Freedom Song (11 page)

Earlier that week, she’d been to the nursing home again. By now she had become familiar with the corridor that led to Osteopathy, and the waiting-room in which
she and Khuku sat until she was called in. People milled around under the signs saying Osteopathy and Radiology and Cancer Detection for apparently no purpose, coming and going until they sat down on the chairs: middle-aged women in saris, men in spectacles.

She and Khuku had grown used to its faint electric lights, its air of being cut off. And the treatment had cost Mini only thirty rupees a visit. Half an hour of the infrared had soothed her arthritis and numbed the leg into the sweetness of acceptance.

E
arly in the afternoon on a Tuesday they set out for Madan Chatterjee Lane, where Mini’s house was. By half-past three Mini had worn a fresh sari for the journey; folded and put her things into her bag.

Khuku was feeling drowsy because she hadn’t taken her nap. ‘I’ll make up for it in the car,’ she said. ‘I’ll doze off for twenty minutes.’ For no reason that could be clearly identified or named, Khuku felt the infinitely reticent and light touch of a sadness, something to do with journeys and roads and people, which she used to experience not infrequently when she was a girl, except that it, and life itself, was much more real then.

No sooner was she in the car than she closed her eyes. She sat in the car, her chin drooping, while the car turned near the corner of a pavement. Fifteen minutes later the noise of the traffic woke her; she said: ‘We’re still in Beckbagan!’

It took them forty-five minutes to negotiate Lower Circular Road, Chowringhee, the junction before Bentinck Street and finally to pass Mahajati Sadan and to arrive at the small lane on the left. By then, they felt like they’d come to what was probably another city. Just on the right what looked like a deep ditch had been dug in Central Avenue, where actually unfinished work for the underground had been begun and then interrupted. Although the ditch looked almost fearsome, there were in fact two children playing and rushing into it, climbing from one side to the other and disappearing again.

Narrowly the lane opened; only just enough space, like arms reluctantly parted, leaving no room for an embrace to the bosom. Yet the car moved forward into this narrow space, obstructed by handcarts and men, going more and more into the interior, towards the heart, towards a home in the heart.

M
uch would change in the next few months in subtle ways, but much would seem to remain unchanged. And the change was probably only a phase, a development as short-lived as anything else; while what seemed to be in a condition of stasis might actually be shimmering with uncertainty and on the brink of extinction.

And Mini’s departure created a gap, a hiatus, that would take time to be replenished again. She had left a vacancy in Khuku’s flat, a vague but living memory of her sitting upon a sofa, reading, and it would take time now for Khuku’s life to reassert itself. Later, Khuku would hear of Mini’s being restricted to her home because of Shantidi’s accident, a fall down the stairs and a minor but troublesome fracture. Winter would end, and Mini would be circumscribed by teaching during the day and returning home. It was as if life, or history, were a spirit
that kept transforming its features, discontented to be one thing at one time.

The change in the weather from late January to early February was small but palpable, a fractional abatement of the dawn’s and evening’s chill. The winter, crystalline at dawn, smoke-filled in memory, was ending. Then there were the other changes, the larger ones; as the country altered, gradually and almost imperceptibly, from one kind of place to another. Memories died and new ways of life came into being.

Then, in February, Bhaskar’s parents began to look for a bride for him in earnest, surreptitiously almost, neither advertising in newspapers nor telling relatives, but sending out signals discreetly.

A
lthough he knew now that they wouldn’t make his plan for Little’s work, Shib kept going as if nothing had happened. Once he was in his office, accountants came into his room to ask him to clear up some problem they were having or simply for some advice, and he would help them out—almost minister to them wondering what his role here was supposed to be. But no real work had been done for days.

His youthfulness (though they knew he was a retired man) had moved the rest of the staff from apathy to something approaching constructiveness. He had come in like a spirit in transit. And he still walked more quickly than most men forty years younger than him.

Again the feeling of peace returned. He could pick up his telephone and ring Khuku if he wanted, but he didn’t feel the need to.

