A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  Pause.

  ‘Not that I’m good at anything else,’ he added as an afterthought, or maybe a negation.

  Milly gave a wan smile which he didn’t see. She could not say why witnessing him in this state, when he had managed to rise above what had been inflicted on him, should overcome her so – this feeling of disintegration was so much more powerful than when she had watched him struggle and lose, struggle and lose, time and time again, to trivial, powerless inanimate objects such as sacks and pliers and cord and wooden spool. It was all he could do; it was everything. The knowledge slayed her.

  Nearly nine years had passed since Milly had left her home village for her first job as a live-in domestic servant in Dumri. During this time, Milly visited her home only four times on annual leave from work: three times while she was at Dumri and once after she began working in Jamshedpur. She saw Soni the first couple of times but missed all that befell her family while she was away at Debdulal and Pratima’s. Milly’s memories of Soni had not exactly faded but had slowly become unvisited, tangential, irrelevant. Childhood friendships were often like that – intense in presence and in the present tense, remote and unreachable in absence. But coming back home again after so long gave sharper outlines and brighter colours to those memories, and Milly found herself curious to know how her childhood friend had turned out. Did Soni get married to a man who had a government job? She was the one who had managed to stay still the longest, despite the annoyances caused by red ants or mosquitoes, to keep the tamarind stones balanced on her forehead and neck. Asking about her now revealed more than Milly had reckoned: the death of Soni’s mother, all the business with her sister, came out tersely from Budhuwa and their mother. All Milly could do was ask if Soni was still living here or had she, like Milly, moved far away from home.

  ‘No, she’s still here. She is a member of the Party now,’ Milly’s mother said. Her face was unreadable.

  ‘Party?’ asked Milly, shocked. It was the Party that had been responsible for Budhuwa’s hand. Milly knew about the death of Soni’s mother but not much else besides.

  ‘Yes, she has become a samaj sewi,’ Budhuwa said, but Milly couldn’t quite judge if he used the term with anger. In these villages people who joined the Party were seen both as extremists and as ‘social workers’. Many looked on the guerrillas as ‘our boys and girls’, as ‘one of us’.

  ‘She lives in the forests now,’ Milly’s mother said. ‘They come to the villages in the dead of the night for food, then they go back before sunrise. They carry guns.’

  Milly was too stunned to say anything.

  Her brother said, ‘She’s joined the liberators, that’s what they call themselves. Two months ago these liberators blew up the school building, the school she and you went to, because the CRPF men were using it as a base.’

  Milly, eyes now round as plums, said, ‘You saw?’

  ‘No. What’s there to see? They went around telling people they did it. Some others saw, they said it was the guerrilla group she had joined.’

  The pressure of the unsaid became so intense that Milly couldn’t bear it any longer. She began to ask Budhuwa, ‘The same group … the same group that … that …’ but couldn’t proceed any further.

  Budhuwa helped her out; it was all one to him now; he wasn’t going to get his hand back. ‘No, she joined the other group, but there’s no difference between them, not really. They are all part of the same Naxalbadi party.’

  The bitterness in his voice was now another presence in the small, dark room. Milly looked down at the floor. Their mother was trying to light the LPG gas cooker she had bought with money that Milly sent home.

  In the end it was Soni who came to her first. A weak hammering of fists on the door very late at night, around one or two o’clock, sent fear running through the whole family, but it was soon quelled by a young woman’s voice, ‘Milly, ei Milly, is Milly there? This is Soni.’ She was trying to balance waking up Milly with keeping her voice down; it was the rattling of the chain on the door that awakened everyone.

  In the moonlight, with the shadows so accentuated, and with the changes wrought on her by time, it could have been someone impersonating Soni. They stood facing each other and they had nothing to say.

  ‘It’s very late, no?’ were Milly’s first words.

  Soni had nothing to return to this except an obvious ‘yes’. They stood looking away from each other, at the shadows, heard the taut, watchful silence of Milly’s family behind her, all of them waiting for something to happen. Milly imagined she heard objects being moved very stealthily, objects that could be used as weapons. The awkwardness between the girls continued to tick; time had made them strangers.

