A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  A week or so after this she was caught by Vinti, eating the balled-up pieces of paper that she had discarded from the fair copy of her school homework.

  ‘Ma, ma,’ Vinti shouted, thrilled and slightly appalled. ‘Milly’s eating paper, come quickly.’

  Milly’s mouth was full. She could neither swallow nor spit out in front of Pendo and Vinti – either would be an unacceptable thing to do right under the noses of the people in whose home she was a servant-girl. Her eyes filled with tears of shame and fear.

  Pendo, stunned for a few minutes, found her voice. ‘Why are you eating paper? It’s a disgusting thing to do, you savage girl. Are you hungry? Don’t you get enough to eat here?’

  Milly nodded to indicate that she did. The bolus felt larger than her head. It was consuming her. Vinti looked at her as if she were something floating on a particularly toxic open drain.

  Pendo said, ‘You’re not in your village any more. These kinds of junglee things are not done here. Is that understood?’

  Milly, her cheeks swollen with the matter inside her mouth, nodded again. She had been caught in her magic ritual; now she was never going to learn the words that Vinti-didi had written and rejected.

  A few days later, a moment of inspiration. Vinti, in Class III of Birsa Munda Girls’ School (a private school, despite the name), was going through a phase of wanting to be a schoolteacher. It suddenly came to Pendo that, in Milly, her daughter could have the perfect companion to play games of Student – Teacher; Vinti could truly teach Milly the elements of reading, writing and arithmetic, not only in play.

  Milly’s first experience of two meals a day – two-and-a-half, if the morning tea and stale chapatti were counted – was at the home of Pendo and Lewis and Vinti-didi and the little one, Suraj. In the village, on lucky days, they had one meal, which was usually bajra ki roti and til chutney. A two-meal day was a rare gift; also a great struggle. There were days when they went hungry. Milly remembered those by the absence of smoke and its particular smell because her mother didn’t light the chulha to cook – there was nothing to put on the fire. Even into adulthood, the smell of a chulha being fanned to get the flames to catch filled her with a simple joy, a sense of security. On smokeless days, Milly remembered her mother sometimes berating her father, drunk and stretched out in a stupor in a corner or outside, in the courtyard, but the more frequent scenario was of her mother crying silently and bitterly, her lip torn and bleeding, her face livid, one eye bruising up, from the thrashing she had just received from her drunken husband. On one of these evenings, with the smell of violence still hanging in the air, Milly had watched, with a kind of horrified fascination, the blood, snot, tears and saliva from her mother’s face all mingle while she had cried out, twice, words etched indelibly in Milly’s memory – ‘The pangs of hunger are great pangs, it’s a burning. God gave us stomachs to punish us.’

  Still, this was the way things were, and Milly and her brothers and sisters, not knowing a regular or even occasional alternative where meals were numerous over long uninterrupted stretches, did not know to complain – this was the way their world was; there was no other. The glimpse of the alternative, village feasts and festivals, was not seen as such because, by their very nature, they were exceptions to the ordinary run of their days. A cow or a couple of goats were slaughtered, and all the families in the village paid for the meat, which was then distributed among the households according to how much each had paid. A meal of rice and beef was what they imagined heaven to be like. Even if what they got on their plates was gristle, tendon, a pucker of skin or fat, it was still flesh. Communal feasts were cooked and distributed centrally. These offered a higher chance of getting actual meat, not just a nub of bone and the translucent fat that clung to sockets. Milly sucked out the marrow from sections of the shinbone, if she ever got one, and was sorry to have to throw the cleaned and picked bone to the dogs roaming through the eating area, alert for scraps.

  At the conversion ceremony, the church paid for the feast following the entry of eight families – fifty-five members in total – into the fold. Milly was too young at the time to have had much understanding of why their mother had decided one day to christen all the little children. She had asked, many years later, what impelled her to do it.

  Her mother had said, ‘They promised a big sack of rice. It was food for a month. I had reached the limit with not having enough to feed you lot. They also said all of you could go free to school in the big town, which would mean government jobs for the little boys when they grew up …’

  Then it had dawned upon her that school was a touchy subject between her and Milly and she had stopped and looked away.

  The christening feast involved the sacrifice of two cows and a big fat pig: it felt as if the days of plenty had arrived. The feast lasted two days. Then, over time, there were the four days of Easter and Christmas Day, all of which included communal feasting. To a lot of people that was inducement enough to convert, although non-Christians were welcomed to these feasts, and sat down, side by side, with the Christians, ate their food, tried to sing their hymns. They could even go into the church, but not during service.

