A State of Freedom Read online

  But he had been spotted leafing through the travel-guide, his hesitation and momentary lostness read shrewdly. A man materialised behind him and began to speak as if he was in the middle of a talk he had been giving: ‘The recesses in the ground floor that you will see were meant for his books and papers and documents …’

  He wheeled around. The sun caught his eyes and dazzled him. All he could make out was a dark, almost black, sharply pointed face, a human face on its way to becoming a fox’s; or was it the other way round?

  ‘If you go up to his sleeping chamber, the khwabgah, on the top floor,’ the man continued, ‘you will see fine stone latticework screens along the corridor leading to the women’s quarters, the harem. These jaalis protected the women from the public gaze as they went back and forth from the khwabgah.’

  The man spoke with practised fluency. If he was trying to advertise his skills as a guide to get hired, then there was nothing in his manner or his speech that betrayed this purposive bent. If anything, he seemed almost oblivious of his presence and his child’s.

  The sun had blinded him so he turned his head away, both to face his son, whom he was afraid to let out of his field of vision for any duration, and to signal to the man that he was not going to be needing his services. The buildings that lay in the slanted shade were an earthen matt pink. Elsewhere, the red sandstone that caught the sun burned a coppery-gold. When he turned around to see if he had shaken off the tout, there was no one to be seen.

  In the rooms on the ground floor of the emperor’s private quarters he was held by the flaky painted decorations depicting flowers and foliage; these faded ghosts still managed to carry a fraction of their original life-spirit. They had been touched up, restored, but with a brutal mugger’s hand. From the vantage point of the courtyard, the interior had looked poky and pitch-dark and he had wondered about the smallness of the chambers and, correspondingly, the physical stature of those sixteenth-century people: did they have to huddle and stoop inside? Was it light enough to see things in there during the daytime? Why were there no doors and windows? What did they do for privacy? And then, the crowning question: did he know just too little about the architectural and domestic history of the Mughals?

  Now that they were inside, the idea that the rooms were cramped somewhat diminished but the feeling that they were, or could be, dark remained. Was it something to do with his vision, or from having just come in from the brightness outside? He blinked several times. The interior seemed to shrink, expand and then shrink again, as if he were in the almost imperceptibly pulsating belly of a giant beast. In the pavilion at the top, where Akbar used to sleep, faded frescoes, nibbled away by time with a slow but tenacious voracity, covered the walls. But the fragments seemed to be under some kind of wash; a protective varnish, perhaps, but it had the effect of occluding them under a milky mist. A winged creature, holding an infant in front of a cave in a rockface, looked down at him from above a doorway. It looked as if it had been assembled from large flakes of once-coloured dandruff. His heart boiled against the cage of his chest.

  ‘Baba, look, an angel!’ the child said.

  He closed his eyes, gripped his son’s hand, turned his face away, then back again and opened his eyes. The angel continued to stare at him. There was intent in those eyes, and even the very first touch of a smile in those delicately upturned corners, as if Persian artists had brought forth a Chinese angel. He shut his eyes again; the face of the fox-guide, accompanied by shifting confetti-links of floaters, flickered across his retina.

  Outside, the courtyard, large enough to be the central square in a city where the crowd congregates for the beginning of a revolution, held scattered groups of colourfully clothed visitors. The spiky phalanx of red cannas blazed in their plots. A square stone platform, bordered by jaalis, rose from the centre of a square rectangular pool, filled with stagnant water, virulent green with algae. Four raised narrow walkways, bisecting each side of the square, led to the platform. The musical rigour that the Mughals had brought to the quadrangular form struck him again; he riffled through his guidebook to read something illuminating about this pool, Anup Talao.

  ‘Baba, can we go to the middle? There are lanes,’ the boy said.

  ‘I don’t think we are allowed to,’ he said, then tried to distract him by summarising the few lines on the feature: ‘Look, it says here that musicians used to sit in the centre there, on that platform, and perform concerts for the emperor and his court.’ After a few beats of silence, he added, ‘Wasn’t that interesting?’, hearing his own need to keep the boy engaged fraying with exhaustion.

