Freedom Song (18 page)

But she and her husband hardly had any time together. They met in the morning at the dining-table as
acquaintances would, the reverberations of night-time already having faded and left them almost more distant from each other. Bhaskar did not look at her in the presence of others; he as good as pretended she wasn’t there; and then he was gone for most of the day. The first days of their marriage was a time of trust in the unproven and of unspoken longing.

Having grown up elsewhere, she had no friends in Calcutta. A few relatives lived on the outskirts of Calcutta, and others even further away. Now and then her brother appeared, dark and bespectacled and much like her to look at, and then disappeared again. And for the first month and a half of their marriage, Bhaskar took her quite for granted.

At night their fingers and hands crept towards each other, in the greed for closeness, and for those sensations, only incompletely experienced so far, of something between pain and satisfaction, concealment, and happiness.

Upstairs was where their new life began, beneath the photographs of late and ever-present grandparents. Where Bhaskar’s and Manik’s and Piyu’s childhood had begun and evolved and come to a conclusion, where they’d slept together on the bed in often anarchic and filial positions, played between and under the beds and bruised themselves, another existence began at last.

She had become used to the lane which, at first, had kept her from sleep.

Early in the morning, when it was not quite light, she sometimes sensed him going out; it was inexplicable; she sighed; and then once or twice she saw him return with a pile of newspapers, the
Ganashakti.
It was a paper she’d never read; but Bhaskar insisted to her, with what seemed to her an excessive and uncomfortable advocacy, that it contained all the real and important news and all that was really worth reading. She didn’t believe him; for
Ganashakti
was a paper that no one she knew read; it was, as far as she knew, used to make cartons and containers in the market; and its pages were swept away in lanes and alleys. These early morning excursions of his became indistinguishable to her sometimes from the intense dreams she had before waking.

She kept herself to herself and still hadn’t quite made friends with the family. During her solitary explorations, she found old comic books, toys, beneath the staircase to the terrace. And she discovered near a doll with an arm missing and a Ludo board a set of tiny pots and pans—kitchen utensils. Though they were old now, they must have once been used by Piyu to cook make-believe meals for an imaginary husband and family, or probably just for the sake of imitating the motions of cooking. How possessive children are about their imaginary homes!—almost as
proprietorial as they are when they grow up and have real ones. Sandhya found them when clearing away piles of other things that had been dumped beneath the stairs to the terrace (she was beginning to rearrange this floor which would be her household), their small but exact shapes lying overturned, but still intact.

And then she put artificial flowers and leaves, imitations of tulips, roses, in two vases. She had loved these so much, almost as if they were alive—she had bought them from a small stall in Gariahat and carried them back crowded in her arms. They, however, turned out to be a less than perfect replica, the edge of the leaf frayed, with a few short strands of loose thread hanging from it.

‘Why don’t you get real flowers?’ asked Bhaskar one day.

‘If I have real flowers,’ said Sandhya, ‘they’ll die in a couple of days—and then who’ll give me the money to buy new ones: you?’

‘But these will get dirty in a week,’ he said.

‘They won’t,’ said Sandhya, aware of some protective magic which would keep the dust from getting to the flowers; and with such conviction did she say it that for a moment Bhaskar was convinced as well. Thus the perennially blooming flowers, cheap, bright, immortal blossoms, remained.

T
hey had still not been on their ‘honeymoon’; and the crows made an unbroken, troubled din outside and hopped about relentlessly. But they’d put all the cheques they’d got as wedding presents into a bank account; part of it they’d use for their trip. And as they spoke, weighing the size of their budget against their expected expenditure, India, in their imaginations, became a series of small hotels, connecting routes, different climates existing at once, peculiarities of cuisine.

She’d always wanted to go to Kashmir. And yet that paradise had been poisoned. How wonderful it was to wander through India with your parents as a child (she blurredly remembered travelling to strange places—this was such a large country—when her mother was alive; there was no death then, nor destiny), then to forget most of it, except a stomach upset that had made you sick or a
sari being bought by your mother in a shop or the paleness of a white hotel façade, and then have a sense of it come back to you many years later as you prepared to make the journey with another person, almost a stranger.

