A State of Freedom
Page 17
Through the murk inside him a single thought rises to the surface – what does the animal think?
IV
1: Axe
The first image that came to her when she thought of that day was the way the blood had arced and sprayed as they threw her brother’s right hand into the surrounding bushes. Her eyes had followed the flying curve of the drops of blood as the severed hand flew into the bushes and disappeared. What else did she notice? That blood on green leaves in the shadow was not red but black. And even on the green that had the sun on it, the blood was also black until you looked carefully, very carefully, and then it would appear to be red, but only if you already knew that it was blood and, therefore, red, not black. Milly remembered all this.
This was when she was little, before she was called Milly, before the conversion. She was still called Manglu then, because she was born on a Tuesday. And her eldest brother, the one whose hand they cut off, was born on a Wednesday and so called Budhuwa. They had come into their hut and dragged him out. There were six of them and it was winter, their faces covered in shawls and woollen hats. Budhuwa didn’t shout or cry. They took an axe from the corner where all the farming implements and tools were kept – the sickles, the ploughshares, the tangi, the chherkha. The lohar had visited recently and sharpened the tools of all the families in their tiny village. He had sat outside in the courtyard around which all the homes were built – he was not allowed to enter any of them – and sharpened scores of these tools and knives on a whetting stone and on the pedal-driven sharpener that was ingeniously connected to his rusty bicycle. The more furiously he pedalled, the more generous the spray of orange sparks from the sharpening edge against which he held each tool. The children all gathered round to watch the fireworks; so exciting they had been. The lohar brought his own glass for water and a plate for his food. Someone gave him roti and pickles for lunch, all of which he ate quickly, wiping his plate clean. Milly, transfixed, like all the other children, by the presence of this magician who could send such short-lived flowers of fire flying at will, remembered that he had sharpened their family’s axe right after he had finished his food.
This was the axe that the men grabbed that afternoon. Four of them came in and got hold of Budhuwa and pulled him out. There were two more outside. They must have already been to the rice fields to look for him and knew that he was at home. It was terror that had silenced Budhuwa, she understood now, not courage. The only person crying was their mother, crying and falling at the feet of each of the men, saying over and over and over, ‘Please let him go, he’s my son, please, I’m falling at your feet, please spare him, let him go.’ Their father, too drunk, even at this hour, to plead, had tottered around the place, barely able to keep his eyes open, or to string intelligible words free of slurring. There was a crowd in the courtyard – people had come out of the surrounding huts to see what was going to happen. Even the children were there. Two women chased their little ones inside, lifting the crawling babies on to their hips. Milly’s mother didn’t have the presence of mind to do that, and neither did their father, so Milly and her six siblings witnessed everything.
Two men held down Budhuwa’s neck, one his feet, while the man wielding the axe said, ‘If you don’t hold out your right hand, I’m going to let you have it in the neck.’ Budhuwa held out his right hand – the fingers were trembling, Milly could see even from far away, where she was standing, almost hidden behind the legs of one of their neighbours stationed at the edge, near the bushes – then withdrew it immediately. She couldn’t see her brother’s face. The axe-wielding man shouted, ‘You choose, then, is it going to be your head or your feet? If you can’t hold out your hand straight and still, you choose.’ Budhuwa held out his hand, still shaking. Milly thought, was this going to be like the time she saw the slaughter of the cockerels for Sarhul, the head of the red one, meant for Luthum Haram and Luthum Buria, chopped off in one blow, the thin jet of blood first sprinkling the pahan’s face, as he had turned his head away, then his clothes, and the headless torso of the bird spinning and spinning and spinning around on the ground, getting blood everywhere. Why could he not have held it down and cut it into pieces?