  ‘Why aren’t we allowed to?’

  ‘Well,’ he thought for a second or two, ‘if people were allowed in, we would see a lot of tourists here walking in and out, posing on the platform, taking pictures … but there’s none of that, do you see?’

  It was better outside – the relative darkness inside had, oddly, unnerved him. But the pressure of tourism was relentless, bullying. Surely they hadn’t come all this way to stand in the sun and look at pretty buildings from a distance, when they could be inside them, poring over the details, going into every room of every palace, absorbing what the guidebook had to say about each and then re-looking, armed with new knowledge?

  In the strange and beautiful five-storeyed panch mahal, each ascending floor diminishing in size until there was only a small kiosk surmounted by a dome on top – eighty-four, fifty-six, twenty, twelve and four columns on each level, respectively, his guide told him – arches between columns took the place of walls and he had been glad of the light and the breeze that came in unimpeded.

  Outside once again, he noticed the squares marked on the courtyard, with a raised stone seat at the centre of the regular cross formed by the squares, and pointed them out to his son. ‘Do you see the squares in the four directions, making the four arms of a big plus-sign?’ he asked, tapping a few with his feet and indicating the rest with his pointing hand, ‘Here, and here, and this … do you see?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Show me the plus-sign then,’ he asked.

  The child danced around, stamping on each square, repeating his father’s ‘Here … and here, and this one …’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do you know what they are for?’

  ‘This square has X on it, and this one,’ the boy said, jumping on each of them.

  ‘Yes, so they do. Do you know what these squares are doing here?’

  The boy shook his head and looked at him expectantly.

  ‘This is a board game, like Ludo or chess. It’s called pachisi. Instead of having a small board at the centre, which is surrounded by a circle of a few players, they had a big one marked out permanently in this courtyard.’

  His son stared silently, as if digesting the information.

  ‘But do you know why it’s so big? I mean, so much bigger than a Ludo or a chess board?’ He was hoping the child was not going to ask what Ludo was: why should the ubiquitous board game of the endless afternoons and evenings of his Calcutta childhood mean anything to an American boy? That worn question of his son’s disconnection with his father’s culture reared its head again, but weakly. He pushed it down, easily enough, and offered the answer to the question he had asked, by reading an excerpt from a nineteenth-century book quoted in his travel-guide: ‘The game of pachisi was played by Akbar in a truly regal manner, the Court itself, divided into red and white squares, being the board, and an enormous stone raised on four feet, representing the central point. It was here that Akbar and his courtiers played this game; sixteen young slaves from the harem, wearing the players’ colours, represented the pieces, and moved to the squares according to the throw of dice. It is said that the Emperor took such a fancy to playing the game on this grand scale that he had a court for pachisi constructed in all his palaces …’

  Again, that expression of wide-eyed nothingness on the boy’s face. He explained the quotation slowly, in simple words, pointing to the squares and the st
one seat, to spark some interest in the boy. The child’s face lit up for an instant. He hopped from one square to another, then another, finally sat, cross-legged, on one of them and chirped, ‘Am I a piece in this game?’

  ‘You could be,’ he laughed.

  ‘What will happen when you throw the die? Will my head be chopped off? In one clean stroke?’

  Before he could answer, a voice behind him intervened sharply, ‘Get that child out of that square!’

  He wheeled around. It was the man with the face of a fox. His eyes glittered. The moustache looked animal too.

  ‘Don’t you know it’s bad luck to have children sit in these squares? Do you know what happened here? Don’t you know the stories?’

  He was sufficiently annoyed by the man’s hectoring tone to protest: ‘Show me a sign that says children are not allowed on this board. It’s part of the courtyard, anyone can walk on it. And who are you, anyway?’

  ‘Look around you – do you see any children?’