For a few days, they—Bhaskar’s relatives—had been waiting to see if Bhaskar, upon getting married, would gradually relinquish his commitment to the Party and take up a more respectable form of existence. The Party was spoken of as an illicit but persistent liaison.

‘But I don’t think Sandhya will allow him to continue for long.’

Someone else said: ‘She’s a hard-headed sensible girl after all.’

‘Let us see.’

They waited. But married life and its responsibilities seemed to leave Bhaskar unchanged. He was still selling
Ganashakti;
and, even now, he would, vociferously if necessary, and for as long as he could, marshalling an array of facts and arguments, criticize the new and sinister global order, the present government that was governing shamelessly from the centre, illegal bargains between nations and business houses, and every relative, cousin, or uncle who happened to disagree with him.

C
RPF soldiers; three months ago, and before then, they’d appeared when the roads were silent, waiting for riots to break out in the city though they eventually hadn’t. Sleepy-eyed, waving at the children. As if they were passing through, a peacekeeping force on their way elsewhere.

And yesterday, going through Ballygunge and Park Circus, a truckload that not everyone noticed. These sleepy, sometimes smiling men. Although they were so still now, they could be cruel. Waiting patiently in the traffic jam like the others, their job probably long done . . .

T
hey—Bhaskar and the wife he hardly knew—made preparations for the journey, preparations to be absent from the house for five days. From responsibilities and business partners, parents and parents-in-law, the meetings in the evening, they decided to take a train to Siliguri, and from there a bus to Darjeeling. People had taken the route many times before and many had it by heart; it was like a well-known line of poetry.

They passed roads that had been made by the British, connecting Bengal to the rest of the country, and which were still more or less unchanged, passing the dirty ponds and warm villages of Bengal, hungry children and women with their heads lowered, bulls sunning themselves; INDIA IS GREAT said the message that disappeared between two places; Bhaskar saw these things as a husband and a holiday-maker rather than one who’d become involved
in the struggle; they were accompanied in the train by a Bengali family, by old women, and children with colds; they had with them two suitcases, a flask, and a tiffin carrier.

Street-theatre, old forlorn papers: rummaging upstairs for something else, Bhaskar’s mother discovered, grown damp with moisture, photocopied manuscripts among a heap of discarded desiderata and wondered what they were.

‘When he’s back,’ she said when two days had passed, ‘I want him to see the doctor again.’

‘Why? Does he still have that backache?’ asked Bhola.

‘I think so. It’s the way he bends at times. He does it slowly and hesitantly, as if it’s a luxury.’

A
nd Khuku lay on her bed in the afternoon. Although her eyes were closed, she was wide awake, she could hear Nando quarrelling, and she wondered if it was good for Shib to be in that office in this heat at this age: she didn’t like it. Outside, in the blank heat, the sun pulsed like a star that could not be seen.

Oh, men must work; nothing else makes them as happy. But she lay there, cross, unable to sleep.

There was movement in the clouds outside, and lightning; it stirred the air. Shib came back to her as he used to be when he was a boy, when he visited their home so often that she was hardly aware of him, but unaware of him in a different way from her unawareness of him now; a different way of taking someone’s presence for granted. How like a ghost that boy was, both in his paleness and in the strangeness
his memory had assumed. He was her brother Pulu’s best friend, a boy whose quietness was deceptive because he noticed more than he appeared to. He was wavy-haired, as he was now, and used to be unusually fair-skinned, more so then than he was at present. He had no mother; she had died when he was two years old, and he’d never had any memory of her. He used to be shy when he came to their house, and her own mother had a special fondness for him because he was motherless and an only child. Thus there was that lost quality about him, even though he belonged to one of the most well-to-do families in the town.