He sorted out his files gravely. He was used to being alone, inhabiting his own world: for he was an only child whose mother had died when he was two. Moreover, he had completed a lifetime of looking after others and fending for himself; even Khuku, when he’d first married her, was in many ways helpless; and he had been a sort of shade-giving umbrella to his son, who’d had a happy and extended childhood.

When he’d first come to Calcutta he’d been a young man, twenty years old, and he’d put his name down, Shib Purakayastha, in a register in Calcutta University.

He smiled. Is there an alchemy for making the old new?

‘Tea, sir?’

He smiled and shook his head at the man who had asked the question.

The man withdrew.

Two months ago it was that he’d considered with an employee, a marketing manager in this company whose products seldom infiltrated the market, the idea of putting in a fresh advertisement for the company. ‘But where?’ There was, for instance, a seven-year-old poster with Little’s printed upon it in large letters under a railway bridge in the South—day and night the trains rumbled above it and the bridge shuddered—whose paper had peeled off almost entirely, leaving behind, miraculously, only the ‘Little’s’ at the top.

Sometimes this man, who had just asked him if he would have tea, brought him lozenges in their new wrappers with Little’s printed on both sides. He had ceased to wonder about this company, or what he really did here, or where his salary came from. And Shib had asked to see the lozenges because he was interested in assessing the ‘standard’ of the product; he’d taken them home to his wife, surprising her by giving her a small full packet. For the story of a working life is also the story of a marriage. She’d put one to the test immediately.

‘But it’s wonderful!’ Khuku had said, absorbed in the flavour of the lozenge; it reminded her of when she was a child, for the flavour, as it was then, came back to her unchanged; she’d tasted them in Shillong as a girl; and she grew puzzled and anxious trying to understand the reasons for Little’s decline.

E
ach time a state- or government-supported company closed down, it was like a death-knell that no one heard. And Shib heard it these days.

It was only after months that people realized that a company was gone. A product disappeared from the market, or it might be bought over by a Marwari businessman and sold as if nothing had happened. And as if removed from all this, in a constricted space, the office window looked out onto the stunted outgrowth of Dum Dum.

But in his spare time, Khuku’s husband had decided to put aside some money in shares; he had a premonition that there was a change at hand. All his life, he had worked in a company, and had had no taste for business or speculation; he had been a cautious and qualified professional. But now,
four years after retirement, some demon seemed to have seized him; when he was not watching television, he wore small, focused reading glasses that sat low on the bridge of his nose, and fussed over papers and forms. Now, with economic deregulation and a freedom that, in theory, had never existed before, there was the prospect of a rainbow-deluge of collaborations and all kind of opportunities coming to the surface. And Little’s would then be a thing of yesterday.

Cautiously he decided to invest some money in the Mutual Fund and uncharacteristically to buy a few shares in a company that made biscuits, and in another one that made shoes. Now, in the last quarter of his life, a business acumen and speculative curiosity, long suppressed in the interests of his managerial skills, began to come into play, and also a silent, watchful interest in political issues, and he began to peruse the papers with more than usual thoroughness. His gaze and concentration as he absorbed the curve and emerging shape of the time were intent.

All was silence around him. At odd moments lost in thoughts on these matters he could be found humming to himself. No one but Khuku, and Bablu, who was not here, knew that he sang. From what little could be heard of that singing voice it would seem that it was a small, high-pitched one, at variance with the quiet dignity of his persona, not very sure of itself. It skirted around the difficult portions
and paraphrased the tune rather than sang it; but it was a strange, lonely rehearsal to itself (often in response to a song that Khuku had just sung) rather than meant for others to hear. When Khuku overheard him, she would say to her husband—‘What? what? are you singing? I see you’re not lacking in courage!’—and, discouraged, he would stop.

W
omen’s memories of their husbands’ working life are radically but subtly different from their husbands’ own, and the same must be true of their retirement. It’s like seeing something from the other side. Of course, Khuku felt lonely when Shib was in his office; and always had done. But, then, during the curfew, when shops and offices and everything else had been closed—ten days of nothing happening—she’d had her wish come true, and Shib at home with her for twenty-four hours of the day.

