A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  The town straggles into an isolated tea-shop or two, a tyre shop and the frame of a house being constructed, with iron rods sticking out of the foundation pillars like tall, thin reeds, and then gives out on to an empty road bordered by vegetation. A mile further on Lakshman comes across a small temple. Its outside walls are painted blue, there is a red pennant on the conical roof and garlands of drying marigolds festooned across the small grilled metal gate. Lakshman ties Raju to a tree, removes his own chappals and walks into the tiny courtyard in front of the gate. He expects to find an idol of Shiva inside but it’s Hanuman instead, a mace in his left hand and a miniature mountain in his right, which is lifted up as if he is offering the mountain as a sweet to a particularly honoured guest. His face and body are painted blue too. Lakshman brings out the coconut, bows his head – more in concentration than devotion, for he has only one go at what he is about to do – then, with a force disproportionate to breaking the coconut in his hand, he brings it down on to the courtyard with something akin to fury, his teeth clenched. The coconut shatters and the fragments are dispersed wildly. There is a dark spray along the concrete where the liquid has exploded. Lakshman collects the coconut shards, reaches his hand through the metal grille and leaves the fruit on the floor of the sanctum. The prayer he says inwardly reminds the god that the offering is for the surprise gift of food, the blessing that had made his escape so easy, that he won’t forget his part of the bargain and will remember the god with gratitude every time he looks after his servant.

  The heat is beginning to bare its teeth, and by the time he and Raju have walked another mile, Lakshman, wet from head to toe, feels he is going to faint. Raju has the self-possession that only an animal can have.

  They cleave to the shaded areas, following the movement of the sun, until that is no longer feasible. At its zenith, the sun has full, ruthless command over everything under it; nowhere to hide. There is nothing to be done except find some cover and while away the time until sunset, at which point they can begin walking again, but he cannot think that far ahead without drinking some water. An image flashes through his head: the water tank in Golu’s temple back in his village, shaded partially by a neeli-gulmohar tree with its small grain-shaped leaves and, sometimes, the blue flowers strewn on its calm, green surface. After an hour of searching, when they reach what he thinks could be a stream, he discovers only a curving line of boulders and rocks, with a rare patch of yellow-green silt where the water has evaporated more recently.

  Raju pulls him along, sniffing the rocky ground and, uncharacteristically, pulls at the chain around his neck, as if he wants to break free or lead Lakshman somewhere. Stumbling over stones, he follows Raju to a tiny puddle of water hiding in the dark opening under the point where two big boulders join their rotund stomachs. Before Lakshman can negotiate his footing on the stones and get down to it, Raju, flexing the chain to its tautest, manages to perch on one of the fat boulders, push his snout down into the opening, his body at a mad angle, and lap up the water. Lakshman can hear the loud slurping, followed shortly by the habitual grunting sounds. He pulls Raju away and peers into the crack. All the water is gone. He shuts his eyes tight – he can see popping colours – and opens them again: no, no water. Raju’s enormous pink tongue is licking the mouth that houses it. He looks unperturbed, unreadable.

  The world around Lakshman turns dark. Before he can think of a suitable punishment for the ungrateful animal, he detaches the nose-rope from the collar and gives it a furious tug. Raju squeals and leaps over the boulder. At that moment the punishment presents itself to Lakshman’s conscious mind. He keeps pulling the rope without letting Raju descend on to more level ground, effectively keeping him hopping precariously from one rock to another, or sometimes jogging on one large boulder, the pain preventing him from finding an even surface on which he can at least balance while being kept dancing.

  Lakshman lets out a crazed laugh – See, haramzada, what I can do to you? How does this feel, eh? How does it feel?

  With each word, the pulling on the rope becomes harder, more manic. The sounds now emerging from Raju change to an infernal combination of shrieking and yowling, the switch between the two random. Lakshman feels fear and relaxes his hold on the rope. Will Raju now leap at his throat? Will he charge and attack him with his nails? Lakshman drops the rope to pick up the stick to protect himself in that eventuality, forgetting that Raju is temporarily untied and can easily run away, particularly after what has just been inflicted on him.

  But Raju doesn’t escape. He sits on a rock, emitting that frightening shriek, which peters out gradually. Lakshman waits at a safe distance, stick held ready in his right hand. He swings between fear at a potential attack and anxiety at the possibility of Raju’s escape. Raju, his shrieking now over, looks down at the ground, as if he is searching for something he has lost. He clambers down and presses his snout between the two round boulders to peer at the spot where the tiny puddle had been, but there is no comfort to be had from there any longer. The chain is now stretched out slackly on the stones. There is a reasonable length between its end and Raju’s neck. With thudding heart, Lakshman catches hold of it but doesn’t dare pull. He will reattach the nose-rope to the collar later, when he feels safe.

