Seeing the Suffering Millions: On Neel Mukherjee’s ‘A State of Freedom’

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth.
                                                             —Theodor Adorno

A Calcutta-born lecturer living on the East Coast of the United States is visiting India with his six-year-old son. He is worried; since their arrival in Agra, an unsettling quiet has descended on his American boy. On the way from the Taj Mahal to Fatehpur Sikri, the father recalls how, the day before, their car drove by a crowd gathered around the body of a worker who had fallen from the scaffolding of a multistory building. Without asking, the father now wonders whether the son too has had a glimpse of the blood-darkened spot where the worker fell to death—whether that is the real reason he has become withdrawn and meek.

The ominous mood intensifies inside the monument. The father, unmoored and clutching onto the boy’s hand, looks at a carved fresco:

An animal, crouching below, had been defaced too, making it look much like the lower half of a human child, decapitated in the act