Unanswerable, obsolete questions glimmered in the flashes of lightning. What would have happened to Khuku if Shib had not married her? After school, Khuku’s family had stopped her college education because they said they could not afford it; it was probably true. ‘But Khuku was never interested in schoolwork anyway,’ her brother said in explanation. She had cried for a week, for herself and in forgiveness. A vacancy opened up before her as one kind of life receded from her permanently, the world of exams and preparations and the panic of examination day, now only to be known in other people’s lives. Then she had stayed at home and practised on the harmonium. She had read new novels, and entered into an imaginary world. Characters in stories became as real to her as people; like Khenti who loved pui leaves, and tender-hearted Goshtho didi in
Mahasthabir Jatak.
Years passed. She read; she waited; she waited silently for some change. She knew, instinctively, she wouldn’t end in the place she’d begun in. They grew up—brothers, sisters, friends; Khuku, Bhola, Shib, Mini, not knowing where they would live, what their children would look like, who their spouses would be, in what way their lives would be different from each other’s, or what incarnation the world would take fifty years from now. At the beginning, they’d moved blindly from birth into the unknown, from darkness into the world; the passage into life, as the one through it, is a journey, and they, unlike the ones who had died in mid-life or as children, had been deemed to complete it, to live out their days in the world.

She hadn’t even realized that Shib thought of her in a particular way. (Shib said that it was her singing that had decided him; and this alarmed her: what if she had not been able to sing?) But Khuku’s elder sister, that stern woman and tender romantic, would always say later, ‘I knew it. When Khuku pinched Shib once, and I saw Shib blush, I knew it.’ Khuku herself had had no idea. When he first proposed to her, in a roundabout way, through her mother, she refused without hesitation. ‘But I don’t think of him in that way!’ she said. ‘He’s more like a brother to me . . .’ Her mother had said, ‘Think again. You won’t find another like him.’ But Khuku hesitated; she was certain she was in love with someone else. How intense and chastening these
emotions seemed now! On and on one goes, gradually to become a stranger to oneself, but never completely, and never knowing what it is that pushes us in one direction and not another . . . And how deeply they believed in romantic love in those days: it was all those long novels. She procrastinated; she neither said no nor yes. Then one day, after she had finished singing a song, she saw a kindness on Shib’s face she had not noticed before; it had always been there, but she had not seen it; it was as if she’d suddenly recognized who he was. Soon after they were engaged, and Shib went to England; and, after six years, she followed him there. It was a few years after Independence; Shib’s father had died; he knew he would never return home. Their marriage was thus a marriage of childhood acquaintances, of two people who had known each other when they had hardly mattered to one another and who had grown one day into their shared life without hardly being aware of it; only slightly embarrassed when that awareness came. And their new life, under some nameless star, began with each other.

T
hen she remembered her friend’s arthritis, and the pain, persistent, monotonous, as personal as something imagined, which was born of neglect and carelessness. Yet the thing about arthritis was that you didn’t know why it happened to one person and not to another; there appeared to be no clearly identifiable cause; it was yet another mystery that governed and left its casual impress upon existence. ‘It’s four months now,’ she thought, and recalled that Mini should have been back in three months for another check-up. And yet the thought of Mini, whose every trouble filled her with a sense of responsibility, also, contradictorily, brought to her a feeling of happiness and excitement.

The last time she’d called her was when there had been an explosion in Central Avenue, not very far from Mini’s building; and they’d trembled and thought that the troubles
had begun in Calcutta. But no, to their relief, but almost to their disappointment as well (for they succumbed easily to excitement), it was the arsenal of a local hoodlum that had blown up by accident.

‘I wonder how she is,’ thought Khuku (for Mini came back to her as a person in a dream), and dialled the number of her school. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I speak to Supriti Biswas?’ The person at the other end seemed to weigh this question and consider its merits. Supriti Biswas. In a voice that sounded slightly put out, the person eventually relented and said, ‘Hold on a minute, please.’

There was a gap of five minutes. She heard the voices of children, random and happy, in the ear-piece. Then a voice she knew well said, ‘Khuku?’