A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  Over and above her bonus and Binay’s, she squirrelled away into the savings account what she could from her net monthly salaries – sometimes a thousand rupees a month, sometimes a little bit more, or less. She sent money home to Budhuwa and her mother every month without fail. After all these outgoings, there was not a great deal left for food, clothes, phone plan, Mallika’s school uniform, books, stationery.

  Mallika went to the local Catholic school, St Catherine of Siena: a small charitable institution, in terms of resources and achievement, but it had big grounds and took in street-children and children from poor and lower-middle-class families. This last factor, that so many children were from lower backgrounds, was both an advantage and a disadvantage, but people in Milly and Binay’s position did not have a wide array of choices: it was either an extremely rudimentary state set-up, teaching only Marathi and Hindi, or no school, which was the commonest state of affairs for children in this jhopri. Who had the vision, will or fearlessness to send children to a private school, even a charitable one? Besides, children were required to bring money in, not be a drain on resources – they had to start work as early as they could, to help out their families. Milly’s religion put them in a fortunate position because St Catherine’s gave preferential treatment to Catholic children. The school’s greatest attraction was the fact that the medium of instruction was English.

  Milly’s own efforts to attend night-classes for adults at St Mary’s were sporadic; the working day, followed by looking after the children, devoured all her time. It was one thing to take a five- or six-year-old girl to a class and make her sit quietly for an hour, perhaps even encouraging her to do her homework, but bringing two children, one of whom was a toddler, was impossible.

  As her daughter grew, Milly had to start thinking of a secondary school for Mallika, since the highest level in the current school was only up to Class 4, until the age of ten, although, in reality, the class level was no indication of the ages of the students in it – Mallika was a rare instance of a student in St Catherine’s whose age and class-grade coincided. There was no way of sending her to a bigger, better school without having to pay more, much more, and that, in turn, was not a possibility without Milly taking on a fourth job. The school she had in mind was Carmel on Hill Road, a girls’ school where the monthly fee would be two thousand rupees. Milly had already found out that the fee was only a rough indication of how much they would have to spend: there would be more expenditure for uniform, books and the huge initial admission cost of nearly ten thousand rupees.

  When she broached the subject to Binay, he was sceptical. ‘What will she do, studying, going to school? We can’t afford it.’

  ‘I can take on work at one more home.’

  ‘But she’s a girl, what’s the point of educating her to such a high level? There’s the boy to think of now.’

  ‘They’ll both go to school.’

  ‘But it’s beyond our means to send two children to high school,’ he repeated. ‘She knows how to read and write. By the time she finishes in this one, that’ll be enough education.’

  ‘No’, Milly was adamant. ‘She’s going to go to school.’

  ‘But look at you, you didn’t go to school, you earn fourteen to fifteen thousand every month … If you are going to take on another home, save that money for Amit’s school.’

  Milly had, without knowing it consciously, become resigned to the fact that she herself was never going to go up to Class 12, even through the more informal channel of night-school, and sit board exams. With the necessity of a fourth job looming, she now acknowledged it.

  All the enveloping noise of the slum that they always heard but were never disturbed or bothered by – it was the very medium of their lives, like air, and who singles out air for attention? – suddenly took on a singular clarity for Milly, each outlined in its sharp auditory shape. More than one television was blaring out the theme song from the opening credits of Balika Vadhu, the little girl’s voice clear as a bell, ‘Chhoti si umar, par nai re babosa …’ The woman next door was shrieking at her husband, drunk again, ‘Churail! She’s a churail! I’ll blind her with my own hands, we’ll see if I’m the daughter of one father or not.’ Then: the sound of a crash and breaking glass, followed by sobbing. A group of boys walked past their door, trailing behind them the song playing on one of their mobiles: ‘Why this kolavery kolavery di?’ The song faded slowly as the boys moved further and further away. Mallika’s head was bowed over her homework. Milly couldn’t see her face, only the head of thick dark hair, which was shining, almost blue in its blackness, in the light from the bulb overhead. How could she see her books if her head was obstructing the light? There seemed to be an invisible wall around the girl, something to hold the world at bay.

  Milly said, ‘She is going to school to the very end, until she’s eighteen and has taken her board exams.’

  11: An epilogue

  It’s Budhuwa who calls her. This is surprising because she is the one who always phones him. Her first thought is that there is bad news. The timing is not encouraging: it’s seven in the evening on a Wednesday, and she is on her way back home after picking up Mallika from school, because on Wednesdays her daughter does three hours of computer lessons offered by the school to interested students from Class 7 and higher. Milly has to pay an extra five hundred rupees a month for this. Before she can disengage her right hand from her daughter’s left and hit the green button, he has rung off; maybe he meant to give her a missed call as a way of signalling to her to call back. The thought of bad news deepens. She phones him immediately.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  He plunges in straight away. ‘Soni’s died.’

  It takes her a second or two to work out who he is talking about; the life here is a great distance from the one she has left behind.

  ‘What? How?’ she whispers when the meaning hits her.