  Two weeks pass. They perform at a crossroads – Lakshman is now desperate; they’ve eaten once in the last two days. Traffic is desultory: a truck every twenty minutes, a few cars. From the open windows of a couple of them empty packets of crisps and gutka are thrown out. Lakshman runs to the spots where these land, hoping to salvage something, praying that the people in the cars made a mistake, or were getting rid of unwanted food. Raju licks the shiny salty-oily innards of an empty packet of Kurkure. Not a single vehicle stops, no one gets out to watch a bear and his owner sitting at the roadside, the man shaking his damru, the bear trying out a few steps. After several hours of this, the heat becomes too unbearable for this half-hearted soliciting to continue. When it’s dark, Lakshman makes his way with Raju to the railway tracks. The heat is hardly any lower at night, when the baked earth radiates it back in its weak revenge on the sun.

  There was a far higher density of people and their settlements along the tracks. They wouldn’t starve around here, or die of thirst. But he works out quickly that these thin strings of slums, and sometimes even small villages, will not provide them with sustenance for more than a day or a night. Besides, there are too few people to make more than one bear-dance worthwhile; or even one – they do not have anything to spare for roadside entertainment.

  Lakshman and Raju live off bread and tea, dal and rice, bananas, the occasional samosa or fried snack, pakoras, sweets, biscuits, fritters. How little one can get used to, he thinks, not for the first time, coveting the food of others, all the while trying not to think of food. At a depleted reservoir under a railway bridge, he strips off and washes himself and his clothes. He spreads out the wet clothes on scrub bushes; they are dry in minutes. He sees Raju, tied to a tree whose trunk casts a shadow as thin as a piece of loose thread, digging up the ground in the four-feet radius allowed him and apparently eating the dry dust and earth. When Lakshman reaches him, he notices, but only after close inspection, that Raju has discovered a long line of black ants and has eaten all that have been within his reach. He has dug up the earth around him hoping to discover a network of nests. Lakshman untethers him and leads him along to where he can spy more ants. They seem to be more readily visible to the animal’s eye than to the human’s. The glare of the burning soil doesn’t make things easier. In a moment of both optical blindness and indulgence, he lets Raju lead him in a zigzag, spiral, circular dance, chasing tiny, scattering black insects, all of which the bear appears to be mopping up with the pink extended cloth of his tongue and devouring with sureness and ease. The grunts and unnameable range of sounds coming out of him seem to Lakshman to belong to the same arsenal out of which his pain is expressed. Would Lakshman, if he had his eyes shut, ever be able to distinguish between the two kind
s? The unexpected gift is exhausted all too soon. He thinks Raju looks mournful.

  – Chaley, he asks, we have a long way to go. He wants to stroke the bear’s head but holds back.

  Scourged by the hot winds, they can barely proceed. The very air has become an invisible fire. Lakshman has salvaged empty, discarded bottles of Bisleri along the way. He fills up whenever he gets a chance, often from tea-stalls and roadside eateries. At least water is one thing he doesn’t have to pay for. Besides, the novelty value of a bear prises open some people enough to offer food. But a substantial amount of their erratic and meagre supply of food comes from foraging. It occurs to Lakshman that Raju is much the best equipped to do this and it may be in his, Lakshman’s, interests even to let the bear free and follow where the animal’s nose and instincts lead him, but that, of course, he cannot do.

  They find watermelons lying among their decaying leaves like dark green boulders in a field. Lakshman waits until it is pitch-dark, then gorges himself on four of them, breaking them open with the side of his hand. He gets the runs through the night and soils his trousers. He exhausts his supply of water cleaning himself, but there’s no way he can wash his pyjamas until he comes to another pond or reservoir. Disgust fills him, and shame, until he feels he can taste them as the rebellious ball of phlegm at the back of his throat, impatient to come out. Like a helpless child, he surrenders to tears, tears of self-pity and anger. How did he get here, squatting yet again to let another brief, hot squirt come out of his sore sphincter, when he had a home, more to eat than he has now, his wife to look after him, children to carry on his line and take care of him in his old age?

  The density of slums increases near the level-crossings and stations of bigger towns. It feels as if the greedy, unruly sprawl is restless in its desire to subsume the iron tracks within it. Pigs, dogs, snotty children with matted hair, rutted earth that will turn to large stretches of puddle-pocked fields, sewage, open drains, narrow lanes with rickety houses closely huddled along them like too many bad, crooked teeth in a mouth, signage everywhere, on walls, on makeshift boards, on the front of houses and shops, signage in Hindi, which he can read, but often in languages he doesn’t know but can tell are Urdu and English. And garbage, garbage everywhere, inseparable from the humans and animals and buildings and shops, each seemingly flowing into the other, with no lines to mark the boundaries. In the narrow roads and lanes, the thickness of traffic – rickshaws, cars, motorbikes, buses, lorries, bicycles, scooters – stuns Lakshman. How is he ever going to penetrate to the centre of these towns and make Raju dance? He can barely cross the road. An odd thing happens. So far on their journey, Lakshman has followed Raju, now this reverses itself; Raju seems to want to hide behind Lakshman, making it awkward for him to hold on to the chain with his hand behind him at an angle to his shoulder. And … and … who knows, what if the animal, in a moment of wildness, attacks him from behind?

