An Atlas of Impossible Longing

by Anuradha Roy

  He had recently read that with the discovery of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, the Archaeological Survey had received more funds for its work in the valley of the Indus. If they had the money, Nirmal reasoned, they might take on apprentices. He had no experience, but he did have a degree in history. But why would they employ him, a small-town college teacher, when there must be Sanskrit scholars, experts in numismatics, and scholars of other kinds struggling to be a part of the Indus Valley’s three-thousand-year-old past?

  “They could start me off somewhere, even if not at the Indus,” he reasoned. “Then by degrees … ” The thought of his probable rejection by the Survey filled him with gloom in an instant. He lit a cigarette and fiddled with the cigarette tin. He yawned and looked at Shanti’s hair, a dark storm across pillows and sheet. She was almost asleep. He took a deep drag, blowing smoke out through his nose, and gave his typewriter an irritable glance. Then he pushed it away and went towards her.

  “Don’t you think,” he murmured, caressing her hair, “it’s possible to make a habit of almost anything?”

  “What do you mean?” she said, her voice sleep-thickened.

  “Here we are, you and I,” he said. “We didn’t know each other a year and a half ago and now I can’t write a letter for looking at you … ”

  “Go back and finish your letter,” Shanti said, raising her head. “Go on, archaeologists need persistence. How will you ever dig out ruins from the earth if you don’t persist?”

  “I’m persistent about things I want,” Nirmal said. He felt under her sari in the region of her stomach. “Now imagine if this were the mound at Harappa, how would I go about finding a route to … ”

  Shanti slapped his hand away. “If you can get used to anything, you can get used to doing without that!” she giggled, hiding her face in the pillow. Then she looked up, her face still half hidden, and said, “And I’m not sure it’s even safe any more, with the baby coming.”

  “Imagine,” Nirmal said, lying back against the headrest and taking his cigarette from the ashtray. “A year and a half ago, I wasn’t even married. Now I’m going to be a father in some months. A year and a half ago, I didn’t know you. A year and a half ago, my mother was normal. Now for a year and a half she hasn’t left her room … and it all seems routine. I even feel happy. I forget about her, that she’s imprisoned. I feel trapped if I’m stuck in the house for a day and I forget she can never go out and meet other people or see other things.”

  Shanti felt fingers of annoyance twist her insides at Nirmal’s sudden change of attention from her to his mother. She tried to smile and touched his hand. “Quiet, let’s change the subject,” she said. “Don’t you know that babies can hear in the womb? Do you want ours to grow up with unhappy thoughts? I want the baby to overhear only music and laughter. Come here to me.”

  * * *

  One floor below, Kananbala paced her room waiting for the Barnums. Every weekend Digby Barnum went out with his wife. Kananbala, awake most nights, had made a habit of sitting on the windowsill and watching their car leave, mysterious, full of promise, heading for destinations beyond her imagination. They would return very late and honk outside until the watchman woke and unlocked the gate to let them in.

  That night, the watchman did not come to the gate despite all the honking. Barnum stumbled out of the car and his driver lunged after him from the other side. It was the first time Kananbala had seen him. She was wide-eyed with disbelief, never having seen a drunk man before.

  “Bugger off!” Barnum yelled at the driver, “Bugger off, you black bastards, sleeping on the job!”

  He shoved aside the driver, who stepped back, looking uncertain as his boss untangled his legs enough to reach the gate, a gate like a wall of wood, and then began to bang on it with his fists, shouting curses.

  Kananbala, not understanding a word, was spellbound. Amulya stirred in his sleep and pulled his pillow over his head. Kananbala willed him to carry on sleeping, leaving her alone to spend the night as she always did, suspended in a world nobody else knew.

  Then Kananbala saw Digby Barnum’s wife for the first time, a woman as elongated as a eucalyptus leaf and as pale. She was in a gown that her curves formed into something smooth and flowing, its silk gleaming in the lights of the car. Her shoes had heels that she tottered on as she hurried to her husband, saying something Kananbala could not hear.

  Mrs Barnum reached her husband and tugged his sleeve to make him stop banging on the gate.

  His arm shot out and hit her across the face.

  Kananbala touched her own cheek as if she had been hurt.

  The woman stepped back, holding her chin. The driver, frightened, cowered by the car.

  “The real man, as always,” Mrs Barnum said, in a voice as clear as the sound of spoon against glass.

  Barnum paid her no further attention. He returned to the closed gate. “Ramlal, you sister-fucker, open up! Can you hear me? You’re sacked!”

  Mrs Barnum strolled up and down the road as if none of it mattered to her. Her husband continued to shout. Amulya mumbled, “Bloody Sahibs, think they own the whole country.”

