he always searches for, almost involuntarily, when he looks at them – the nearly shut, heavy-lidded eyes, the long mark for the nose and the faintly, inscrutably smiling lips of Shiva imprinted on the slope of Nanda Devi that Ramlal had taught him to discern when he was little.

  On a golden afternoon when the boys were eight or nine years old, Ramlal had pointed out and named all the peaks – You see that blunt one, just along from the flat line, that’s Mrithugni, and the one after that, with the two dips, the two curves, do you see? – here he had shaped the indentation with his hand, to make his brother understand better – that’s Trishul, because if you see it from the other side, we’re seeing it sideways, if we see it from the front, it looks like Shiva’s trishul, do you see the three prongs of the trident?

  And Lakshman, dumb with wonder, had nodded. Whether he had actually understood it at the time he no longer remembers.

  Ramlal had continued – Then the one after it, on the right, here, follow my finger, that one is Nanda Devi. That is where Shiva lives.

  Then a dramatic pause, after which – You can see him. Do you want to see him? I can show you how to spot him.

  Still silent, Lakshman had barely been able to nod.

  – Follow my finger very carefully now. First close your eyes and think of Shiva. Now open them and look hard at where I am pointing. See that front slope of Nanda Devi? You see it, with snow on top and on the front, with rock showing where there’s no snow? You see it? Now look directly under that long, thin line of snow, just under that shadow. Do you see his two eyes? They are the curved lines under the shadow, one on each side of that black ridge that has no snow on it – that’s the nose. Do you see the eyes and the nose? The eyes look a bit sleepy, no? That’s because he has just woken up from his meditation. Why are you so quiet? Can’t you see?

  Of course, Lakshman could see – he could see the god’s beautiful, lotus-like eyes, more closed than open, and the mouth, almost smiling … there he was, the great god Shiva, his face imprinted on Nanda Devi, his abode. And there he, Lakshman, was, gazing on it, a wonder revealed to a boy, and all the air, all the light and all the days were his to do what he wanted.

  That evening Lakshman drinks four glasses of the bhaang-laced saffron-and-pistachio lassi they whizz up near the temple, an annual ritual at this time of the festivities for Golu. The hand with the bhaang is generous, in keeping with the mood around the occasion, and Lakshman finds himself, first, slowed down to the dragging, underwatery beat of his heart, then giggly in an escalatingly uncontrollable way. After a while the marketplace cants at an uncomfortable angle and he loses the ability to command any of his thoughts or the way a wildly rushing and random stream of them seem to make a playground of his mind. He is sure
he saw Golu frown. That white, white skin, like wax made out of milk. So much blood. And that smell. The meat the day after at the communal lunch has always had the whiff of goat for him. His wife and children will love the mutton. A heavy shroud falls on him, and he is suddenly fighting for air and light, for breath. He heaves and retches and the grass beside him gets covered by a small, viscous patch of yellowish-green liquid, still smelling obstinately of pistachios and saffron under the sour overlay of sick. And yet even after there is nothing to bring up, not even the last drop of his bitter, green bile, he still finds himself under that recognisable lid. Now there is an immovable stone upon it, getting heavier by the minute. There is nothing to do, nothing that can be done about it.

  When he wakes up, the helter-skelter film in his head has stopped but the weight hasn’t shifted an inch. He observes himself, from a distance, watching the children play danda-gulli outside and feeling nothing. Geeta complains about the piles of bear-shit at the back of the house and how the man she is paying to clear it away has not showed up for the last three days and the stench is unbearable, this used to be a human house, not a zoo, and the children are distracted all hours by the bear, and the creature is going to eat them out of house and home, where is she going to find the money to keep feeding him, too, when there is barely enough for the children and the three adults, particularly now that Lakshman has stopped bothering with even the basic work that their scrap of land demands and she has to look after that on top of everything else, how is she going to do it, does he think she has ten hands, how are the vegetables going to grow …? Lakshman’s right hand itches to slap her right across the mouth, but the feeling lasts for the tiniest moment before that dark crushing takes over again.