If you are looking for a comforting, feel-good read, we recommend you pick something else. For, Neel Mukherjee’s third book, A State of Freedom, is anything but. It’s a book calculated to jerk us, his readers, out of complacence. It is visceral and deeply unsettling, both in terms of content and style.
A State of Freedom revolves primarily around the very loosely connected lives of five characters. An US-based Indian father and son visiting Agra and Fatehpur Sikri; a domestic cook in Mumbai; a mountain man and his dancing bear; a girl from a village under the shadow of Naxalites; a construction worker - the characters come from widely different backgrounds, threaded together only by the common theme of migration - and by extension, dislocation.
What is it like to live every day of your life in a vacuum of poverty and need? What is it like to leave the life you know behind in the hope of building a better future? Is it possible really to achieve freedom from one’s fate? All pertinent questions at a time when human migration is probably at its peak in the world; when people are moving from the village to the city, from one city to another, from one country to another, for survival.
A State of Freedom doesn’t as much seek answers as offers a glimpse into the daily battles of the lower echelons of India.
Most of the characters in the book come from poverty-stricken backgrounds. And no matter how widely different the circumstances, the have-nots here lose out to the more privileged. The cruelties meted out to the weak - animal or human - are relentless, and Mukherjee holds a mirror to us that throws up ugly, distorted yet honest reflections.
Money - hard cash - is an ever-receding chimera for most of the characters in the book, fight as they do with constant need: “The battle in this matter was a three-way one, between space, money and need, and need almost always lost.”
Renu, the moody cook from Bengal who works in a Bandra house, disregards her own needs to slog and finance her talented nephew’s education. But how far can she stretch herself?
“Two more years of sending money,” she said, then quickly tried to dispel the burden of the last few words by her usual dismissive tics... Then another shift with: “He says he’s going to come back and build me a house. We shall see.”Neel Mukherjee, ‘A State of Freedom’
In a remote tribal village, poverty and neglect come hand in hand to literally become a demon that eats up lives. When not being raped or dismembered, people queue up for weeks in the hope to see a doctor in the district hospital.
Soni didn’t get to hear the details of what happened on her parents’ first outing to the hospital, but only gathered a sense of how reduced they were afterwards, like husk, without weight, without any consequence.
Ramlal, who migrates to the big city with its promise of endless work, finds himself catapulting into a downward journey. The punctuation-free last chapter dedicated to him drives home a state of mind beyond even despair:
‘...all of this better no comparison really than days sitting on the road in a bazaar or a chowk waiting waiting to be picked sometimes you are and sometimes you aren’t sometimes there is need for only so many and he not among those needed in the end it’s not despair that kills you but hope...’
The stories - in a way, it feels like a collection of short and longish stories put together as a novel - traverse seamlessly across caste, class and religious prejudices as they do in life in India. Inequalities too change colour here, depending on the prism through which they are being looked at.
Take the class prejudice Milly, growing up as a child domestic help far away from her terror-struck tribal home, encounters in varying degrees in different homes.
From keeping her chipped plates and bowls separately from that of her employers’ to being chided for leaving a hand-print on the bed she makes to not being allowed out of the house - the abuses are as numerous as they are uncomfortably familiar.
And ironically, the upper middle class family, which Milly feels has been kindest to her, had seen near-violent fights between father and son on the topic of “‘correct way’ for servants to behave”.
Mukherjee’s clear-eyed vision also points out there are no simple solutions to these maladies, no matter what extremist ideologies propound.
A State of Freedom in fact has little of the hopeful about it. I, as a reader, kept looking for a speck of brightness, a tying up of loose ends, but Mukherjee - God-like - refuses to oblige. Bleak at best - Milly is the only character who has a modicum of optimism attached to her fate - and gruesome at worst - I had to skip a page or two where he describes the horrific “taming”of Raju, the bear - Mukherjee breathes life into a desperate, brutal, violent world mercilessly.
You keep wanting to lend a hand - or a hug - to the characters and want to know that they make it in the end - but there’s barely such satisfaction. And the first and last chapters, melt as they do into the unreal, add to the tangible horror of this jagged, skewed world.
A State of Freedom is clearly not an easy book to read. But can it make us think? And more importantly, can it push us to attempt a change in ourselves?
(A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee, Penguin Books, Rs 599)
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