The axe came down, Milly didn’t remember if she saw that, only the flinging of the hand, which flew past her into the bushes, and her head followed that arc and her eyes got fixed on the brief agitation and parting of the leaves and branches and the blackness of the blood on the green. She couldn’t turn her head back to the source of the terrible sound: her brother. Something had frozen her neck. Or her eyes. After a long time the howling changed to whimpering and she could turn her head. The first thing she saw was the axe, which they had left behind. The sparse amount of blood clinging to the edge of the blade was out of proportion to the cries that she had just heard.
2: Friend
The youngest daughter of the woman from behind whose legs Milly had watched the mutilation of Budhuwa was her dearest friend. The girl’s name was Soni and she and her family lived in the same village. The girls played in the dust together, ran along the narrow aars of the rice fields, chasing each other, sat under mango trees to shelter from the rain and made up songs about the way raindrops or downpour sounded on the leaves. ‘Jhim jhim jhim, it goes,’ Milly said. ‘No, jhum jhum jhum,’ said Soni. They climbed trees and made reeds out of the long leaves of palms. They discovered that the stem of the papaya tree was hollow; they dipped it in soapy water and blew bubbles. They saved tamarind stones after eating the ripe fruit off the trees in the summer, or tamarind pickle at other times during the year, cleaned them and put them to use in invented games. They lay on the ground, balanced a stone each on their foreheads, exactly between their eyes, and a garland of the brown seeds around their necks, and kept very still so that the stones didn’t fall off, and pretended that they were both brides, decked out on their wedding day. The girl from whose neck a stone slid off first would be the first to get married. There were no shop-bought toys or dolls, but they made do with painted clay birds that someone in the village made – they had dried palm leaves for tails and ears – and little carts made of sticks and dried sal leaves, and garishly painted carved sal-wood or bamboo creatures: humans, animals, once even a bus with wheels. They had to be told what it was because they had never seen a bus before. They played with leaves and stones, arranging them in pretty patterns, sometimes strewing flower petals around them and singing the songs from Ba-parab: ‘Rupa lekan ba chandu setera kana/Sona lekan ba chandu mulua kana’.
They sat next to each other in the local school, which was three miles away, and a few metres off a tar-metalled road, in the middle of open land with nothing around it except a long, low knoll on the horizon to the east, a few trees dotting the red earth, and some bushes, scrub and other vegetation. Children from all the villages within a radius of ten or twelve miles had to walk to, and back from, this school, the only one in this particular block of the district. They didn’t mind; it didn’t occur to them that something such as minding existed; this was the way things were and they knew nothing else. Sometimes the long journey in all seasons meant that they missed class, but this was infrequent. There was certainly a lot less absenteeism among students than among the teachers.
The school was painted pink and had two large rooms, a blue ‘kitchen shed’, where the students’ midday meal was cooked, and an outhouse, which was the latrine and had a wooden door that did not reach all the way to the floor. It had to be shut with a hook lock, which had begun to rust. This toilet was a new thing for all the children because their homes didn’t have any – everyone did his business in the open – and they had to be taught by the teacher how to use it. Much embarrassed giggling had accompanied these demonstrations. Milly and Soni had been the most helplessly tittering of the lot.
Everyone between the ages of seven and eleven sat in one classroom, and the older children in the other. They sat on the floor, cross-legged, facing the teacher and the blackboard. There weren’t enough chataïs for all
of them – anywhere between thirty and forty-five – so some had to sit on the bare concrete. Sometimes as often as fifteen or twenty days a month the children walked to the school and the teacher didn’t show up; or she did and left around noon. Over time, this had the effect of thinning student numbers, too – who would want to walk so far, especially during the merciless summer and monsoon, to sit in a room, waiting, waiting, until it was time to walk back again? And when they tenaciously continued to come regularly, it wasn’t because of the lessons – there weren’t many – but for other reasons: a close friend or two; an escape from being sent to the fields to work; or simply a way of keeping at bay the weight of endless days of nothing. And the biggest reason of all, the one square meal they got in school, regardless of whether the teacher was present or absent.