  Kananbala wanted to say, “They do.” But she had almost stopped breathing so he would go back to sleep. Amulya turned on his side, and in a minute Kananbala heard his snore again.

  The gate creaked open. Barnum pushed the spindly watchman aside so that he fell, and he and his wife went in. The car followed. The watchman got up, yawned and dusted himself off.

  “Bastard,” the watchman spat in Hindi towards the house. “Drunkard,” he said, closing the gate again.

  * * *

  The windows were Kananbala’s only view of the world. If she traversed the length of the room and looked through all three windows, tilting as far as she could, she could see to the end of the road’s curve on both sides. Kananbala was at the windows all day, and often most of the night.

  Almost at dawn, when the air still retained a memory of the cool of the night, she waited for the brinjal colour of the sky to grow lighter and brighter. When the sky turned properly blue there came the man who promised that his papayas were from Ranchi, and then the bhuttawala, fine wisps from corn sprouting like golden hair out of the basket on his head. In the early days, when they had first lived in Songarh, vendors never came that far. Now, she had heard, there was a new cluster of houses further down, with Indian people, clerks and teachers, those who would buy from carts.

  Kananbala could tell the time from the calls of the vendors, the flower-seller just after dawn, the fruit-sellers in the morning, the vegetable man in between. Bread from a bakery in the market came in a tin box welded to a creaking bicycle. A bangle-seller, handcart glinting red and gold, stood at the gate sometimes and called out for a long five minutes, seeing a woman at the window and scenting a sale.

  She could not go to the gate to buy bangles, she knew.

  She had not left the house since Nirmal’s wedding, nor even her room very often. She knew she had said things she should not have. She could not think where the words had come from, nor could she precisely recall what they were. But from people’s faces she could always tell when something wrong slipped out. They did not look so appalled any longer, but all the same they did not let her meet outsiders. The roof was out of bounds too. They were afraid she would jump, as she had once threatened to.

  Amulya came back from the factory every day at noon, and sat with her as she ate her lunch, returning to work in the afternoon heat after settling her in for her nap. Each evening, after the gardener had left, he led her down the stairs and out into the garden to walk forty-three steps this way and forty-three that, for a long half-hour. She got tired and breathless, her knees felt weak, so he had often to hold her through the latter part of the walk. He would encourage her, saying, “You must do this, make yourself do this, or else your muscles will rot.”

  “Why?” she would beg. “Why do I have to walk in this heat? I don’t go anywhere. Why must I walk?”

  �
�One day you will find you can’t even get up from your bed,” he would say.

  At times, enraged by her fatigue, she stood still and hissed at him, “You carbuncle on a cow! You stinking hyena!” He would grimace, but continue to direct her forward.

  After the half-hour was over, he would sit her down on the swing and light his pipe. Then he would tell her all that had happened during the day, and about the two new houses in their immediate neighbourhood. One of the houses was indeed occupied by Indian rather than English people, he said once, a retired couple from somewhere, no children. “See, I told you it was the right decision to build here.” He had exhaled a cloud. “Just watch how this area changes now.”

  She listened, sometimes responding with a comment, sometimes spitting out “son of a donkey” or “tail of a sewer rat” or “frog with warts” – words her mind concocted unbidden. If she did that, Amulya would clench her hand to make her stop. When she felt the pressure of his hand on hers, she knew she had said something she should not have, and tried to be quiet. She wondered about the irony of his belated tenderness, but she did not question it aloud.

  Manjula, observing them every day on the garden bench, said to Shanti, “Look, now the old woman’s got it made. She has us to serve her night and day, and her husband’s discovered romance in his old age. Oh Ma, what wouldn’t I give to be her? Don’t you know what they say? Ripe fruits get cotton-lined baskets.”

  Shanti now thought hard of other things when Manjula spoke with her customary venom about her mother-in-law. In two months, Nirmal would take her back to Manoharpur and she would walk by her river again, waiting for her child. Until then, she would close her ears, hum the old songs, and shield her stomach with her hands as if to shut the ears of her unborn baby. Inside, just under the tight-stretched skin of her belly, she felt she could hear a minute heart gallop like a horse, an unformed mouth trying to form words to say to its mother.

  * * *

  Some weekends there were parties in the Barnum house, and on those evenings first the van from Finlays would come, then the electrician for the lights, and then the smells of alien food. In the evening there were fairy lights in the lawn and the indistinct, shiny forms of the Barnums’ friends who came and went in cars that never let them down outside the gate, but always under the covered porch you could not see into. Kananbala waited, and watched, and waited, hoping to see someone, something.

  Only Mrs Barnum was now regularly visible. She had taken to swaying out of the car when they returned from their parties and stopping at the gate for the watchman; then she would walk the length of the drive, making a detour across the lawn before she agreed to enter the house, her long silk gowns trailing in the grass, her white shoulders gleaming in the darkness. Kananbala would watch her with eyes full of greed.

