Free Freedom Song by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

everything about Khuku these days reminded Puti of her mother). She—whom Khuku had called, simply, Didi—had died just over a year ago of Parkinson’s disease. Her brain hadn’t been affected, thank God; but her movements had been reduced to a minimum until, finally, she hadn’t been able to get up from the bed without the help of nurses. At least she hadn’t suffered terribly; anyway, it had seemed to Khuku, there was nothing Didi had liked better than lying in bed with a magazine; and this it had been possible for her to do till a few months before she had died; in this sense, it had been a happy ending. When Khuku visited her, she’d find that Didi was still eager to take part in conversations. She’d open her mouth and form a few words to ask a question, and Khuku would have a clear view of her betel-stained upper teeth, whichprotruded slightly; and when the others gossiped, she’d listen, her eyes moving and registering surprise, disbelief, and amusement. Thank God she had had hired nurses always attending to her—not everyone had a rich son in America to pay for their medical expenses; she might have died much earlier had she not been so well looked after.

N ow and then, their voices could be heard; not the voices in which they spoke to Khuku, but those that they reserved for themselves. They did not bother to speak softly; there was no one else in the flat. It had not been so silent since the days of the curfew.
    Khuku often thought that three servants were too many to have in the house; there was only herself and Shib; and these three, for large stretches of time in the day, had nothing to do. Then they reigned like angels or demons without another habitation. They were itinerants, of course; three months later, they might not be here. Only Nando, even when he left, returned again and again.
    ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
    It was Uma. Nando had reached forward and transferred an egg from his plate to hers. The egg was more than an olive branch; it was a testimony of his intentionstowards her. Love, or something like it, had possessed him.
    Uma had stopped eating; her right arm was poised in mid air.
    ‘What do you think you are doing?’ she asked again. ‘You’re lucky I’m not going to throw the egg into that corner’—she gestured with her head—‘because I don’t want to dirty the kitchen and upset mashima. But I’ll tell mashima about you.’
    Nando stared at his plate. Of late their quarrels always came to these exchanges. Nando was allowed an extra egg daily by Khuku, not because of favouritism but because not long ago he’d been suffering from tuberculosis. He’d contracted it during a spell of unemployment—after being sacked by Khuku—which he’d spent at home, in a basti near Tollygunge, before a reconciliation brought him back to the job.
    During the curfew a month ago, all had been disorder and silence. Jochna, who was becoming increasingly pretty, had not been able to come to work for two days; there had been tension in her area and fear of violence. It was at such times that the sketchy unfencedness of their existence became palpable, that they must lead lives perpetually and nakedly open to duress. The Muslims had taken out a procession; at night, when usually an owl—Lakshmi’s ancient companion and carrier—hooted near the railway crossing, with atremulous sense of something about to happen, Jochna and her family and other Hindus in the basti had been moved to a nearby Christian school, while the furious Muslims apparently congregated and went about shouting and protesting. So Jochna did not come to work for two days. Ordinarily this would have irritated Khuku, but this time the atmosphere, distant but palpable, of strife precluded any response, unfortunately, except sympathy.

N ando had spent most of his life in Calcutta; he had started out when he was a young man as an assistant to a cook in a sweet-shop. He could not read a single word in any alphabet. In