  But the sheer numbers mean that they attract attention, which, Lakshman is beginning to understand, he can attempt to harness. Set inwards a little distance from the railway-edge of the town, Lakshman and Raju put on their show under a tree near the crossing of three roads, in the narrow margin between an open drain and the stream of traffic, the band where fruit-sellers and snack-merchants sit during the day. A sizeable crowd gathers around them, impeding the passage of traffic. Encouraged by the number of people, Lakshman tries to up his game – he sings snatches of Hindi film songs which are currently all the rage and which he has heard blaring out of loudspeakers everywhere along the way. He doesn’t know the lyrics, only the refrain or the catchphrase, but that seems to be enough, coupled, crucially, with Raju’s antic movements, to bring some entertainment to the gathering.

  Halfway through the act, Lakshman feels an odd sense of detachment steal over him after he inadvertently notices Raju’s eyes – blinking, unfocused, looking at nothing, or seeming to be looking at something beyond what is in front of and around him. It is as if he is not present. Lakshman begins to feel that he, too, is looking at himself in a different way, from a distance: a man playing a damru, mouthing repetitive words of command or cajoling, singing snatches of popular songs, with a funny black-and-grey animal circling him on its hind legs, sometimes shaking itself rhythmically, sometimes bringing up its front paws to its face as if in a namaste. In this state of flotation, Lakshman feels that he has done this before many times, this roadside performance, including this very one, in this very place, at this very hour, so much so that he can predict the next few seconds of the action. All his life is becoming the repetition of the same few actions, unfolding in slightly different destinations.

  A corpse is borne past them on a pallet with its retinue of mourners. Ram naam satya hai, Ram naam satya hai. Lakshman, pulled out of his reverie, instantly notes that the dead body passed him on his left side; an ill omen. His heart goes out of the performance. He tried to wind it down but a child, accompanied by her father, wants to ride Raju. Lakshman, pushing down his anxiety, asks for an upfront payment before he assents. The man gives him ten rupees. Scarcely believing his luck, he lets go of the rope pulling Raju; the bear sits down immediately. Lakshman attaches the rope to the collar – in a sign of how much he has been trained, Raju goes on all fours, thinking that it is time to go. The girl is seated on him gingerly, the father’s hands on her, steadying her, unwilling to let go, should anything untoward happen.

  Lakshman’s heart is a mad drum only he can hear. The trick will be to keep Raju in this position. Will he be able to understand the change in signals – leash and damru, not nose-rope and damru? The corpse-bearers. He should not be attempting this on a day a corpse has passed on his left. The girl’s legs come down the sides of Raju by only a few inches. She holds them out; she is not relaxed and clearly having second thoughts. The father keeps up a comforting patter. Lakshman adds his voice to it, but more to keep Raju comfortable and steady. Instead of playing the damru, he lets Raju see that he is standing up and tugs gently at the collar band, hoping, praying, willing that Raju is going to start walking slowly, thinking that they are moving on from here.

  And Raju does exactly that. He starts walking, the girl balanced on his back, the father at her side, reaching out to keep his hand on his daughter, and Lakshman following no more than three feet behind, chain in hand, crooning – Chal, mera beta, chal, chal, mera Raju, mera chhotu, chal, chal.

  Halfway through Raju’s navigation of the circle, the crowd erupts into applause.

  The following day, at around the same time, Lakshman and Raju begin their act again. But this time Lakshman advertises before he begins – Come, come, come one, come all, come to see the bear that gives children rides on his back, a gentle bear, a paltu bhaloo, a bear who is a child himself; come, come, only ten rupees a ride, ten rupees only. He shakes his damru as he chants this in a sing-song. Raju shakes his head. People think he is doing this in harmony with the rhythm of the damru. Raju gives ten children rides on his back. Lakshman has to turn away a few more because he judges them to be too heavy for the bear. He makes just over a hundred and eighty rupees that evening.

  He orders two plates of dinner at a shack – rice, roti, dal, sabzi, egg curry – and gives one to Raju, then buys fruits and laddoos for both of them. Raju shits – an enormous pile – near where the pigs are wallowing on a spreading hill of garbage, sewage and mud as they try to find a slightly secluded spot where they can settle for the night. Lakshman picks the back of a dawakhana, shut for the night; a narrow ledge that forms the top stair of a flight of three leading to a collapsible iron gate, heavily locked, at different points, with five padlocks. The place has the great advantage of a gulmohar tree a few yards away on the lane that leads to the main street. Lakshman ties Raju to this tree, checks and rechecks if the day’s takings are in the inside pocket of his trousers, and settles down to wait for sleep to come.