But Milly’s case was slightly different. She had her best friend not very far away in the village; there was no need to do a round trip of over two hours every day to be with her. True, the midday meal was a big attraction but there was something bigger than this. Milly was on fire to study, to learn to read and write, to go to a bigger school where she would get to wear a uniform and carry a pile of books in her hand or in a bag, books she would be able to read easily from cover to cover and retain in her head everything they contained.
But after barely two years at this school, Milly, at the age of eight, was taken out and sent by her mother to work as a housemaid in distant Dumri, eight hours by bus from her village. The family desperately needed the money, and her mother, who tried to hold everything together, couldn’t see how they were to hold off starvation if Milly wasn’t sent away. She was going to need every paisa from those extra two hundred rupees a month that were going to be Milly’s wages. Her mother had nine mouths to feed – herself, seven children and a drunkard of a husband, who instead of earning money was a drain on what little they could pool together. They struggled to raise the bus fare, which was one hundred and twenty-five rupees. The money necessary for a return ticket for her father or one of her older brothers to accompany Milly was beyond their means, so they had to wait until someone else was travelling to Dumri. Arrangements were made for Milly to be met when she got off the bus. This was all done without her knowledge; not because her mother thought that the girl would be upset, but because the idea of consulting a daughter on a decision already reached by her mother was unimaginable.
Milly was told two days before she was scheduled to go. At first, she thought she was going to see a town far, far away, a different world altogether, so there was some excitement mingled with the fear that she felt, excitement especially about travelling by bus, which she had never done before.
‘How long will it take to get there?’ she asked.
‘Six, seven, eight hours,’ her mother said.
Milly did not have any notion of time to understand what this actually meant, she only knew that it was a very long time.
‘Oh, that’s very far. When will I come back? After how many hours?’
‘You won’t come back, you will stay there,’ her mother said.
‘Stay? Stay where? Many days?’ Milly was baffled.
Even after the situation was explained to her – that she was going to be living in the home of a couple in that far-away town – and a consolatory lie, that she was going to come home every month, added to the mix, it only dawned on Milly by slow degrees that she was being sent away to work. She looked at the healed stump of Budhuwa’s arm, its end gathered together in a tiny knot-like pucker like the kind she had once seen at the end of an inflated balloon, and realised that it would look a little bit different when she saw it next time; and something went in a sweeping movement inside her child’s chest, emptying it.
‘And school?’ she asked in a small voice. ‘Studying?’
‘Nothing doing,’ her mother replied impatiently. ‘Studying. What good is that for a girl? You’ll be more useful bringing in some money. Now shut up.’
The pictures in her school book, with the words written large under them – ainak (glasses), kachauri (stuffed pastry), titlin (butterfly), aurat (woman), gilhari (squirrel) – went through her head. There would be no more books, no more pictures. She looked at the faces of her brothers and sisters; Budhuwa’s was turned away. Three of them were too little to understand what was going on. The faces of the other two looked small. Or so it appeared in the shadow-casting flame of the sooty hurricane lamp. Then a different thought struck her: Soni.
When Milly said that she was going to a different country to earn money, and that she was going to come back every month in a bus, bearing gifts of tinsel, sweets, pictures, and red, blue, green and yellow ribbons, all things she considered beautiful and desirable, it wasn’t at all clear that Soni understood the full implication of what her friend was saying. There were no goodbyes, no promises or expectations to see each other soon, because there was no understanding of absence and not having each other’s company. There was no wrench, no exchange of tokens or mementoes. The day’s play ended as it did on any other ordinary day.
The next day, when boarding the bus, Milly was eager to sit at a window because Budhuwa had told her that she could see the world, the trees, the houses, the fields, all moving past her in the opposite direction when the bus was in motion. She sat at the window and looked out. The bus was stationary, still boarding. She looked out at Budhuwa standing beside her mother, who had a toddler on her hip and one of the younger brothers holding on to her hand. Milly saw her father with his crumpled face. Someone was selling bananas. Budhuwa bought one, reached his hand in and gave it to Milly. The bus was beginning to fill up rapidly. Something shifted and she began to cry, not as a child cries, with its innocent and skinless complaint against the world, but as an adult, silently, trying to keep it all in, only just beginning to understand the weight of the world.
