A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  With the money he had, Soni’s father could only buy fourteen tablets. He watched the young man in the dispensary cut out four tablets with a pair of scissors from a blister-pack of ten to add to the one full pack. The pills were gone in two days. The pain, which hadn’t disappeared but had somewhat lessened, came roaring back, as if punishing her for daring to use something to battle it. Soni saw her mother return to becoming a wraith again, and her heart felt like it was rice being threshed. Her older sister stopped going to school to take over the duties their mother could no longer perform.

  They went picking kendu leaves in the forest together. For every hundred leaves, they would get twenty-five paise. One afternoon they were late coming back: dusk had already begun to settle and soon it would shade into dark. Soni’s sister led through a wider path, away from the denser jungle. They heard a vehicle not far away: forest officials on duty. The sound came nearer and nearer and, with it, the two beams of the headlights. Without exactly knowing why, the two girls tried instinctively to hide, but a beam caught Soni’s sister as they were attempting to scurry into the interior. The Jeep came closer and stopped. Two men jumped out. The girls could hear voices.

  ‘Who’s there? We’re forest officers. We’ve seen you. Show yourself,’ one of them shouted to the trees.

  The girls might have stayed undiscovered, but someone shone a powerful torch and the light caught Soni’s sister straight on her face. Later, Soni would think, they could have run into the cover of the jungle; they would never have been found.

  Now, Soni watched her sister transformed to stone. The men came nearer.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them demanded. ‘Why are you trying to run away?’

  ‘Come here, move closer,’ the other man commanded. They were holding lathis. ‘What, you’ve swallowed your tongue?’ he barked. ‘What were you doing in the dark in the forest? Do you not know, it’s not a good place for girls to be?’ His voice changed with the last sentence; something else had crept into his tone, something slow and lazy.

  The other man laughed. ‘Yes, tell us, what were you doing?’ he asked. ‘What are you holding?’ He extended his right hand and took the bundle of leaves that Soni’s sister had collected.

  ‘Aha, kendu. Do you have a licence to collect leaves? Don’t you know it’s illegal otherwise?’

  Licence? Illegal? Everyone in the village had been doing it for as long as the girls had been conscious, and their parents and grandparents and ancestors before them. But Soni’s sister was too cowed to answer them. What if there really was a new rule they didn’t know about? Every day the government people made some rule that made their lives more and more impossible. They kept hearing talk about how they would have to leave their village and the forest and move far away because big companies wanted the land. Where would they go? What would they do?

  ‘You have to come with us,’ the man said, and grabbed Soni’s sister’s wrist. She seemed to have become stone, yet that stone was trembling, a tremor that was transmitting itself through the narrow gap of air to Soni standing by her side.

  The man nearer the Jeep added his voice to this. ‘Yes, you need to come with us. We’ll see what we can do with you.’ And then a laugh like a crow manically cawing its death.

  Soni could feel her sister trembling. Why wasn’t Didi speaking? Where were they going to take her? What were they going to do?

  ‘Let’s take the younger one too,’ he said. ‘There are two of us, and two of them.’ That carrion laugh again, like audible gusts of rot.

  Didi let out a cry – ‘No!’ So clogged, from the depths of a dream, it seemed. Then that stone-like inertia broke and everything happened so fast that it outran thought. Soni’s sister reached out a hand towards her, pushed her away and said, ‘Run! Run back home’ in a ferocious whisper. She tried to wiggle herself away from the man who was still holding her wrist. The grip tightened. One beat, two beats. Then Soni moved sideways, turned her back to the men and her sister and started to run. She heard rustling, a cry go up from the men, heard one of them shouting and beginning to run after her. She was nine, light, fleet-footed, powered by fear; and she knew the forest, where she could slip into a brake or take cover behind a close-packed sentry of trees. And the light was going fast, particularly near the ground, up the trunks of trees now almost to the height of an adult. She ran like a spirit escaping the case of its body at the moment of death. All she knew was the particular small clearing, at the junction of two thin, almost invisible trails, that she had to get to before the dark devoured everything. If she couldn’t, she would be lost for the night and eaten alive by a leopard or a bear. She looked back only once. What light was left was like ash. Through the screen of the tree-crowd, she saw, or imagined she saw, one of the men, visible only because of his white shirt, huddled on the ground as if weeping over a dead loved one. Or an animal eating its prey. The darkness, and the swiftness of her backward gaze, made it impossible to see what he was hunched over. The forest seemed to stick in her throat.