  Soni gave a little laugh and said, ‘I can’t tell in this dark what you look like now.’

  That laugh hadn’t changed. Milly was, in the blink of an eye, back to the age of six.

  ‘I can’t see you properly, either.’

  ‘I have to go soon. You’ll come to me tomorrow? On the other side of the river? Not the village side, but across the water. Stand exactly opposite where the gram sabha sits. You’ll come?’

  Milly hesitated.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. Nothing will happen to you, you’re with me.’

  Much later, Milly thought that it was this reassurance, unprompted by anything she had said or done, as if Soni had read the silence, that made her keep the rendezvous the following day.

  At four o’clock on an April afternoon it was impossible to stand anywhere except in full shade. The river, Baniya, was green; one could cross it at its thinnest spot partly by stepping over the stones that had come out of their underwater hiding during the run of dry months and partly by wading across. On the other side lay what looked like the border of a jungle, but there were narrow paths through it and one could walk down them to the edge of another village. Right now, the mahua trees were in bloom, the red soil decorated here and there with small rugs of fallen cream flowers. Milly was surprised that they hadn’t already been picked by the villagers to make mahua, or eaten by deer and langurs.

  Beyond that was the larger surprise of not being able to fit the seventeen-year-old Soni to the image Milly had of an eight-year-old girl. That old image was not sharp, but she would never have thought the new reality in front of her as a development from that faded memory.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ Soni asked, laughing. That sound again, like cool, green water flowing over rocks.

  Was there something of the girl she had known in that smile, that laugh? Would Milly have recognised her in a crowded street of a different town? Was Soni thinking the same things about her: that Milly, too, would be unrecognisable to her?

  As if she had looked inside Milly’s head, Soni said, ‘You know, you’ve changed a lot, I wouldn’t have recognised you if I bumped into you somewhere else, somewhere far away from here.’

  Yes, that flowing chatter, that complete ease with everything, that’s not left her, Milly thought. She said, ‘I was thinking the same about you.’

  ‘They tell me you live in big cities now, Ranchi, Jamshedpur. You’ve moved up in the world. You earn lots of money? Have you married someone from the city?’ Her eyes were dancing with excitement.

  Milly felt shy and turned her head away. They were still strangers to each other and she didn’t know if their shared past was going to be like a change of weather they could easily slip into as they walked the red paths through the trees, shafts of sunlight falling on them wherever there was an opening in the canopy. She noticed that there weren’t one or two people from the village in here, collecting firewood or kendu leaves. Budhuwa occasionally picked kendu leaves from the forest floor now, to supplement his income from the plastic-thread-making, but he complained that he was not too good at it, not sufficiently nimble. Besides, Budhuwa had said, the traders, to whom the villagers sold their bundles of leaves, had to pay a tax to the Party people, which they resented, so they were wary of taking on new, unfamiliar collectors, wh
om they suspected were in cahoots with the Party. Milly looked at the thick, fissured bark of the kendu tree, a regular grid of rectangles, like cracked earth during drought. It didn’t seem so benign any more. She had learned in her childhood that spirits lived in some of these large old trees, Burubonga and Ikirbonga and Chandibonga and many others, not all of them benevolent. Lutkum Haram and Lutkum Buria had their very own sal tree. She had always wanted to see the bonga in his or her tree but when she had asked, her mother had waved a hand in the general direction of the forest and said that they could be found there. Father Joseph had tried to discourage them from believing in such things, but Milly had left the village before either system of belief could take hold.

  She breathed in that familiar vegetal smell, the smell of sun and the sun-baked bright earth. A dazzling butterfly flitted past. Did she miss this in Dumri and Jamshedpur? Did she prefer to live in a town which had none of these things? Yes, she did. Sabina was going to send her to Mumbai. She wanted to be in Mumbai rather than stuck here with forests and rivers; you can miss something without wanting to be reunited with it, without wanting the other things that necessarily came with the thing you missed.

