Amit Chaudhuri - Freedom Song

They came to a house. An old man was sitting on the balcony of the first floor upon a wicker stool and eating from a bowl. A woman in a cardigan leaned over the banister and looked over her shoulder and cried, ‘Hurry up, Mira, do you want to miss your bus?’ The old man dipped his spoon into the bowl and said, ‘Don’t scold her, ma, she’s a little slow.’ The mother said, ‘Mira — Mira? I can see the bus coming now,’ although the lane was still empty. The door to the room on the ground floor was open, separated from the courtyard by a porch which was a little stage that accommodated a coir mat and two or three pairs of rubber slippers. There was a message on the wall outside: C.P.I.(M.) FOR UNITY AND HARMONY AMONG ALL COMMUNITIES. A man, wearing pyjamas, a shirt, and a sleeveless pullover, came to the door and said: ‘You’re late.’ ‘Give it to me, don’t waste time,’ said Bhaskar. As they were waiting, Bhaskar lit a cigarette, and Mohit, still a little awed and shocked by this act, began to pace up and down the porch, stopping only to inspect a fern that had grown on one side. A small girl had arrived at the pavement in uniform, a blue skirt, white shirt, and blue pullover, accompanied by a servant girl who would herself have been no more than ten years old. She was swinging her plastic water bottle upon its infinitely co-operative strap and standing a little way from the servant girl and talking to herself. Occasionally, she looked up at where her mother and possibly her grandfather were standing, ignoring the rest of the world, as if her imminent farewell were meant only for them. The man in the sleeveless pullover emerged with a pile of Ganashakti and transferred it from his arms to Bhaskar’s. ‘Did you sleep well last night?’ he said sourly. Bhaskar ground the cigarette underfoot and kicked it into the courtyard among the mournful plants and ash-grey earth. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he replied. He walked out of the gate, followed hotly by Mohit.

Each newspaper was folded and tied with a jute string. ‘You take half,’ said Bhaskar. ‘Here.’ ‘What are you going to do with them?’ asked Mohit, cradling them and laughing. ‘Distribute some,’ revealed Bhaskar very seriously, ‘and sell the others later.’ Bundled up, they were slim and surprisingly hard, and each paper could be held in the fist like a baton. They began to walk back the way they had come, to an increasing accompaniment of noise from motorcycles and cars. As they passed the houses, Bhaskar aimed his paper at one or two of the porches, where it fell on the floor with a sharp sound, or sent it flying at a first-storey balcony, a swift journey in the course of which the paper arched in mid air and finally landed just beyond the flower-pots. There was a special purpose in these throws, for the readers of Ganashakti were fellow-travellers of the Communist Party, they believed in its necessity and its vision, and an inexplicable bond was formed between the distributor, whose every aim with the bundle seemed to be a salute, and the silent house. Mohit glanced back to see if the houses in which the readers of Ganashakti lived were any different from the others, but they were the same, with the fronts of balconies and doors painted in white or green, and other parts chipping away to reveal a structure of stone and iron that was as intricate and fragile as a honeycomb. The two went on until Bhaskar had completed the round and they had come to the end of Vidyasagar Road. By now Bhaskar had acquired a small limp; Mohit said: ‘You’re growing old, Bhaskarmama. The Party must be in a bad way if they’re taking members like you.’ ‘What do you think I should do?’ ‘I think you should do yoga,’ said Mohit. ‘Buy a book and learn the asanas. Or you won’t be selling newspapers for long.’ ‘I want to have some tea,’ said Bhaskar.

Afternoon saw Khuku and Mini fall asleep on the double bed, Mini on the side on which Shib slept at night. These days the fan was not switched on, and the women hugged their own bodies, a light shawl lying casually upon their feet, taking on their tender, ghostly shape, while now and then Khuku complained of the cold and shivered. She had had all the windows closed except one, which let in a smell of smoke that must have drifted, unmoored, from a distance. Because the room, without the hum and movement of the fan, was so still, the world outside seemed proportionately larger, with more space having come into existence to accommodate the different afternoon noises, of bird call and bird chatter, and vendors, hammering, and taxis. Somewhere below, cars arrived, people got out, doors were slammed one by one, or almost together: not everyone was asleep. Next to Khuku, Mini, very softly, was snoring, and on another floor, someone coughed, the little angry explosions seeming to go off just outside the window. Khuku clasped her throat with her hand and warmed it. How pleasing that sensation was, warmth, so rarely known for most of the year! Khuku began to fall asleep.

Outside, Jochna, sitting on the veranda at the end of the hall, combed her loose wet hair and considered the city. Uma, leaning over the banister and looking unconsciously upon the tiny heads of the watchmen far below, hung clothes to dry from different-coloured plastic clips. In a slow, imperceptible way, the city swam around her, the temple with its pseudo-classical shape that was being ‘completed’ for fifteen years, which they thought of simply as ‘the temple’, the vacant white perfect terraces of decaying ancestral mansions, surrounded by the enigmatic tops of masses of trees, the solitary, invisible factory chimney, with its waving plume of smoke the colour of pigeon feathers, the weathered white marble dome of an ancient princely house now given out to wedding parties, shining as coldly and beautifully as a planet, and, at large intervals, the famous multi-storeyed buildings with mythical Sanskrit names, all this swam around the two maidservants, Uma and Jochna, the first, who did not know her age, but looked thirty years old, abandoned by her husband, but vermilion still fresh and bright and new each day in the parting of her hair, and the other, fourteen years old, short, dark, with intelligent eyes, and slow to smile. Uma was telling her the story yet again:

‘He begins to go for weeks to the other village, until I ask him, “What do you do there?” and he tells me, “I’m living with my wife,” and I say to him, “If she is your wife then who am I, eh?” He was like that from the first day, I can touch you and say that. He said, “I never wanted to marry you, it was my people who made me.”’

Jochna had other stories to tell, of her elder sister who was learning to make clothes in a tailoring class, and her nine-year-old brother who went to a municipal school. Tinkling sounds came from outside, of hammering and chiselling, as labourers worked like bees, and seven- or eight-storeyed buildings rose in the place of ancestral mansions that had been razed cruelly to the ground, climbing up like ladders through screens of dust. An old mansion opposite the veranda had been repainted white, to its last banister and pillar, so that it looked like a set of new teeth. In the lawn before it, a mali in khaki shorts, alone, unaware of being watched, fussed over a row of potted plants. In another sphere altogether, birds took off from a tree or parapet, or the roof of some rich Marwari’s house, startling and speckling the neutral sky. Not a moment was still or like another moment. In a window in a servants’ outhouse attached to a mansion — both the master’s house and the servants’ lost in a bond now anachronistic and buried — a light shone even at this time of the day, beacon of winter.

For a long time, neither of them seemed to move from where they were sitting. Then, burrowing into the hall, they lay down on the carpet between two chairs, a sofa, and a centre table, their feet, or Uma’s shoulder, visible depending from where one saw them, leaving empty the place where they had been, a veranda framing a winter sky, and light, an occasional sweep of birds, and grey, thinning smoke. Now only the sounds remained, giving a sense of the city outside, caught in the light, and a mosquito, like a lost aeroplane, that had wandered in; the sound of the two voices, Jochna’s and Uma’s, fell like drops of water, again, and again, deep, sounding muffled underneath the sofa. The colour of Jochna’s dress, with red and black flowers, reminded one of the interiors of pavement stalls on Rashbehari Avenue, with dresses folded or hung up in the afternoon, and a fist clutching forty rupees. It could have been worn by a small plastic doll. There was something of a cat’s secrecy about the two figures.