It had been a mixed blessing, this enforced, artificial reunion. It was as if a train they’d been on had halted somewhere unexpectedly and they’d been forced to take a holiday. She’d found that he wasn’t interested in discussing what was happening at all—the riots, the anger; more interested in re-reading old copies of the
Statesman
which he’d accumulated during the last week in a drawer. How
little concerned he was about the silence outside, in which the sound of a single car horn became disconcerting, as he sat all morning reading! Neglecting to shave, even; a grey stubble appearing on his cheeks.

The truth is, he was not used to being at home. And with Bablu away they were less like a couple than a pair of lodgers.

Then, gradually, the heap of newspapers by his side of the bed had grown, the small alley by the bed littered with papers, as if he were undertaking some sort of research. And his going to the toilet three times in the silence of the night, the sound of the flush nudging her deep in her sleep; she’d begun to worry whether there was anything wrong with his prostate. Any sign of abnormality made her worry and wonder, and this new silence outside and proximity within brought to her awareness what she probably hadn’t noticed before. She listened to him breathe at night. Many nights she spent not sleeping, but thinking and awake.

Once the curfew had ended he’d gone out into the world and bought oranges. But it had been a great blunder. On returning home, Khuku pointed out that they were, from the way they peeled and tasted, those terrible sour mutations that resembled oranges, kinoos. She derided him for his lack of discrimination. ‘What!’ Shib said. ‘But I
told
him I want oranges!’ Indignation, however, could not change the kinoos into oranges. Life had begun again.

A
nd then there were only two days left for that performance.

‘No, it’s not
a famous
group; I’ve never heard of them before. But it’s a nice name. You feel you
must
have heard of them.’

‘That’s right.’

The two, aunt and niece, were desultorily discussing that frayed but bright entity, Bhaskar’s theatre troupe; for this late manifestation of the artistic bent was worth commenting on. Yet one of Khuku’s elder brothers, now dead, had written poetry, in rhyme and in blank verse, in twelve-line sonnets, in a marvellous phase between the age of eighteen and twenty, and had even had one poem published in
Desh,
and that copy had been circulated in at least five houses.

Another brother, Pulu, had done a stage adaptation of an unadaptable Sukumar Ray poem when he was a young man in Shillong, using all his four- and five-year-old nieces and nephews and his sisters-in-law in the cast (that was when Khuku was in London, rainswept and with six hours of sunlight, with Shib, who was still a student, and it had been described to her in a letter; and she’d known the strangeness of being in another country that she could not recognize if she looked out of the window and have the sense of her own country return to her from a description).

And it was now, a few days before this street-play, that it occurred to Khuku that her family had always been full of ne’er-do-wells, each one doing exactly what he pleased, and if Pulu hadn’t been brought to England in 1959 with Shib’s help he’d still be wheeling and dealing in secondhand cars in Shillong (which is what he’d been doing when he’d had that play enacted—a major success when her nephew and niece Moni and Beena—Borda’s children—and India itself had been ridiculously, helplessly young). These ne’er-do-wells were somehow provided for by Providence. And she thought of that family and realized that the bonds of relations surrounding it, radiating across and scattered through this city and elsewhere, was finally coming to an end, and she unexpectedly grew absorbed in its memories.

‘And they’re just a handful of boys,’ said Puti. ‘I wonder how Bhola mama copes with them.’

‘He’s indulgent—towards all his children, I’d say.’

‘But too much indulgence isn’t good, is it?’ said Puti, mother of a son, Mohit, who was so responsible at fourteen that he sometimes even gave advice to his parents.

At this moment, Bhaskar was witnessing the construction of a stage in a by-lane off Vidyasagar Road.

They’d arranged about seventy-five chairs, in rows.

Borda’s elder daughter in Golf Green was among those that had heard of the performance. She, Beena, lived with her parents, and went to work each morning with the air of one about to perform, once again, an indispensable task. The rest of the family almost forgot about her at times, as they forgot those with less than ordinary fortunes; until they thought about her again in a wave of passing sympathy. She was planning to go—‘Dear Bhaskar’s play’: she could not miss it.