  Here in Dumri, Milly was given lunch after the family had finished eating. In other words, she ate whatever was left over, which often meant that if the family had, say, a dal and two kinds of sabzi, she would get rice or roti, some dal and whichever vegetable dish had not been eaten entirely by Lewis, Pendo and Vinti, and Suraj, when he grew up a little. This rule of priority applied particularly to fish, egg and meat dishes: by an unspoken rule, Milly was not allowed to eat – or not given – these special things, the leftovers being saved for the children and Lewis and Pendo, in that order. If anything remained after they had had a meat dish several times, Milly was given the final residue, which often consisted only of potatoes and gravy with tiny shreds of meat here and there, or an inferior piece, all bone, gristle, fat and membrane, which no one wanted to eat, or when Pendo thought the dish was on the turn and couldn’t be given to the family any longer. Milly didn’t mind, didn’t even notice most of the time. She had plenty to eat – plenty of rice, which was such a luxury back home and, crucially, a reliably regular supply of two full meals every day. She no longer went to bed, after writing out the difficult words from her one page of reading every night, wondering whether she was going to eat the following day.

  A child breaks things. Milly was eight, going on nine, when she started working in Dumri. Her child’s hands could not carry large, heavy objects, get a saving grip on a soapy saucer or cup intent on slipping from her grasp. They did not have enough span to arrest something from falling and breaking while she was doing the cleaning. Such accidents were not frequent; they were usually limited to dropped knick-knacks. The plates, glasses and bowls were all stainless steel at Pendo’s, so there was no danger of breaking them. A set of four china cups and saucers arrived once. They sat in a cupboard and were taken out for very special guests, not so much to honour them as to advertise Pendo and Lewis’s upward mobility. After one of these outings, Milly broke the handle of a cup while doing the washing-up. It was such a delicate little toy-ear-like thing, it simply came off in her hands. Pendo scolded her – ‘Look what you’ve done, you clumsy pagal! My set is ruined for ever’ – and Milly felt afraid for a day or two, then it all blew over. The lame set sat in the darkness of the cupboard and was forgotten.

  The reprimands were, predictably enough, in direct proportion to the cost of the object broken. There were few expensive things in Pendo’s home; usually the value was of emotion or attachment. Milly broke a terracotta doll belonging to Vinti once; Vinti brought the house down. Again, Milly was told off, but this time she felt that Pendo’s words and tone had something of the performance about them, as if she felt she had to be seen by her daughter to be punishing the servant who had broken her toy. On this occasion, Milly felt far worse – and far more fearful – than the time she broke the handle on the cup: her lessons were dependent entirel
y on keeping Vinti-didi happy. This storm, too, passed; it was a children’s quarrel, temporary and trivial, although clouded by the element of class.

  Nearly four years after she started at Pendo and Lewis’s, Milly was taken out of their home by her mother and sent to a Bengali couple in Jamshedpur, an even bigger town. By now she could read Hindi effortlessly, write slowly and haltingly but clearly, and do basic addition and subtraction. She knew the English alphabet and could read small words – ‘cat’, bat’, ‘car’. She read the word ‘bus’ one evening and smiled at her younger self, which had not known what a bus was, until the moment of the journey to Dumri.

  5: Fate

  Soni had known them to visit their village frequently; in fact, a few of the group were familiar faces. She was sure that she had seen the woman in the blue sari with the medicine van on the two occasions it had visited their village. The new water tank, behind the school, had been built by some of them. They gathered in front of the school, or on the neat green in front of the church, or the raised square platform under the circle of the eight giant trees by the river where the gram sabha sat. ‘Samaj sewi’, social workers, she thought they were called. She had heard them give speeches, long, fiery ones, and had tuned out; everyone who wanted to win elections gave speeches. Those men during election time came from big towns or cities, promised big things, smiled, bowed, then left. Everything carried on as before. But the social workers were different. She could tell by looking at them that they belonged here, were people like her and her neighbours. Word went round that they were putting on a play.

  What was a play? She had only the haziest notion. She joined the crowd assembling near the well. She stood next to her sister, intent on watching her face during the play – maybe this could make her smile again? Would it have singing? Yes, it did. They were words she didn’t understand. What language were they singing in? Would the play be incomprehensible too?

  The song was over. The group disbanded and moved to the sides. Two women returned to the centre. They pretended to be picking kendu leaves. Or was it kindling? They spoke about how the forest was their home and protector, how it provided them with everything they needed. But the government wanted to move them out and give the forest to rich people, big companies, who wanted to cut the trees, sell the wood, dig up the land for the riches under it … The water of the rivers and streams would turn red from green and would no longer be fit for any use. They would lose everything, their homes, the forest, the air, the water, their freedom, and would be made to work as slaves on the land, no longer theirs but someone else’s. Soni watched, unblinking.

  They talked of adhikaar, haq, izzat: ‘The government does not give us those things, rights and respect. We have nothing except the rights to jal, jameen and jangal. They’re going to take our water, land and forest away from us.’

  Then they shifted to talking about how much they were paid for every kilo of tamarind collected, or every pile of hundred kendu leaves, and how much the tamarind or kendu was then sold for. They said the difference could pay for a doctor’s clinic at the village, or a month’s supply of rice and lentils.

  ‘Why have we been poor and hungry for decades? Why do we always hear of vikas, of crores of rupees given by the Centre for development, and never see a paisa of it? Where does the money go? Why has our situation not changed?’ There was a lot of talk. Sometimes Soni couldn’t understand what was going on.