  ‘No one knows. The paramilitary have started to come again, lots and lots of them. It could have been them, or it could have been her own people. There are lots of stories buzzing around. Some say she had become a police informer and her people found out and killed her. Some are saying she was caught trying to escape her squad – otherwise why would her body be found just outside the village?’

  ‘Where did they find … it?’ She has to say something; this is the only thing she can manage. Without looking in her daughter’s direction, she searches for Mallika’s hand with her free one and laces her fingers through hers.

  ‘The big mango tree after the turn-off from the road.’

  She cannot bring herself to ask the next question, not in Mallika’s hearing, but Budhuwa seems to have guessed it.

  ‘Bullets, not machete,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘I didn’t see the body.’

  She flinches. She doesn’t want Mallika to get wind of what they’re talking about but she doesn’t want to let go of her, either.

  Budhuwa keeps talking: ‘The soldiers’ clothes that she had on her, everyone’s saying that it’s CRPF uniform. Apparently the guerrillas bought it as a job-lot in some market somewhere.’

  She wants to ask so many things but cannot in her daughter’s presence. She says she’ll call him later.

  All the things that Soni had said to her on that walk in the forest tumble through her head. So many questions … Before she has fully finished thinking one, her mind jumps to another. Something Soni had said suddenly appears, like a light she didn’t know existed around a corner: ‘Your life is in bits and pieces – a little bit here, a little bit there. One year in Dumri, another year somewhere else, then another year yet somewhere else again …’ Milly disagrees silently, vociferously. Her life is not fragmented. To her, it has unity and coherence. She gives it those qualities. How can movement from one place to another break you? Are you a terracotta doll, easily broken in transit? But she can no longer give Soni the answer, which has occurred to her so many years later.

  V

  Someone whose name he has now for
gotten one of their lot maybe or a foreman from another site tells them a story one night while they are drinking their adhaa or pauwa of Toofan whichever size each can afford someone tells them you see that Taj Mahal the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built it for his dead wife hundreds of workers in construction like us lot thousands of us it took years and years to build and when it was done the emperor saw it was so beautiful that he did not want anyone who might want to rival this gem to copy it not even a single part so he cut off the thumb of the right hand of each of those mazdoors just imagine you’re building this big hotel and at the end of it you go back home without your right thumb buss khel khatam you’ll never work again and you will have to beg and your life will end with dogs eating your flesh

  but before the dogs something else is eating his flesh the flesh on the inside of his chest because when the coughing comes it feels like the insides are turning into the kind of cloudy wool-like dust which emerged when he was once asked to remove yards and yards of a corrugated grey roof by breaking it up into manageable chunks manageable for the women working on the site to carry them away on their heads except the transference of that dust inside him is the human flesh version so he imagines a kind of red foamy wool where his chest is and it was all fine it began slowly just a little cold a cough and when it grew from little he went to a dawakhana and got a red mixture in a bottle marked with white squares standing on their corners in a long strip showing how much he should take every day but that didn’t cure it so he paid more money in a bigger dawakhana the one with angrezi medicines and got a small bottle of thick green stuff which did nothing either except perhaps send him to sleep until another mazdoor pointed out that the combination of the green medicine and Shokeen or Toofan gave a nice depth to the buzz from the alcohol all he got from it was the feeling of being a stone and a sleep like drowning impossible to rise to the surface in the morning to go wait in the line of mazdoors to be picked for a day’s work and sometimes he didn’t bother to get up or couldn’t bring himself to become human again from stone on time and just let the day’s work go laziness and ache like a vast snake that has got him in its coils and will not let go until it has squeezed out the last drop of breath from him and then he will be husk and where would he be then floating away in the breeze

  but the green medicine didn’t work and someone told him that it only soothed the throat and his coughs were coming from deeper down from his centre and now there is the fever a chhip-chhup bukhar as they used to say never so high as to fell you never so low as to make you feel that nothing’s the matter with you it doesn’t burn you up but rumbles on a bubbling drain under the surface of your skin and some lafanga mazdoor sleeping alongside him on the pavement near the big chowk so that they can be in the queue the moment they wake up instead of having to walk with a pounding head its shattering weight feeling odd sitting atop the slightly shaking weightlessness of the rest of him this lafanga says with that face of yours when you cough you’re like a barking fox this isn’t new at least two mistrys have laughed at him asking him if he’s come out of a human and one of them refused to take him on because foxes brought bad luck to a building site he said this is a cremation ground or what that foxes should roam around in human form he said

  he thought he could escape the shame of his looks by leaving his home far behind but no his face is everywhere he is but no that was not why he left not seriously although when he was a child he had often thought of leaving just because of that and when he grew up more pressing reasons pushed down that child’s anger or maybe the rage became something else like a seed becomes a tree bearing fruits that contain the seed from which will grow the same tree but the original parent tree he thinks the one that produced the first seed of rage is always one thing money and lack of work to make any money and how long could he and his brother till a scrap of land the size of a raees admi’s garden land that could barely provide one square meal a day throughout the year to two men their wives and children let alone produce any surplus that could be sold to get money for all the things apart from just food one needs money for and sometimes often for food too because that patch produced nothing for three months of winter and money to produce money as their father said when they were little money makes money like cats and dogs have kittens and puppies which grow up and go on to have more kittens and more puppies but you need to start somewhere and his father wanted to start with a government job until the fire swallowed him the whole forest in flames and the strange sound of birds in the dead of the night over the hum and crackle of fire and he watching his twin’s face aglow as if the fire was lighting him up from the inside but he wasn’t going to go down the road his father had attempted to take he wanted to leave his village because there was nothing there nothing everything was in the cities in construction in building which someone said always needed people endless supply of people like feeding a fire as his father and his forest had fed a fire and he could make so much money that he would be able to send money home and save and then one day he would have enough punji to start a business and punji is what one needed if one wanted money to bear money-children and money-grandchildren like cats and dogs

