Freedom Song by Amit Chaudhuri

Author:Amit Chaudhuri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780746302
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

School had begun again, the first troubles were behind them, and, in addition to the faint moustache that had formed on Mohit’s upper lip and proclaimed his gradual farewell to childhood, the educational system had thrown further responsibility on his young shoulders, forcing him to study each day for the finals one and a half years away, giving him a seriousness beyond his years. After that, a brief respite, and then the upper matriculation, the Joint Entrance . . . Only ten days ago he’d been cycling from house to relative’s house in the morning. Now his eyes were a little red, because he’d been studying late into the night the past few days. All that had happened before—the end of the tests, the curfew, the troubles far away in Ayodhya, the visit to Bhaskar’s house—seemed vague and dreamlike, and the days now, taken up with work and preparation, seemed like a world of perpetual wakefulness.

He was an only child; as was his cousin Sameer. That was neither an accident nor coincidence. Their parents had planned it this way. No more large untidy families like Bhola’s; they would devote all their attention to their one child.

Khuku said to Mini: ‘I’ve never seen anyone who studies quite so hard as Mohit. He wakes up at five in the morning . . .’ She shuddered, because she’d hated studies at school; but Mini, being a schoolteacher, looked impressed.

Puti would converse with Mohit as if he were a grown-up. And in some ways, he was—with his father away on tours he often substituted as the ‘man’ in the house. And yet he was shorter than he should be at his age, and was any day expected to shoot up.

‘Why not?’

‘Do I have to answer that? You know that next year is your “final” year.’

The year of the ‘final’—it had been waiting for him, it seemed, like a mythical mountain, always there, but coming nearer and nearer; and now it was in sight.

‘And time will fly.’

‘I couldn’t study the way he does,’ said Khuku to Mini after a few moments. ‘That boy is ambitious and knows how to look after himself. Unlike that other idiot, Sameer . . .’

Last year his grandmother—Khuku’s elder sister—had died. (That had been a few months after Bhaskar, to the bemusement of all, had joined the Party and even Mohit’s grandmother had heard and whispered her disbelief.) There had been a sleepless air at home as she had lapsed into a coma, then passed away, then been taken away to the crematorium. It had been something like it was now, with the exams coming up—the confusion of a proper sense of time, the feeling that someone familiar had suddenly gone away, the strange sense that the absence was temporary. It was still strange that his grandmother, who had hardly moved for the last two years of her life, should have left and never returned. Meanwhile, he swotted for his exams and his eyes hurt. A year ago, his mother’s

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