FREEDOM ISN'T FREE

Recently, two events occurred in close succession of each other. I met Manchanda uncle, my school friend Rohit's Dad, at a book launch. We got down to talking about cravats which were a big favourite with him. He proudly pointed at  the one he was wearing, purchased over 40 years ago from England. Then a few days later, when I was going through the transcript of a speech delivered by my brother Bunty ( Vikram to the world wide web) at the Graduation Day of  Loyola College, Chennai,  I stumbled across an extract of a song from our school days of 1973 antiquity. 

It went like this:

"Freedom isn’t free,

You gotta pay a price,

You got to sacrifice,

 For your liberty."

As a firm believer in celestial signs, I reckoned that this coincidence of a chance meeting with Manchanda uncle and the mention of an old song in a college Graduation Day ceremony was God's message to me to write a story. Have not a large number of  very famous stories been written by people possessed after such flashes and booms up above? It goes on something like this if you care to listen. 

Unlike the Annual Sports Day or the Talent Contest which were the two other important dates in the school calendar when a student's  presence was compulsory, attendance was optional at the Annual Prize Night. One attended the Annual Prize Night only when one won a prize for academic excellence or performed in the cultural programme organized on the occasion.

I never won a First, Second or Third Prize, those being monopolized by NK, Rohit Manchanda and Jawed Ashraf (and later on Sanjay Mahapatra) in that monotonously regular order. However, in 1973, as a student of Class V, I was selected as one of the three Narrators in a programme on the Freedom Movement. If I am not wrong, one of my younger brothers,  either Vikas or Bunty , was also a prize recipient- so the five of us, which included my parents, went to school, a distance of ten miles. 

The Narrators  or sutradhars were asked to speak passages in turn - and the choir would sing a fairly long song consisting of nine stanzas of which one I remember :

"Freedom isn't free, freedom isn't free,

You got to pay a price , you got to sacrifice ,

For your liberty,

There was a leader name Gandhiji,

With a small band of men earning liberty,

From Himalaya mounts  to Comorin Cape..."

I wanted to be selected as a Narrator  because the other option, that of being a member of the choir, was fraught with danger. The music teacher, Mrs. Satyanesan, of the most gentle voice and ungentle disposition, had a penchant for spanking our legs with a ruler after putting her ear to our face like a doctor's stethoscope. She genuinely believed that a spank on the calves improved a child's  voice. So when Mrs Bahl,  my friend Alok's mom, and my old class teacher in Std II, called me for  audition, I pronounced 'we' as 'ooee' and not 'vee ', the lips correctly forming a round shape. Well, the long and short of it was that I was selected as one of the three Narrators and got my deliverance from the music teacher and her ruler. Such simple tests they had those days.

On the D- Day, there I was, a cold December evening, standing at the extreme left of the stage in Xavier's Hall which had been commissioned the year before on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee celebrations of our Independence. I remember they had powdered my cheeks, probably violated me with some sparkles,  placed a cap for sure as well  a sequinned gown of sorts. The hall was packed with people, excitement and fair amount of confusion. 

Each of the Narrators had to speak thrice in turns. I think the first two rounds I spoke without faltering and the choir Freedom -isn't -free-ed. But when it came for my third round of narration, I forgot. No words came out, and dumbstruck, I looked at Mrs. Bahl and Mrs. Roberts for a prompt. I think they were more anxious than me, and animatedly tried their version of Dumb Charades. However, the three of us had never rehearsed this Plan B before, so expectedly, it yielded no fruitful result. But it provided me with a singular stroke of good luck at seeing my teachers  in such comical discomfort  - they wrote something in the air with their fingers, they shouted silently,  they rolled their eyes funnily, they even swayed their bodies- alarm writ large on their faces.

Then I turned my face at the crowd. Sitting in the front row was Rohit's father, nattily dressed, suit and cravat and all, moustached, not frighteningly and military- twirled, but sufficiently threatening to worsen the frayed nerves of a nine year old kid who was up for laughs and scowls- depending whether you had come to watch the function or to organize it.  Next to him was the school principal, Rev. GA Hess, SJ,  wearing an inscrutable look which I found pretty unhelpful.

And it did not help matters when I saw my father, letting out a guffaw, which sporting fathers normally reserve for children in these situations. He was, it seems, even enjoying it - the hallmark of a "dil per mat le yaar" man who had seen these things before. Except rude behaviour and violation of the sunset curfew, nothing used to shake him up. The resolve of even the best behaved crowd to offer an extended embarrassed silence as a moral support to a faltering child on stage breaks down when someone lets out a guffaw. It was no different this time and soon many joined.

Next  I spotted my mother, anxious, absolutely livid at my father. She was trying to send me all the help that a pair of a concerned mother's eyes could be capable of in such trying times . It was probably her prayers that got me back my tongue , and after the longest one minute of fun at my expense, I spluttered out what had been drilled in the past few weeks. The choir completed the song, the applauses signalled the end of an event and from behind the closed curtain, I bid a hasty retreat.

Later  when I rejoined my parents, I gave a Sorry-I-failed-you look at  my mother. After all she was not one of those more fortunate mothers who were used to see their precocious and brilliant children quite often on the stage and even on this rare occasion I had let her down. But mothers are mothers. With a 'koi baat nahin beta' look , she just ran her tender fingers hand over  my tousled hair, combing it perfectly, as she had done a thousand times before , and let the matter rest there.