A State of Freedom Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Neel Mukherjee

  Praise

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  1: Axe

  2: Friend

  3: Friend, part II

  4: Paper

  5: Fate

  6: Jamshedpur

  7: A change of place and a meeting

  8: Imprisoned

  9: Home

  10: Work, money, accounts, the reproduction of everyday life

  11: An epilogue

  V

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Can we transform the possibilities we are born into?

  A State of Freedom prises open the central, defining events of our century – displacement and migration – but not as you imagine them. Five characters, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more.

  Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives – formally daring, fierce but full of pity – delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

  About the Author

  Neel Mukherjee is the author of two novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel. He lives in London.

  Also by Neel Mukherjee

  A Life Apart

  The Lives of Others

  Praise for Neel Mukherjee’s

  A STATE OF FREEDOM

  ‘An extraordinary, compassionate, complex, hard-hitting wonder of a book. It is in a class of its own.’

  Rose Tremain

  ‘A State of Freedom is an extraordinary achievement. Subtle and multi-layered, it’s a study of the brutality of social divisions, written with tremendous tenderness; a work that insists on the dignity of figures obliged to lead undignified lives. A powerful, troubling novel. The moment I finished it, I began it again.’

  Sarah Waters

  ‘Neel Mukherjee’s breathtaking A State of Freedom is that rarest, most wonderful of things: a book both literarily dextrous, full of unforgettable scenes, images, language, and characters, as well as a furious, unsparing, clear-eyed study of how a society’s gross inequities of money and power demean and deform the human condition. The most astonishing and brilliant novel I have read in a long, long time.’

  Hanya Yanagihara

  ‘Fans of Neel Mukherjee expect that his books will be exceptional and once again he has produced just that. A State of Freedom is formally audacious, vividly observed, and deeply imagined. Unsentimental yet full of heart, grimly real yet mysteriously dreamlike, with characters who continue to live their complicated lives long after you’ve turned the last page. Just a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.’

  Karen Joy Fowler

  ‘This is a great hymn to poor, scabby humanity – a devastating portrait of poverty and the inhumanity of the rich to the poor. A masterpiece.’

  Edmund White

  Christopher

  A STATE OF FREEDOM

  Neel Mukherjee

  After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

  V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

  ‘Migrants? We are not migrants! We are ghosts, that’s what we are, ghosts.’

  Syrian refugee at the border of Austria, August 2015

  I

  While trying to check the bill before settling – an old habit, inculcated by his father, of giving any bill the once-over to see that he had not been overcharged – he realised that he had lost the ability to perform the simple function of adding up the individual items and the tax that together made up the grand total. Standing at the reception desk, he tried again and again. Then he took out his wallet and tried to count the rupee and US dollar notes nestled inside; he failed. Something as fundamental to intelligence as counting was eluding him. In the peripheries of his vision he could see a small crowd gathering to look at him; discreetly, nonchalantly, they thought. The news had spread. It was then that he broke down and wept for his son.

  He had hesitated about taking the boy to Fatehpur Sikri right after their lunchtime tour of the Taj Mahal; two major Mughal monuments in one afternoon could be considered excessive. But, he reasoned, it was less than an hour’s drive and to fit the two sites into one day was the generally accepted practice. They could be back at their hotel in Agra by early evening and after an early night with the television and room service they could leave for Delhi, refreshed, the following morning. The reasoning prevailed.

  When he mentioned part of this plan to the driver of his hired car, the young man, all longish hair and golden chain around his neck and golden wristlet and chunky watch, took it as a veiled order to go about the business in record time. He revelled in the opportunity to drive along the dusty, cratered slip road to Fatehpur Sikri at organ-jostling speed, punctuated by abrupt jerking into rest when impeded, and launching as suddenly into motion again. They passed a string of dingy roadside eateries, tea-shops, cigarette-and-snacks shacks. The bigger ones boasted signboards and names. There were the predictable ‘Akbar’, ‘Shahjahan’, ‘Shahenshah’, a ‘Jodha Bai’, even a ‘Tansen’, which was ‘100% VAGETARIAN’. There had been a speed-warning sign earlier: ‘Batter late than never.’ Not for the first time he wondered, in a country given over to a dizzying plenitude of signs, how unsettled their orthography was. A Coca-Cola hoarding adorned the top of one small shop, the brand name and shout line written in Hindi script.

  ‘Coca-Cola,’ the boy said, able to read that trademark universal wave even though he couldn’t read the language.

  ‘We can have one after we’ve done our tour,’ he said, his mind occupied by trying to work out if another order to the driver to slow down to prevent the boy from being car-sick would be taken as wilfully contradictory; he worried about these things.