  Almost involuntarily, he turned around: to his right, the extraordinary symmetry of the detached building of the Diwan-i-Khas; behind him, the jewel-box of the Turkish Sultana’s house; and in the huge courtyard on which these structures stood, not a single child to be spotted. All those colourfully dressed tourists he had seen earlier seemed to have vanished. There were one or two to be seen standing in the shapely arches of buildings or colonnaded walkways, but there was no one in the courtyard and certainly no children. Incredulous, he turned a full circle to be sure he had let his gaze take in everything. No, no children. The man too was gone. There was a sudden, brief vacuum in his chest; then the sensation left.

  ‘D-did you see the … the man who was just here? Where did he go?’ he asked his son.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘But … but you saw him speaking to me, didn’t you?’ He was nearly shouting.

  ‘Speaking? What?’ the boy asked.

  Of course, the child wouldn’t have understood a word; the man had been speaking in Hindi.

  ‘B-but … but …’ he began, then that futility was inside him again, making him feel weightless.

  He extended his hand to his son and caught the warm little palm and fingers in his grip and wanted to hold on to them to moor himself and at the same to scrunch them, so fierce was the wave of love and terror that suddenly threatened to unbalance him. He took the boy and ran into the Turkish Sultana’s house but was blind to the ways craftsmen had made every available surface blossom into teeming life with dense carvings of gardens, trees, leaves, flowers, geometric patterns, birds, animals, abstract designs. At another time he would have been rooted to the spot, marvelling, but now his senses were disengaged and distant and all he saw was the frozen work of artisans and their tools. In one of the lower panels, the heads of the birds of paradise sitting on trees had been destroyed. An animal, crouching below, had been defaced too, making it look much like the lower half of a human child, decapitated in the act of squatting; it brought to mind ritual sacrifice. A small thrill of repulsion went through him. The mutilated carvings had the nature of fantastical creatures from Bosch’s sick imagination; left untouched, they would have been simply beautiful. Then the dimness started to play havoc with his perception. Shapes and colours got unmoored and recoalesced in different configurations. It was like discovering a camel smoking a pipe, formed in clouds in the sky, shift and morph into a crawling baby held in the cradling trunk of an elephant, except there was no movement here, no external change of shape to warrant one thing becoming another.

  He forced himself to read a few lines from the relevant section of his guidebook but they remained locked too; signs without meanings. He asked his son, ‘Do you like what you see? Can you tell me what these are?’ He couldn’t make the words come out animated.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘All right, let’s go look at something else.’ No amount of beauty could counter the permanent twilight of the interiors.

  The baize-table lawns and the begonia shrubs radiated light like a merciless weapon. A ripple passed through the blazing froth of bushes, as if the vegetation was shuddering at his presence. Almost dragging his son along, he ran towards a small, perfectly formed building, standing in the flag of shade that it flung on the pied stones of the courtyard. Mariam’s House, the guidebook said. It was the colour of something that had been sluiced indelibly in blood in its distant past. Under the stone awning three-quarters of the way up, the ventilation slots – surely they were too small to be windows? – looked like blinded eyes, yet the house gave the effect of looking watchful. It struck him then, suddenly, a feeling that the walls and stones and cupolas and courtyards were all, as one organism, watching him and his son.

  And something was: another angel, this time above a doorway. Barely discernible through the slow, colourless disappearing act that time and the well-intentioned but wrong kind of preservative varnish had together enforced on it, it still managed, through some inexplicable resurrection, to fix him with its eye. It was like looking into the face of ancient light transmitted back from the beginnings of time.

  He took hold of his son’s hand to return to the car, moving as fast as having a six-year-old physically attached to him would allow. The larger half of the site remained unvisited; he had had enough. The very air of the place seemed unsettled, as if it had slipped into some avenue where ordinary time and ordinary circumstance did not press against it. Then, with rising anxiety, he knew what was going to happen next, and it did. From the dark inside of a square building, the fox-man came out and stood under the domed canopy of a platform at one corner of the building. He could see the man so clearly, so close, that it was as if all the distance between them across the courtyard had been telescoped into nothing. Then the man retreated into the dark again. He had known the exact sequence of events beforehand, even known the bending of distance that would occur, known that the platform on which the man had stood was called the Astrologer’s Seat even though he had not visited that section of the palace quadrangle. He felt himself pursued by the place as they ran out, retracing the route through which they had made their way into and through the palace complex.