  ‘Why have you become quiet? There must be a man. Tell me quickly,’ Soni was laughing again.

  Milly laughed, too, and said, ‘No, no man anywhere. But I hear you’re carrying guns nowadays. You joined the Party? How come?’

  The one question that was like a fishbone in her throat was one that she couldn’t bring herself to ask.

  Soni didn’t reply.

  Milly asked her again, thinking she hadn’t heard.

  Soni said, ‘You haven’t lived here for a long time, you don’t know how bad things have become. You can’t fight them with votes. How can you fight a lion with toy bows and arrows made for children to play with?’ The words seemed dragged out of her.

  There were cloud-islands of insects, a dense patch for a few inches, hovering in the middle air, then clear light-and-shade-and-heat again. On a low bush, a spider’s web was teeming with scores and scores of tiny baby spiders.

  ‘Do you understand? Elections are not going to improve our lot,’ she said. That ease, that familiar laughter, all had disappeared. In their place was a focused avidity in her face. If the red soil of the place, and the April heat, had a face, Soni’s, now, would be that.

  ‘But why did you join?’ Milly asked. ‘I thought you wanted to get married and move away from here.’

  ‘I told you, I started to go to their meetings. Then I thought, we are women, we are killed over dowry, and our parents cry and say, oh we lost a girl, and then they forget about us. We are forgotten. We’ll all die, but why not do something in the short time that we have, so that people remember us? If I die tomorrow, my father won’t cry and say, oh we lost our girl, he’ll cry and say, she fought for the people, she laid down her life for the people, she died fighting for adhikaar, for the rights of our people, and they won’t forget me. My comrades will build a monument to my name, keep it alive.’

  Milly was silent, absorbing the torrent of feelings that had gushed out of Soni. Eventually, she said, ‘You fight too? You know how to fire a gun?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’ Soni proceeded to explain their training, their life of drills and exercises; of muzzle-loading rifles and country-made revolvers, learning how to shoot, target practice, raiding police armouries, lifting guns off policemen killed in encounters; of the art of hiding and running away, of the greater art of surrounding and disappearing. She left out the recurring bouts of malaria and diarrhoea, the exhaustion like a second skin over them, the slow erosion of the body that was the gift of living in the open, like animals.

  It seemed to Milly that they were talking about children’s games, hide-and-seek in the forest, jumping around with sticks and leaping on each other in a game of ambush. All this military training, guns and bunkers and guerrilla warfare seemed unreal to her, and to Soni, too – she talked about it so casually, so laughingly, that Milly, hearing her, could not invest it with either seriousness or menace. Yet she wanted to: she had witnessed, as a little girl, that these matters were not play-acting and could blast lives, but what she couldn’t do was draw a strong, legible line between that childhood memory and what she heard now from a friend who was still associated with days of play, of innocence and stippled sunshine under tamarind trees, of dolls made with bamboo and leaves. How did guns appear in the picture?

  Then all that she had been holding in came hurtling out against her will.

  ‘Your people cut off my brother’s hand,’ she said.

  Soni looked puzzled; she didn’t know what Milly was talking about. But when she worked it out, she was stunned, as if Milly had slapped her.

  ‘How can that be? It cannot be,’ Soni said, shaking her head.

  ‘Yes, the Party did it. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘But how can it be? There was no squad until four, five years ago. And your brother, that was when? Much before that. We were small then …’

  It was Milly’s turn to fall silent with confusion. She could only repeat stubbornly, ‘Haan, it was the Party that did it. Everyone says that.’

  They walked on in silence for a long while. The setting sun had turned all the sunlit patches in the forest a glowing golden-red. Occasionally their faces encountered strands of invisible webs. Previously, this would have made Soni laugh and gently curse the spiders but that ease had vanished. Milly couldn’t read the darkness that had settled on Soni’s face; the light under the areas of dense canopy was fading.