  and look what happened how many years in big cities two three four he has lost count how many years digging breaking rocks stone bricks digging carrying rubble and sand and stones and cement and sacks on his head on his back digging and lashing two or three ladders together with rope and tying the tall bamboos for the scaffolding verticals and horizontals in a giant criss-cross and the long training to get it right putting together the bamboo the planks the cloths and securing them to the outside of the building in a way that no one could fall or nothing could dislodge and land on another mazdoor working below how the bamboo had a gentle rocking give swaying him ever so slightly when he was on that skeleton of wood a lulling comforting movement almost one that could soothe him and make him forget almost forget the world below it made his head spin to look down better to lean forward and keep himself connected to the wall inches in front of him with his fingers and paint or scrape or hammer that almost imperceptible rocking flipping between comfort and terror the gingerly sideways movement that hint of elasticity in the bamboo like sitting on the pliable branch of a tree is this what birds feel like that temporary bit of solidity between air below and air above or do they feel like husk too and maybe when he was lucky he could put brick upon brick upon brick with the slather of wet concrete between each be indoors to whitewash a wall surface a floor make it smooth

  all of this better no comparison really than days sitting on the road in a bazaar or a chowk waiting waiting to be picked sometimes you are and sometimes you aren’t sometimes there is need for only so many and he is not among those needed in the end it’s not despair that kills you but hope at other times when he is chosen the work can be for a day or three days or weeks then there are days when there is nothing only waiting only time and hunger in the end it’s not despair that kills you but hope in the beginning he was lured in with the promise of hundred and twenty-five rupees a day but got only seventy-five and when he asked timidly he was told he could leave if he didn’t like what he was getting there was always someone else to do it so he settled for seventy-five for ten hours of hauling twenty-kilo sacks of cement on his back and carrying wet concrete on his head up three four seven floors and breaking stone every day the same repeating the same actions yet every day singular the destination the fellow workers even the work changing ever so slightly while remaining the same and digging in the sun for eight ten hours when stepping out in that heat could evaporate your blood and make you a different kind of husk seventy-five rupees was something

  yes something to put away in the triple-inside-pocket that he had had sewn on the inside of his one shirt on the advice of some other mazdoors who were also getting it done because money was safe nowhere someone had his shoes stolen off his feet as he was sleeping the sleep of the dead because that’s the sleep you sleep after mazdoori work then the friendly embrace of Toofan and
in his case the additional caress of the sickly sweet green medicine you could have your head taken off you and you wouldn’t notice but what kind of cast-iron protection was it you could have your shirt torn off you or cut skilfully with a knife and you wouldn’t know you would be sleeping the sleep of the dead and he keeps it in the plastic pouch that houses his ration card folded into quarters to keep it from damage from moisture rain and his own sweat the money in that bluish plastic pouch too and in the beginning when he felt the ties of home and the faces of his wife and children and brother floated up in his mind when he was still hopeful about saving for punji and sending money back home simultaneously looks laughable to him now but then he was hopeful and it’s hope that kills you in the end he sent back god knows how much how long ago it was three or four times maybe thousand rupees in total nothing really a baby’s piss he had to live after all how to live on seventy-five to hundred rupees a day when that income was random and uncertain the thought of saving makes him laugh like he is barking someone will call him a fox again the only thing to save is himself

  and how is he going to do that

  when his earliest dream for himself all he wanted to be was the pampered son of a rich man who rode in cars and looked out at the world from behind a pane of glass which could be lifted up or down depending on how much of the world you wanted it could be turned on or off like a tap he would like that world to be able to turn it on or off whenever he wanted he saw a boy like that in his village they must have been the same age and the boy in the car had looked at him and his twin and a few of their school friends standing by the side of the narrow road doing nothing staring at the car watching it halted and trying to start up again to negotiate a hairpin bend up to the big new house in which the boy and his father came up for the summer months the boy had looked at them and their eyes had locked and he had said something to his father then the window had come down and the boy had stuck out his hand and given them all tangerines from a bag inside the car no words had been exchanged he and his twin and the boys had moved closer to the car and taken the tangerines then the window had gone up again as they sat on a stone peeling the fruit they both discovered that there were little cloves chhora hiding near the bottom in between the bigger ones and someone told him and his twin that they were for motherless boys they had been secretly put into the fruit by their dead mother’s soul for her children for them how did he know how did that boy know that they didn’t have a mother and now a father swallowed by fire the boy was not from here