  The boy seemed subdued; he didn’t move from the bare identification of the familiar brand to wanting it. Ordinarily, he would have been compulsively spelling out and trying to read the names written in English on shopfronts and billboards. While he was grateful for his son’s uncharacteristic placidity, he wondered if he hadn’t imposed too much on a six-year-old, dragging him from one historical monument to another. He now read a kind of polite forbearance in the boy’s quietness, a way of letting him know that this kind of tourism was wholly outside his sphere of interest but he was going to tolerate his father indulging in it. After a few questions at the Taj Mahal, which began as enthusiastic, then quickly burned out into perfunctory – ‘Baba, what is a mau-so-le-um?’, ‘Is Moom-taz under this building?’, ‘Was she walking and moving and talking when Shajjy-han built this over her?’ – they had stopped altogether. Was it wonder that had silenced him or boredom? He had tried to keep the child interested by spinning stories that he thought would catch the boy’s imagination: ‘Do you see how white the building is? Do you know that the emperor who had it built, Shahjahan, had banquets on the terrace on full-moon nights where everything was white? The moonlight, the clothes the courtiers and the guests wore, the flowers, the food – everything was white, to go with the white of the m
arble and the white light of the full moon.’ The boy had nodded, seemingly absorbing the information, but had betrayed no further curiosity.

  Now he wondered if his son had not found all this business of tombs and immortal grief and erecting memorials to the dead macabre, unsettling. His son was American, so he was not growing up, as his father had, with the gift of ghost stories, first heard sitting on the laps of servants and aunts in his childhood home in Calcutta, then, when he was a little older, read in children’s books. As a result, he did not understand quite what went on inside the child’s head when novelties, such as the notion of an order of things created by the imagination residing under the visible world and as vivid as the real one, were introduced to him. He made a mental note to stick to historical facts only when they reached Fatehpur Sikri.

  Or could it have been the terrible accident they had narrowly avoided witnessing yesterday at the moment of their arrival at the hotel? A huge multi-storeyed building was going up across the road, directly opposite, and a construction worker had apparently fallen to his death even while their car was getting into the slip lane for the hotel entrance. As they waited in the queue of vehicles, people had come running from all directions to congregate at one particular spot, about twenty metres from where they sat in their cars. Something about the urgency of the swarming, and the indescribable sound that emanated from that swiftly engorging clot of people, a tense noise between buzzing and truculent murmuring, instantly transmitted the message that a disaster had occurred. Otherwise how else would the child have known to ask, ‘Baba, people running, look. What’s happening there?’ And how else could the driver have answered, mercifully in Hindi, ‘A man’s just fallen from the top of that building under construction. A mazdoor. Instant death, bechara.’

  He had refused to translate. He had tried to pull his son back from craning his neck, but as the queue of cars moved, and their vehicle moved forward, through a chance aperture in the hive of people around the death, he saw, for the briefest of flashes, a patch of dusty earth stained the colour of old scab from the blood it had thirstily drunk. Then the slit closed, the car started advancing inch by inch and the vision ended. He saw his son turning his head to continue to stare at the spot. But had the boy really seen the earth welt like that, or had he just imagined it? There was no way he could ask him to corroborate. Worries came stampeding in: had the child seen it? Was he going to be affected by it? How could he establish if he had, without planting the idea in the boy’s head? All of last night his mind had been a pincushion to these sharp questions until he had fallen asleep.

  They returned now, summoned by the boy’s unnatural quietness. By the time they got out at Agra Gate, having shaved all of ten minutes from the journey, the boy was looking decidedly peaky, and he felt that his own lunch had risen in rebellion, to somewhere just behind his sternum. The driver grinned: there was just the right touch of the adversarial in the gleam of self-satisfaction.

  More than twenty years of life in the academic communities of the East Coast of the USA had defanged him of the easy Indian ability to bark at people considered as servants, so he swallowed his irritation, even the intention to ask the driver to take it more gently on the journey back, in case he couldn’t control the tone and it was interpreted as a peremptory order. Instead, he said in Hindi, ‘We won’t be more than an hour.’

  The driver said, ‘OK, sir,’ nodding vigorously. ‘I will be here.’

  He checked the car to see if he had taken everything – a bottle of water, his wallet and passport, the guidebook, his small backpack, his phone, his son’s little knapsack – then shut the car door and held out his hand. The boy’s meek silence bothered him. Where was the usual firework display of chatter and fidgety energy, the constant soundtrack of his aliveness?

  He knelt down to be on a level with the boy and asked tenderly, ‘Are you tired? Do you want to go back to the hotel? We don’t have to see this.’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘Do you want a Parle’s Orange Kream?’ he asked, widening and rolling his eyes to simulate the representation of temptation in the advertisements.

  The boy shook his head again.

  Behind him, on a grass verge, a hoopoe was flitting across. He said, ‘Look!’ and turned the boy round.

  The boy looked dutifully but didn’t ask what it was.

  ‘It’s a hoopoe. You won’t see this bird in New York.’ He supplied the answer gratuitously.

  The boy asked, ‘Is this a moss-o-moll-lom?’

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ his father laughed, ‘it’s not a mausoleum. It’s a palace. You know what a palace is, don’t you? A very good and powerful king lived here. His name was Akbar. I told you about him last night, remember?’

  ‘That was Shajjy-han, who built a big big marble stone on his wife and she died and he was very sad and cried all the time.’