  Breaking the crust of uneasy silence that had settled over them, Soni said, ‘Let me walk you back to the river. It’s getting dark, you should go home.’

  ‘Are you going back to your … your place in the forest? How will you get there in the dark? How far is it?’

  ‘I will stay in the village with you. We are taking food to the camp with us tomorrow night, so I’ll need to be in the village with some comrades tonight.’

  The birds were headed homewards. Milly thought she could even discern one or two early bats.

  Suddenly Soni said, ‘Do you live in a big house in the city? How many rooms?’

  ‘Yes, a big house. Three rooms – two for sleeping, one for sitting. And another room for the kitchen.’

  ‘There are separate rooms for sleeping and sitting?’

  It struck Milly that besides wonder, there was something else in Soni’s voice, some wistfulness, a longing for what she had never experienced and her friend had, perhaps even the slightest touch of envy. It made it easy for Milly to bridge some of the distance between them.

  ‘And cars? There are many cars in the city? You’ve been in one?’

  ‘Haan, hundreds and hundreds of cars, but I’ve never ridden one.’

  ‘They pay you a lot of money? What do you do with it?’ The question made Milly coy, but Soni was now saying: ‘They are exploiting you. If you are providing labour and those punjipati are paying you wages, they are exploiting labour. This is one of the reasons why we have started our deerghkaleen ladai, our protracted battle. Kranti is the only way forward.’

  She continued, driven by some opaque reason to narrate. Her lines of thought became jumpy and disjointed, moving erratically between lifeless political jargon and the animated account of her daily life in all its density and details. Her face had become flushed with the passion of the telling. All those big, new words that Soni brandished – burjawa, punjipati – were incomprehensible to Milly. She found herself deeply uncomfortable with this kind of talk. The long words felt so odd, so wrong, coming out of Soni’s mouth. Ten years ago Milly had sung the hymns she had been taught in church – ‘God’s love is so wonderful’, ‘Praise Him for He comes to save us’ – without understanding a single word, learning them instead by memorising and repeating the sounds and the intervals. When she had sung them to Soni, she had asked Milly, ‘What does the song say? What do the words mean?’ Rather than confess to ignorance, Milly had given he
r version of what little she had understood of Father Joseph’s preaching and stories and added her own colour to them.

  Soni now continued, ‘You don’t feel scattered, a little bit of your life here, a little bit of your life there? A broken life, in bits and pieces.’

  Milly tried to change the subject. ‘Aren’t you afraid? All this kranti, explosives, guns, sentry posts, the police hunting for you … Don’t you feel fear?’ she asked.

  The revolutionary’s mask still intact on her face, Soni repeated her earlier words, ‘What’s to fear? We’ll all die, anyway. This death is more honourable. I’ll be immortal, written about in the Party’s letters and papers for other comrades to read. The lives of people like us are nothing. But you can make something of your life, stop being nothing.’

  The mosquitoes had come out in force; the girls knew they were nearing the river. Suddenly, Soni’s mask slipped and she said, in a completely different tone, ‘Yes, this will take my life. If I go outside the jungle, I’ll be killed. I can only get out after the revolution.’

  Something sounded extinguished inside her. Milly couldn’t see her face in the dark.

  The brief river-crossing turned them into little girls again: squealing over the possibility of falling into the water, mock-fear about not being able to discern the stepping stones in the dark. But it was only playing at being children; that time was over.

  Later that night, Budhuwa said to Milly, ‘Careful. They often force people to join them.’ For a few moments, Milly had no idea to what he was referring. Before she could react, Budhuwa asked, ‘Did she persuade you?’

  ‘No! You must be mad to think that.’

  ‘You shouldn’t stay here, in this village, much longer. It’s good that you’re going away to Mumbai. Now that young people have started moving to the towns and cities for jobs, they are finding it hard to recruit guerrillas. We heard that they are holding some young boy who was visiting his family from his school hostel in Rourkela. They are holding him in the forest and teaching him about revolution and not letting him go, either back to his father’s village or to the hostel. Once they get their claws into you …’