3: Friend, part II
Soni was the one who first noticed it. She said to her mother, ‘What do you have in your mouth?’
‘What do you mean? Nothing,’ her mother said.
‘You do. Open your mouth. Show, show.’
‘Here, haaaaaa.’ The jaws opened. Nothing in there. The jaws shut. ‘See, nothing. I told you.’
‘No, you’re hiding it. See, here, here’, and Soni touched the slight protrusion on her right jaw, low down, almost under the ear. It was as if she had tucked in a morsel of a treat, a sweetie maybe, and had stowed it far back in her mouth to savour it slowly. ‘No, no, show again,’ the girl demanded.
Soni’s mother obliged. Soni stuck a finger inside and poked around. Teeth, wet flesh, but no hidden sweet. Her mother gently caught hold her wrist and moved her ferreting hand away.
‘You’re very naughty,’ she said.
Yet that lump persisted: Soni could see it clearly the moment her mother shut her mouth again. Then she forgot about it.
Until her elder sister, older than her by seven years, noticed it too and pointed it out in front of the others.
Soni piped up, ‘Yes, there are sweets she’s hiding in there.’
Their mother, rushed off her feet, snapped back, ‘Sweets, sweets! Where do you see sweets? Why have sweets got into your head? Where are we going to get sweets from, you mad girl?’
There was no mirror in their hut, so Soni’s mother couldn’t check for herself. She felt along her right jaw, pressing at and around the point her daughters indicated. Yes, there did seem to be some kind of swelling, but she didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. She thought of asking her husband but forgot about it. Then someone else, her neighbour, mentioned it as they were picking sal leaves and dead branches in the forest one afternoon. The two women walked back to the village to verify the matter in her neighbour’s hand-mirror, a rectangular one framed in green plastic, which was so small that it showed only segments of the face, not the whole thing, if held too close. It took Soni’s mother a few tries to get the distance between mirror and reflection right so that she could see her entire face in perspective.
That nothing became something. At first, the pain was a dull ache, sometimes flicking over to a throbbing, then returning to the steady state of ache. The monsoons had tricked them that year by not arriving and the rice in the fields had died to a brown waste. The only thing the villagers could salvage was bundles of hay and straw from the dried plants. Soni’s mother had fallen over, face down in the sharp stubble, while tying a bundle she had harvested earlier in the day. An egret, watching the ground intently, strutted a couple of steps and flew off. The pain seemed to have come alive: it was moving its hundreds of fingers up into her ear, her neck, the back of her head, her right eye, her throat. The sparrow’s egg had given birth to an animal that was struggling to get out.
She gurned and drooled. The pain wouldn’t allow her to speak. They gave her tribal remedies: a hot poultice of quicklime and turmeric on the growth; a paste of jumuri leaves; dried red berries of the ajarini infused in hot water. These did nothing to abate the pain. Soni watched her mother let out the screams of a woman possessed at night, when she said the thing in her jaw was moving. At other times she saw her writhe and thrash on the floor, once beating her head against the mud wall so hard that a small crack appeared on it. Soni’s own heart thrashed inside her little chest. Why couldn’t they take her mother’s pain away?
The nearest doctor’s clinic was three hours’ walk away. She was never going to be able to do it, not now. Soni’s father rode his wife pillion on a borrowed bicycle and took her to the doctor, worrying not so much about the reduced person he was pedalling into town as the doctor’s fees. He only had thirty rupees with him. How would he pay for the medicines on top of the fees? The doctor waived his fee, wrote out a prescription and said, ‘This tablet, number one here, give two to her every four hours. Then you need to take her to the hospital. This needs to be removed. She’ll need an operation. Quickly. I’ll give you a letter, show it to the people in the hospital.’