  Every time he spoke, the American accent made his father’s insides go all squishy.

  ‘No, this is different. Akbar was his grandfather. Come, we’ll look at it. It’s a different colour, see? All red and brown and orange, not the white that we saw earlier.’

  They passed some ruined cloisters, then a triple-arched inner gateway, solidly restored and, slightly further from it, a big domed building that was awaiting restoration work. Touts, who had noticed a man and a small boy get out of the car, descended on them.

  ‘Guide, sir, guide? Good English, sir. Full history, you won’t find in book.’ Not from one voice but from an entire choir.

  Beggars with various forms of crippledness materialised. From the simplest pleading, with a hand repeatedly brought up to the lips to signify hunger, to hideous displays of amputated and bandaged limbs, even an inert, entirely limbless, alive torso laid out flat on a board with wheels – this extreme end of the spectrum of human agony filled him with horror, shame, pity, embarrassment, repulsion but, above all, a desire to protect his son from seeing them. How did all these other people drifting around him appear to be so sheathed in indifference and blindness? Or was the same churning going on inside them? Truth was, he felt, he was no longer a proper Indian; making a life in the plush West had made him skinless like a good, sheltered first-world liberal. He was now a tourist in his own country; no longer ‘his own country’, he corrected himself fastidiously. He suppressed the impulse to cover the boy’s eyes with his hands and said impatiently, ‘Sweetie, can we move a bit faster, please.’ It came out as a command, the interrogative missing.

  Men came up with accordions of postcards, maps, guidebooks, magazines, photos, toys, current bestsellers in pirated editions, snacks, rattles, drinks, confectionery, tinsel, dolls, plastic replicas of historical buildings, books, whistles and flutes … He kept shaking his head stoically, a tight half-smile on his lips, and ushered his boy along.

  The child, distracted one moment by a tray of carved soapstone figures, then another instant by a flashing, crudely copied replica of an inflatable Superman toy, kept stalling to stare.

  ‘Baba, Baba, look!’

  ‘Yes, I know. Let’s keep moving.’ He was so relieved – and grateful – that the cheap toys had diverted the child’s attention away from the suppuration and misery that he almost broke step to buy one of those baubles.

  That small manifestation of interest was enough. The loose, dispersed assembly of touts and peddlers now tightened into a purposeful circle.

  ‘Babu, my child is hungry, hasn’t eaten for four days.’ The shrivelled girl with matted hair in the woman’s arms looked like the living dead; she had no energy or will to swipe at the flies clustering on a sore at the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Here, look, babu, babu-sa’ab, look …’ A button was pressed and a toy came to mechanical life, emitting tinny games-arcade sounds of shooting guns as it teetered forward.

  A man came up uncomfortably close and, with the dexterity of a seasoned cardsharp, fanned open a deck of sepia prints of famous Indian historical buildings and temples. A picture of a naked woman appear
ed and disappeared so quickly that it could well have been the prestidigitator’s illusion. He was shocked; didn’t the man see that he had a small child with him? Or did he not care?

  The surrounding gardens, well tended by Indian standards, shone in the white-gold light of the January afternoon, yet, looked at closely, all that riot of cannas and marigolds and manicured grass lawns could not really disguise their irredeemable municipal souls. There was the typical shoddiness – straggly borders; lines that could not keep straight; a certain patchiness to the planting, revealing the scalp of soil through the thinning hair of vegetation; the inevitable truculence of nature against the methodising human hand … and underpinning all this amateurish attempt at imposing order and beauty he could feel, no, almost see, what a battle it was to keep the earth, wet and dark now, from reverting to red dust in the obliterating heat of the Northern Plains in the summer. He bought tickets and entered the great courtyard of the Diwan-i-Am. The world transformed – in the burnished gold of the winter afternoon sun, the umber-red sandstone used for the whole complex at Fatehpur Sikri seemed like carved fire, something the sun had magicked out of the red soil in their combined image and likeness.

  He looked at his son, expecting to see a reflection of his own wonder on the child’s face, but all he could discern in that mostly unreadable expression was … was what? Boredom? Across another courtyard, all blazing copper in the light, lay the palace buildings. He backtracked to consult the map etched on to a stone block towards the entrance, but with no reference point to indicate ‘You are here’ he felt confused.

  While retrieving the camera and the guidebook from his backpack, he said to his son, ‘Stay still for a moment, don’t run off. We’ll go to all those beautiful little palaces, do you see?’ By the time he had slung the camera around his neck and opened the guidebook to the correct page, he could tell that the boy was itching to run across the courtyard. He tried to keep an eye on him while skim-reading the relevant page. Yes, he had found it – this must be the Mahal-i-Khas, the private palaces of Akbar. His head bobbed back and forth, like a foraging bird’s, from page to surrounding environment. When he had established beyond any doubt that the two-and-a-half-storeyed building on the left, which had a touch of incompleteness to it, was Akbar’s private apartments, he caught hold of his son’s hand and made to enter the building.