  They sent a search party into the forest at first light the next morning. They couldn’t find her. They came back to the village at dusk, in total silence. When Soni and her father entered their hut they found her sitting with her back against a wall, her face in the shadow. Their mother was crying, but to Soni’s ears and eyes it was a different kind of crying, a different sound, not of pain but what she could only think of as anger. Didi was a stone again. Her knees and elbows were scabbed, her legs cut in places. In the darkness inside, Soni couldn’t see what she would discover over the next few days – bruises everywhere, a slow, pained walk as if everything inside her sister had been broken. She remembered her mother saying only one thing when they returned from their search: ‘She crawled back, she couldn’t walk.’

  Over time, Didi learned how to walk normally again. Yet something felt lacking – sometimes she bared her teeth in a kind of simulation of a smile but, lacking the corresponding illumination in her eyes, it couldn’t be called that; it was a perpetually failing, half-hearted rehearsal for it.

  Even as Soni’s mother’s body came to resemble a scarecrow’s – she could barely eat anything – her face seemed to be sucking up all the matter in her body and storing it in that bulging angle. Her face changed shape: it was a small, empty, shrivelled sack from which someone had forgotten to take something out from a hidden corner. Her eyes were distant and out of focus all the time, as if they had become strangers to the head to which they felt they didn’t belong any longer.

  There were two trips to the nearest public hospital, a four-hour journey on a bus. The seventy-five rupees for the bus ticket for each passenger were out of their reach. Soni’s father borrowed the fare and an amount he guessed he would need for medicines; the total came to five hundred rupees. He was told that he would have to pay six hundred rupees if he repaid after one month, seven hundred and twenty-five after two months, eight hundred and fifty after three, and so on. But he couldn’t think ahead to the time of repayment or the reality of the incremental sums involved; they meant nothing to him; now was the only thing that mattered.

  The hospital – how was he going to negotiate that? Who was he supposed to talk to? Who was going to guide him to the right person? He should have brought someone from the village, someone educated, someone who could speak, someone who would know whom to speak to. This place was going to crush him. Wherever he looked there were sick people, people with bandages or casts, the bandages sometimes with a visible blot of blood underneath, dark at the centre, fading towards the peripheries, people walking very slowly with the help of sticks, people lying flat on the floor and in the entranceway, people lying absolutely motionless, eyes wide open, in some cases, staring at nothing, people groaning, coughing, wheezing, people with missing hands or legs, with open sores and grisly protuberances. A man was sitting, back to a wall, the left side of his face a bulging hive of tightly clustered black berries. Soni’s father’s stomach heaved. He couldn’t read a single sig
n, he didn’t know how to. How stupid was it to have come without anyone to help him? This place was going to crush him.

  He went from person to person, the doctor’s letter clutched in his hand, asking for guidance, some kind of direction. The only word he thought could help him was ‘operation’; the doctor had said she needed an operation. Someone said, ‘Go to that table there, they can help you.’ When he went to the table, he was told he had to go somewhere else. At a counter, the press of people clamouring to be heard, reaching forward pieces of paper, elbowing and jostling, defeated him. How was he ever going to get to the front? When he did get there, after an hour, he was told he had come to the wrong place. He had to go upstairs. They couldn’t help him here, this was the … then some unintelligible words. He went up two flights of stairs to the next floor. People rushing about, waiting, sitting, standing. Who was he going to ask for help? He fixed on a woman he thought looked like a doctor; she had that listening rope around her neck. She told him he had come to the wrong place. He had to go downstairs and ask at the main counter. He went downstairs again. He was a tiny piece of straw in the wind. When he jostled his way to the counter downstairs, he was told to go upstairs again. This time he said that he had already been, but had been sent back down. The man said there was nothing he could do, and could he move aside – he couldn’t spend the entire day talking to just one person, there were others waiting behind him.

