Amit Chaudhuri - Freedom Song

Within the flat the heat was bearable. Sometimes a breeze entered the room, but intermittently, because of the block of flats opposite; that building was an obstruction. Yet the walls were cool; it was a flat that became damp during the monsoons.

The bombs exploded in Bombay.

The day after the explosions no one wanted to go out but found themselves at work anyway, the usual noises surrounding them.

Mini phoned Khuku.

‘Mini?’ said Khuku. ‘You’ve come to school?’

‘What was I to do? I felt I had nothing to do at home.’ She began to laugh, then.

‘Nothing to do at home!’ said Khuku. ‘Here was a chance for you to take a day off.’

She herself was planning to leave shortly for the market with two hundred rupees in her purse. There was a pleasurable and wholly fictitious feeling of doom around this simple expedition; it touched everything about her life at the moment.

‘Let’s see what they do!’ she said. ‘They won’t be able to harm me,’ as if she were speaking of a gang of half-wit miscreants to whom it would soon be proved that she was unassailable.

She said then, conspiratorially:

‘Suleiman came yesterday. . He looked quite pleased.’

This mood lasted all day.

There, near Mini’s house, near the sweetshop with its heavy smell and the decrepit landlords’ houses, birds rose almost peacefully into the air.

Thus they would rise habitually from this most ancient part of Calcutta, shriek, and then return a few moments later to balconies and cornices.

In the South, a rather mournful-looking red flag went up by an excavated ditch in the middle of the road. There was no breeze these days, except the slightest one, which caused the flag to flutter.

Towards the end of March, Bhaskar went to see a girl who lived in Jodhpur Park. This meeting was reported to Khuku by Puti, her niece.

‘She sings, mashi,’ came Puti’s voice on the ear-piece. ‘So of course Bhola mama asked her to sing. Then he sang a couple of songs himself.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ Puti’s laughter filled the space of the ear-piece momentarily. ‘But you know Bhola mama, mashi.’

Apparently they had liked the family — it was strange how all the families had been likeable; this particular father occupied a respectable position in a fairly well-known company; and the daughter, ‘although no beauty’, had ‘personality’.

‘Is she not good-looking?’ asked Khuku.

‘Mm.’ She thought for an instant. ‘They said she has sharp features — a little too sharp, said Abha mami. She’s neither dark nor fair.’

‘What does Bhaskar think?’

‘Bhaskar wants to marry her,’ said Puti. ‘He liked her very much.’

‘But I thought he was going to marry the other girl — the one whose mother died of cancer?’

Puti lowered her voice thoughtfully.

‘I think Bhaskar likes whoever he meets,’ she said. ‘Now the first girl is too quiet for him. This one is more talkative.’

Three days after the meeting, the father rang up Bhola: ‘Mr Biswas, she’s our only daughter; our only child I mean. And to tell you the truth, it’s my wife who’s a little unsure. .’ The wife, who’d been so welcoming, so enthusiastic! And was the telephone the right place to vent these misgivings? ‘No, I can see why, Mr Lahiri,’ said Bhola. He had half expected it. ‘But,’ said Mr Lahiri, ‘if it’s not a serious thing — his commitments, I mean — because we liked the boy very much. .’ But Bhola could give the gentleman no such assurance. ‘Mr Lahiri,’ he said, suddenly moved, ‘my son is concerned about things affecting each one of us today. . But I can say that his political ideals don’t affect his work or his family life.’ ‘I quite understand,’ said Mr Lahiri.

A decision just had to be made; would Bhaskar marry, or would he wait? He’d come to set his heart in secret on the last girl, but that now seemed out of the question and the desire almost faded. He had waited; he had waited for a reply that did not come. Then he thought impulsively, ‘I must not prolong indefinitely what is after all a wearisome business.’ Yet he couldn’t bring himself to utter the final syllable. The second girl was what remained; he couldn’t recall her face for the moment; but did that matter? ‘Say yes,’ he said in his own darkness, addressing himself, ‘we cannot control our own fate.’

After a few days, Bhaskar agreed to marry the second girl he’d met.

So it was that the match was decided with hardly any of the other relatives knowing about it; they went, ignorant and happy, about their own ways; and even Puti who had a way of hearing about things long before others did remained ignorant. The others who would have heard were kept from this news for about a week; of this union between Vidyasagar Road and a lane off Lansdowne Road.

The girl was two years younger than her son; she’s dark, but so am I, thought Bhaskar’s mother.

And it’ll do him good, she thought, to have some responsibility on his shoulders at last; for I think he still depends too much on his father. His father’s growing old; it had hardly occurred to them, because time seems not to affect the people one is closest to; they have a living but transcendental existence in those who love them. He needs to grow up; he’s still such a boy; and she thought of him tenderly, in her mind’s eye, with a Ganashakti in one hand. They all had dreams, but Bhaskar’s mother’s was practical rather than grandiose; for she hoped, no, she believed, rather calculatingly, that the marriage would divide Bhaskar’s energies and weaken his attachment to politics; while Bhaskar’s dreams, they were another matter, they were the nation’s dreams, or so he believed. .

There was a plan in her mind, quite cunning, and probably all the more effective because she wasn’t entirely conscious of it. She had expected, in truth, it would be a year, even more, before Bhaskar found a girl. But it had happened uncommonly quickly, as if fate itself had decided it should be so and that the problem should be dispensed with. She herself — Bhaskar’s mother — remembered when she’d seen her husband’s photograph for the first time when she was eighteen and hadn’t liked him particularly because he was balding.

And thus it happened that the date for the marriage was fixed after Bhola said yes to Dr Ghosh. The parents acted with undue haste, wanting to get it over with as soon as possible, before the two concerned had had a chance to change their minds. And the summer had only just begun to get unpleasantly hot.

The venue for the reception had now to be fixed; they gravely consulted the calendar with Goodforce Literod printed on it; and they decided it would be convenient to have it in a house located five minutes away, across the main road and the tramlines, which had been renting out its ground floor for weddings ever since they could remember. Of course it was a house like any other, but noticeably at certain times of the year it was transformed and almost made unrecognizable by lights. Then, later, it returned to being just another house, but never completely lost its aura of being a house where weddings were held. Even dates in the summer for this house were in demand, for people were always getting married whenever there was an auspicious day in the almanac; thus the 17th was already booked, so was the 21st, and so was the 3rd, leaving only the 12th.

They began writing names on envelopes, names of people who lived in other parts of Calcutta, and in Pennsylvania and California and England, people who wouldn’t be able to come to the wedding, and might have even forgotten what Bhaskar looked like; all their names were written in the heat, and the cards put inside the envelopes.