Freedom Song (19 page)

Later she grew sleepy; the talk had relaxed her. The light of oncoming dusk played and scattered on the large windows. It scattered and seemed to vanish but remained like a glaze. A thought came to her: I’ll go there tomorrow; she said she’d be at home.

She’d fall asleep now as usual in the middle of the afternoon and wake up unable to tell for how long she’d slept, whether it was ten minutes or half an hour or more. Why, sometimes it seemed to her she’d fallen asleep as a child and woken up to find that most of her life had passed by; she was here.

A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy. Sometimes it seems that there is no reason, except a slight sense of boredom, a hint of life’s emptiness, a memory of familiarity and a promise of pleasure. Half asleep already, she prepared herself for the journey.

Five years ago, after her husband had retired, she’d come to this city with some trepidation and uncertainty to make her home here in old age. The young leave this city if they can; the old, it seems, return to it; and this had been the incentive for coming here—the possibility of experiencing, in early old age, the buoyancy of visiting known houses through these roads, of watching the old apparently arrest and embrace time as children and grandchildren grow taller and older, surprising one.

And there were friends, which she hadn’t thought of then. Every time she went to the New Municipal Corporation Buildings with its strange E-shaped block of flats off Central Avenue it was as if something had changed slightly from before and she couldn’t put her finger on it. The route was familiar, though, the dust and reconstruction and disrepair. It was not so much a return to childhood for her as a contact with something she’d known for a long time, in conditions neither she nor her friend could have foreseen. And now, very lightly, like a merciful gift of remembrance, obliterating as it engendered, it began to rain. It fell on the graffiti on the walls inside lanes, the hammer and sickle that
multiplied everywhere and the pleas for family planning, the advertisements for companies; it first rained on South Calcutta and then moved towards the North, the clouds prefiguring, and desultorily washing, the route Khuku would take. I’ll take a flask of tea and some sweets from Mahaprabhu, she thought.

For she didn’t want Mini or Shantidi in the kitchen once she’d arrived.

Must tell that rascal straight away, she decided, thinking of Nando. Of course, if I tell him now he’ll forget about it tomorrow.

She must remind that shirker to put the tea in the flask the first thing the next morning.