  Soni’s father turned away, came outside and sat down on the steps. Against his will, his mouth twisted, like a child’s; he couldn’t make it hold its shape; he failed to make his crying resemble a dignified adult’s. His wife tried to comfort him. What a strange world, he thought; she comforting him when it should be the other way around. He was utterly defeated. People around them probably thought he was crying because some near one had died in the hospital and he had just received the news. What were they thinking? He had never felt so ashamed in his life.

  An elderly woman, hobbling on her stick, came up to him to commiserate; it was all up to him, uparwalla, she said, and looked up at the sky. It was she who accompanied him to the main desk of the surgery section, on the other side of the building. Here the collection of people waiting to be seen was even grislier. Some of them hardly looked human any more. There were dogs sniffing at sores and winding their way in and out among the humans. No one seemed to have the energy to chase them away. It was the elderly woman who spoke to the man in charge, who filled out the forms for him and who conveyed to him the most important information: the people here had been waiting for operations for days because there were no doctors to do them. They would have to return the following day, but there was no guarantee that a doctor was going to be present to look at Soni’s mother. They would have to keep trying until they got lucky one day; how long that was going to take, no one knew.

  Soni didn’t get to hear the details of what happened on her parents’ first outing to the hospital, but only gathered a sense of how reduced they were afterwards, like husk, without weight, without any consequence.

  They went again, after two months. Soni’s father borrowed money again, while the previous loan remained unpaid, accruing interest. He could no longer bear to see his wife thrashing about like a cow in labour. He felt his insides had become the floor on which the thrashing happened. He had to save her and he had to save himself. This time he asked the Christian man, Joseph, to accompany him to the hospital. The fear, which had paralysed him, of dealing with that huge, crushing, opaque world was mitigated when Joseph agreed.

  Joseph’s presence certainly cut out the time wasted in the previous visit going around in circles. Soni’s father let him do all the running while he followed him like a faithful dog. That same crowd of afflicted people again, that same assortment of maimedness and leprous sores and growths, skin like crust, arms and legs no longer arms and legs but leaking barrels, withering branches, spongy sacks. And everyone waiting, some for days, months, who knew how long, waiting to be relieved of pain. Illness was a luxury for the rich. Illness had reduced everyone here to a beggar.

  Joseph returned with news that there were no doctors in this ward who could perform an operation. Everyone was still ­waiting – there was a huge list – and no one knew when a doctor would show up; there hadn’t been one for weeks. The last doctor in attendance, many days ago, came and did four operations: one of the patients had died, the other three had had to come back with aggravated problems. This information came not from the staff but from the assembled people, awaiting treatment, and their relatives.

  There was nothing to do but go back.

  Ten days after this, Soni’s mother hanged herself. It was Joseph who discovered her; the tamarind tree from which he found her hanging by her saree was in the woods behind the clearing at the back of the church. It was only after they brought her down that he recognised who she was. She had tried to cut out the tumour at the back of her jaw, almost under her ear, with something sharp. They couldn’t find the instrument.

  4: Paper

  The only thing Milly took with her on the eight-hour bus journey to her new life was her school textbook and some sheets of dirty, blank paper which she had saved from a small sheaf distributed in school earlier in the year. She knew that the book was called Pratham Kiran, although she couldn’t yet read the first word, only the second. The clothes she had were what she was wearing: a pair of old drawstring pyjamas frayed at the bottom edge, the string replaced by her mother for the purpose of travel and held together by a safety-pin; and a shift, which was once white with a bold red paan-leaf pattern on it, but now looked like a greyish-brownish swabbing cloth. The rubber flip-flops on her feet had mismatched straps and were of slightly different sizes for each foot because they had been found in that state.

  The people who employed her belonged to the same tribe: Munda. The man, Lewis, and his wife, Pendo, both Christian converts, like Milly, had moved from a remote village to Dumri because Lewis had bagged that ultimate prize – a government job. He worked as a clerk in an offshoot of the state government’s Forest Department. Milly’s parents knew them, and the grandparents of both families had lived in the same village many years ago. This was how the job had come about. Lewis and Pendo wanted a Munda Christian girl and Milly’s mother had put her daughter forward.