  Things perked up. Two men joined the women. The women announced, in loud, frightened whispers, that one was a forest official and the other a contractor. Why had they shown up? The two men started harassing the women. Did they have permission to pick leaves? Where was the piece of paper that gave them permission? How much had they collected? Did they know they would be fined for the illegal picking of leaves? Everything in the forest was government property. The women would have to come with them and pay a big fine, and if they couldn’t … here the men began to laugh. They caught hold of the women’s arms and started dragging them away. The women cried for help. One of the men pulled at the clothes of the woman he was holding by the wrist. Soni felt a tremor passing through the skin of her arm where it touched her sister’s. She looked sideways. How could anybody sitting so still – Didi’s eyes were not blinking, she didn’t seem to be breathing even – generate such a steady, low hum of trembling? Soni turned back to look at the actors. They were gone, but the audience could still hear the women screaming and crying, the men laughing. The sound held. She sensed an ultimatum in the play that she was seeing.

  Two of the samaj sewi came onstage, a man and a woman, and asked how long the people here were going to put up with such humiliation, such indignities? Were they not humans, too, or were their lives as nothing to the big people?

  She noticed that her sister’s trembling had transmitted itself – it was she, Soni, who was now the core of the tremor. She was approaching the realisation of something fateful in herself. Something her sister had said after she had come back, something Soni thought she had forgotten, now inserted itself in her head – just a few words: ‘I didn’t put up a fight because they would have killed me otherwise.’

  The meeting happened by chance. Soni and her sister had gone to wash clothes by the river when they saw a group of people appear out of the forest, on the other bank, and begin to wade across the water towards the village. It was winter and the river was a narrow green channel running through a wide expanse of sand and black-and-grey-and-white rocks that were now exposed. As they came nearer, Soni could recognise most of them. She was now better informed and thought of them as ‘the Party people’, not samaj sewis. They were the ones who organised the meetings and plays, the ones who had recently started visiting the village in a truck, with doctors who spoke to anyone who was ill, with injections for babies, medicines for fever and pain and stomach trouble, bandages for burns and bites.

  They seemed to know who her sister was and what had happened to her. The woman who was always part of the medicine-van group spoke first. She said her name was Bela. She squatted at the edge of the water to be level with the girls, then she put both her hands on Soni’s sister’s shoulders. She looked at Soni and asked her to leave them alone. Three days after this, Soni’s sister left home to join the Party.

  Soni waited for a few years until she had finished with Class 8. Their school was now being used as a base by the Army to flush out guerrillas who had taken over the forests. She could wait for months, years, before the school was returned to its proper use. But it was too late for all that. She knew to whom to talk, now that she had seized – by both hands, it felt – the decision that she had made years ago. It felt like acknowledging someone familiar, someone destined, who had been within her sight for so long.

  The Maoist activists operated in the surrounding forest and often held meetings in the bordering villages. They found a sympathetic audience in the villagers whose lives of unchanging poverty and misery and hopelessness needed a radically new kind of hope, which the militants provided. The Party, as the Communist Party of India (Maoists) – CPI(M) – was called, had two guerrilla wings; the group Soni joined was the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.

  She couldn’t join the group her sister was in because there were strict rules against having family members and relations within one squad. ‘Liberation’ was a loaded word around these parts – all areas of forest in this state under the control of Maoist guerrillas were called ‘liberated territories’. Their village meetings were well attended and one of their chief purposes, recruitment of young men and women, was often successful. Some were inspired to join because they wanted change, improvement to their lives of hunger and squalor. Others joined because they had no prospects – low education, no jobs, no possibility of changing their lives for the better. Still others, because the guerrillas paid money to the new recruits: an upfront payment of fifteen hundred rupees, then the promise of a monthly payment thereafter; besides, they would be fed and clothed and even given further education at
no cost. And who wouldn’t want to leave the dirt and mess of the villages, the open drains and sewers, the lack of sanitation, the river polluted by a mining factory upstream, its green water now the colour of the dark-orange soil? Soni certainly felt this new experience, of waking up in the forest and being the first to breathe in the air that smelled of dew and trees and leaves, as a wonderful thing in her life.

  First, the new recruits had to undergo a year-long training session. Soni, along with her new comrades, got up at four in the morning and ran up and down the hills, did sit-ups and push-ups and presses. The squad commander drove each recruit to better his or her performance over the months, expecting him or her – there were nearly as many women who joined the guerrillas as men – to shave time off their personal best. She learned to crawl through jungle floors and was marked on, among other things, how noiseless she could be during the exercise. She was given increasingly intricate lessons on camouflage and that most vital of all talents: how to appear silently and disappear with the swiftness of a snake bringing its head down to strike. She was taught target practice and given lessons in using explosives. She learned how to make IEDs – Improvised Explosive Devices – that could be set off using basic, easily available and seemingly innocuous things such as catapults made out of twigs and rubber bands, flashbulbs in cameras, hypodermic syringes, water pistols, even battery-operated children’s toys.