Amit Chaudhuri - Freedom Song

‘I have to wake up early tomorrow,’ he muttered, waiting to see what she would say. But she didn’t protest; she had wavy hair; he saw that she had dark lips; the calm sound of the fan repeatedly filled the silence. ‘Are you missing home?’ he said, turning on his side and letting his hand fall near her shoulder; he had acquired a small belly, and she seemed thin in comparison to him. This morning, she had cried when leaving her house. ‘No, not really,’ she said, quite gravely, like a child who has had a new experience. It was strange; they’d spoken with each other at length two nights ago in the rented room in that house in which they’d been married; and they had forgotten, for the time being, what they had talked about and would almost have to be reacquainted with each other. Bhaskar switched off the light and they tried to fall asleep. He had not known before how shy he was with the opposite sex. It was an uncomfortable night; whenever a car passed through the lane, its headlights lit up the wall of the room, and towards dawn, a kitten mewed and sounded like a child crying. Each sound set the tympanum in the inner ear vibrating.

Towards dawn he awoke and gazed unsurprised at her as she slept, her eyelids momentarily parted to reveal the blue-grey light in her eyeball. But she was not awake, and everywhere there were only the merest signs of life; the blue dawn; a reticent vibration from the tramline; the early insistent cry of a shalik; her breath; in each of these life resided on the edge of itself. Meanwhile the fan lulled them.

When Bhaskar woke up again, he found she was not there. He was surrounded by the sound of crows and buses and rickshaws and the tube-well and schoolchildren, all things apparently in perpetual transit. Going down, he was startled to see that she had joined his parents and Piyu for breakfast in the room where they all ate.

‘Where should I put these?’

Sandhya was holding a chain from which a golden locket hung. She held it, weightless, in her palm.

‘Let’s put this one back in its box,’ said Bhaskar’s mother. They bent forward like two conspirators. Light glinted and scattered.

It was one of the things she had given her. Last month she had taken a bus and gone to the jeweller’s and had had a necklace and a pair of earrings ‘broken’ and converted into this longer, this more beautiful piece. And she felt a strange tenderness towards it that was not unconnected to loss, for what was once hers had become something else and someone else’s.

Her youth lived on in the forms these jewels took. And whenever Bhaskar’s mother felt that familiar boredom coming on with a piece of jewellery, she would take the piece, like a child with a toy, to the jeweller who had first made it and describe in words the new design, and leave the piece with him as if she were lending it to him; and he would give it back to her made ‘new’ in five days. Sometimes, when the piece was not very old, one suffered a small loss, for the jeweller subtracted about a tenth of the gold as part of his fee.

When she was young gold had been cheap, and she remembered those beloved thick bangles and that floral necklace she’d got when she was married.

After Bhola had left his job and embarked upon his business, Bhaskar’s mother had been protective and uncompromising about one thing: her jewellery. She was wise; for it was instinct rather than experience that told her that once he started using her gold to cover his business losses, it would happen again and again. But it had to be admitted that he had never made such a request. And this disinterested emblem of beauty and desire, the soul’s continual yearning for celebration, so removed from the everyday, which would one day belong entirely to her children, to Piyu or to her sons’ wives, remained untouched.

Two days later they stripped the bed of its floral covering; some of the flowers had dried and fallen to the floor, from where they were swept away by Haridasi. For Haridasi, Bhaskar’s wedding and the bride’s arrival had been events touched with wonder. It had certainly been the biggest change in the household since she’d come to work here. She had looked carefully at the bride, and thought she was graceful, if not beautiful. And the bride too had glanced at her once or twice.

Bhaskar’s father-in-law began to visit late in the morning.

‘Come in, come in,’ Bhaskar’s mother would say from the veranda when he rang the bell. She would feel strangely embarrassed, as if she wanted to keep something hidden from him. During the wedding, under the artificial canopy, the world shut out, she’d had trouble recognizing him; there they were, like two actors from separate plays, having met in a strange place, hot now at the end of it, he poised, she uncomfortable and glowing with the heat. Twice since the wedding she had seen him in dreams, in the first one arriving at their house bearing gifts and in the second inexplicably displeased about something. Ever since then her vision of him had been oddly prejudiced, as if she, to her discomfort, knew something about him that no one else did.

Sandhya would race down the stairs barefoot from the second storey.

‘It’s terrible out there,’ he would say, coming up.

Bhaskar’s mother did not quite know how to take him. And she was wearing a green sari which she wore when doing housework.

He didn’t seem to notice.

‘It is easy to see,’ he would say, ‘that this is a house which a lady takes pleasure in keeping tidy.’

From his second visit onward he would go straight up to the second storey; there he would sit talking with his daughter for an hour. On his way out he would shout a farewell to Bhaskar’s mother.

He would come at all times of the day, but mainly in the morning.

What do they talk about? she would think.

‘Are those your parents, ma?’ asked Sandhya. There were two pictures on the wall on this side of the room, one of Bhaskar’s mother’s father, another of her mother. Like them, she too, the new bride, did not feel that she as yet fully existed in this house. They considered this world from the hereafter with a certain immediacy; they both had daubs of vermilion on their foreheads that looked like they still hadn’t quite dried. Outside, a summer that distributed, unequally, shadows and heat had settled down on Vidyasagar Road.

‘Yes,’ said Bhaskar’s mother. ‘And those are baba’s mother and father.’

A smell of cooking drifted up stealthily from downstairs. And she, the newly married one, turned her eyes towards a large framed black and white photograph of an old woman in a white sari, sitting on what looked like a chair, and another of Bhola’s father wearing a moustache. The tops of the frames had become brown with a kind of fine powder as if they hadn’t been dusted for weeks. These photographs had been hanging there for almost twenty years now; and now their eyes gazed upon this couple each morning. She — the grandmother — had come to Bhola’s father as his second wife, after the death of his first one, sixteen years old at the time of marriage and only thirty-two when her husband died. Only her children remembered now that she had had a gift for mathematics and had won a gold medal at school, but had forfeited her studies after marriage, much to the disappointment of her schoolteacher, an Englishwoman, a disappointment that the sixteen-year-old herself couldn’t understand. Along the wall, all the parents were joined together in eternal life, and a peripatetic gecko was known to live behind these portraits, curved, alone, arbitrarily moving from one frame to another. And Bhola’s father was a mystery; no one in this house had set eyes upon him because he had died a few months before Bhola’s birth. In that death lay the key to this family’s early misery, and their subsequent search for order and balance.