  These connections were vital: while they did not treat her as one of their own – she was the servant-girl, after all – there was some fundamental commonality that linked them, a sort of tribal bond. Milly was fortunate; it could so easily have gone in the other direction: the hatred of the successful for the less lucky of the same group. Maybe it was this tribal sympathy which made them notice that Milly’s sole possession was her school textbook and some cheap paper from an exercise copy, yet not treat her with contempt or cruelty.

  While cleaning one morning after Vinti, the nine-year-old daughter of Lewis and Pendo, had left for school, Milly found herself alone and dared to reach out for the other girl’s small pile of books by a chaupai on the floor. She thought of the possible consequences of touching what was not hers but the temptation was too great. She laid down the broom, picked the biggest book and opened it. A forest of words and pictures emerged, beckoning her in. Not a single word made any sense – none of them was in Hindi, the only alphabet she knew.

  A shout from Pendo, ‘Milly, Mill-ee-ee, what’s taking you so long?’

  Startled, she dropped the book, then replaced it hurriedly. ‘Coming,’ she called out, afraid that she had somehow been seen and was now being summoned to be punished.

  For the following two days she cleaned around the books in a frenzied hurry, willing herself not to touch them, and ran out of the room. But in the evenings, when she was engaged in her duties – making roti, filling the buckets in the bathroom, helping Pendo with the preparation of dinner – half her mind was in the room in which Vinti was busy with her homework. On days when Vinti read aloud from one of her books, whether in Hindi or in their own play language, Milly felt an odd emotion
tightening her chest – a mixture of restlessness, lightness and anger. She wanted to spit in the dough. The rotis were rolled unevenly and came out singed. On more than one occasion, a roti caught fire as she was holding it with a pair of tongs over the coals on the chulha. Pendo scolded her roundly.

  One day Pendo discovered Milly poring over one of Vinti’s books, rapt, her entire being elsewhere, softly mouthing something that sounded like nonsense to Pendo, but on close listening was deciphered as repetitions of certain words – ainak, aurat, titlin, gilhari – that made even less sense to her.

  Pendo revealed herself. ‘What rubbish are you up to?’ she said. Milly looked stricken. Softening her tone, Pendo said, ‘Do you know that speaking to yourself is a sign of madness? Do we want a mad girl on our hands? What are you doing with Vinti’s book? You don’t know how to read.’

  Milly, who was on the verge of bursting into tears, felt proud of the little literacy she had and decided to defend herself. She said, ‘Yes, I do. I can read from my book, and a few words in Vinti-didi’s.’ The avidity on her face was like a glow.

  Pendo couldn’t be much bothered with her maidservant’s breathlessness about her incipient education – she had two small children to look after – so she let the matter pass. Milly, fearful of being caught browsing Vinti-didi’s books, took to leafing through, again, the latter half of her own tattered book, the sections she couldn’t read because she had been taken out of school before they reached them. She looked at them in the afternoon, when everyone had a nap and she had a free hour or two, then again at night, just before getting into her bed, which was a couple of thick sheets, folded over, on the kitchen floor, another bundled-up sheet for a pillow and an old, greasy mosquito net, the four corner strings of which had to be tied to a window bar, the tap in the sink and two nails on the wall opposite, to erect it. She sat outside this dented, misshapen parallelogram and looked at her book in the light from the naked bulb on the ceiling and wished her mother would fall face down on the burning chulha one evening, or get lost in the forest while gathering kindling or mahua flowers fallen on the ground and get eaten by a jackal or bitten by a snake, or have her arms and legs cut off by the men who had come for Budhuwa, the men (and women) who came to the village every night and had to be fed and given places to sleep. She looked at the opaque words on the pages and ripped them out, one by one, and scrunched them up and put them inside her mouth, chewing slowly and carefully, using lots of saliva so that the ink which created the words dissolved thoroughly and dispersed as a thin stream of disassembled words through her insides. In the morning she knew she would wake up knowing the words that had withheld themselves so far.