  While waiting for the car, he dared to look up: the sky was an immense canvas of orange and red, not from the setting sun, it seemed to him, but from the red sandstone that burned, without decaying, under it. Everything was ablaze.

  On the road back, a huge, slow procession of shouting men, hundreds and hundreds of them, coming from the direction in which they were travelling, stalled all traffic. The car windows were rolled up instantly; the protestors were within touching distance. The vast, crawling snake seemed to be an election rally, although he could not tell – the posters were all in Urdu, a language he couldn’t read, and he couldn’t make out a single word amidst the shouting of slogans. They could have been in an utterly foreign country. The boy had his nose pressed to the window; he had never seen anything like this.

  ‘We just have to wait until it passes, right?’ he asked the driver. A pointless question. The driver shrugged.

  Time in this country flowed in a different way from the rest of the world. It was the flow that had carried him a long time ago, when he was a boy, growing up in Calcutta, but now he could no longer step into it: he had become a tourist in his own country.

  The rally seemed endless. Occasionally, it stopped altogether. After forty minutes of sitting inside the car, the driver said, ‘They’re moving.’

  A brave taxi up ahead had decided to cut through a narrow lane on the left – a dust-and-straggling-dead-grass path, really – with the hope of rejoining the main road at a point further up where it would already have been traversed by the rally. Like mechanical sheep, cars started leaving the main route and entering this side-lane. Their driver was quick – he manoeuvred the car sideways with manic energy and was into the path before the rush to get in there created total gridlock. But he was still behind a few vehicles and the juddering stop-start stop-start stop-
start movement down an unmetalled alley was the modern equivalent of running the gauntlet. Soon they came to a complete halt. The procession, well behind them, still seemed to be in full spate, but at least they were now not in the flow of something volatile and unpredictable.

  He must have dozed off. The next thing he knew was a shadow blooming inside the car at the same time as he heard a timid pattering on the window next to the boy. A bear, standing on its hind legs, was looking in, its muzzle almost pressed to the glass. There was an irregular patch of mist that changed shape in rhythm to the animal’s breathing. Its pelt was a dark slate-grey shag-cushion of dust and tiny insects and bits of straw and grass. Up close, the hairs looked coarse and thick, somewhat like the quills of a hedgehog. Behind him, a man extended his arm forward and tapped on the glass with his black fingernails. The child pushed back on the heels of his palms and moved backwards, trying to burrow into his father’s lap, but couldn’t turn his fascinated head away. The man outside looked eerily familiar – he had the sharp, pointy face of a rodent’s and a moustache that seemed alive. Surely he must be dreaming? They were still in the country lane, and the terracotta late-afternoon light had turned to ashy dusk, but that … that man at the car window … He felt that the spinning of the earth carried him like dice in the slot of a roulette machine and delivered him to destinations that were endlessly repeatable, each ever so slightly different from the other, all more or less the same.

  Encouraged by the unblinking gaze of father and son, the bear-wallah tapped on the glass again, and made a shallow bowl of his palm to beg. Those glittering, scaly eyes indicated a sickness that would finish him soon. Inside, he was too frozen even to shake his head in disapproval. At a signal from his keeper, the bear lifted its paw and replicated the human’s begging gesture. The chain, attached to the animal and run through the space between two of its fingers, obliged clinkingly. He saw the head of a huge iron nail driven through the paw – or was it a callus? The claws at the end were open brackets of dirty gunmetal. The paw could easily smash the window, reach in and tear out the child’s entrails. He tried to ask the driver to shoo the man away but no sound emerged from his throat. He tried again.