  Every few months Digby Barnum went away for a week or two, maybe to the mines in the interior. Those weeks, in the afternoons, Mrs Barnum would leave the house alone and return in a different, long car, driven by a young man who could have been Tibetan. On one such night Kananbala watched as Mrs Barnum leaned through the car window and talked to the strange man before she began to walk towards her house. She happened to look across and saw an Indian woman’s face drinking hers in at a window on the other side of the silent black road.

  “How extraordinary,” she muttered, and yet, perhaps because she was only half English – the other half unknown – she turned again, and waved at Kananbala’s dark, immobile shadow.

  Kananbala had never in her whole life waved at anyone. She was confused about what to do. Her hand would scarcely rise. But in a rush she stuck an arm out through the bars of the window and awkwardly, like a child in a bus, waved as well.

  The day after, when Mrs Barnum returned with the strange man, she pointed Kananbala out to him and he looked up and waved too, a wide smile crinkling his eyes. He and Mrs Barnum looked at each other and, laughing, Mrs Barnum said something to him in English. The night was still and quiet and Kananbala could hear each word, but she understood no English.

  Mrs Barnum said, “Poor old thing, Ramlal says she’s completely mental, babbles dirty words at people; fun, don’t you think, darling? Would you like it if I did that to you?”

  They laughed together and the man said, “Go on, say something, that’ll be delicious.”

  Mrs Barnum waved at Kananbala every night, whenever she returned from anywhere. Kananbala waited for her at the window. Barnum thought his wife very odd to get out of the car outside the gate, whatever for? Once, when he saw her waving upward after they had returned from a shopping expedition, he decided it was time to be stern. Larissa had no sense of propriety, really. What must the servants think, their mistress waving at the local mad woman? There was something in all those things people said about mixed blood. The longer he was married, the more he felt sure of this.

  * * *

  The following week Barnum left on one of his long trips. Kananbala had got used to watching Mrs Barnum go out every afternoon and return every night, later and later, with her young man. It had been playful, all that waiting to see what new, subtly shimmering gown Mrs Barnum would be in each night, when she would arrive, and when she would notice her at the window and wave.

  But tonight was different. Tonight Kananbala’s throat contracted, her heart thudded and her fingers went cold as she watched Mrs Barnum and the young man returning in his car.

  It was perhaps one in the morning. The night was luminous, with a great, wobbly, yellow egg yolk of a moon bobbing behind trees that swayed in the breeze. Kananbala leaned outside as far as her bulbous body would allow and waved with both arms when the car stopped and she saw them out on the road, a few yards from the gate of the Barnum house. She knew she had to stop them.

  Kananbala had seen Mr Barnum that afternoon. He had come back before time and found Mrs Barnum absent. Kananbala had seen him drive off soon after he arrived, perhaps in search of his wife, and return without her. From a little after twelve at night, Barnum had been waiting outside the gate, concealed in a cascade of bougainvillea. Kananbala could see from the way he stood hidden that he intended to catch Mrs Barnum and her lover together and then … what? Kananbala stared mesmerised at the spot in the bougainvillea into which he had disappeared.

  Mrs Barnum wondered why the Indian woman was waving with both arms. Then, with a happy laugh, she raised both her own in imitation. Her lover bounded out of the car and ran behind her. Kananbala saw his teeth gleam as he smiled. The road was bright with the moonlight, in which they had grown sharp shadows that followed them. Mrs Barnum was giggling and making as if to push the clinging young man away. Her high heels clattered on the tarmac.

  They reached the gate. He kissed Mrs Barnum’s fingertips and murmured something that Kananbala thought the breeze floated towards her. She looked away in panic at the distant, dark outline of the fort and the shadowy bulk of the forest, wishing something would stop what she knew was going to happen.

  Barnum stepped out of the leaves and orange flowers.

  Mrs Barnum swivelled towards him. In a quick rattle, she exclaimed, “Darling … is everything alright? The Munby party … went on so long … ”

  Mr Barnum pulled his hand out of his pocket, thwacked the side of his revolver into her cheek and snarled, “Shut up.” His wife stumbled back with a gasp of pain. Before Barnum could turn the gun the other way, Kananbala saw the lover leap on him. Mrs Barnum followed with a scream. Kananbala shut her eyes in terror and opened them a second later to see the lover diving back into his car, driving off. Barnum lay on the ground bleeding from his throat. Beside him, Kananbala could see the moon return the curved glint of a knife.

  Mrs Barnum looked around, her moonlit face spectral. She tore off one of her long earrings and looked down at her hand as if surprised by it. Clutching the earring, she knelt by Barnum’s side for a moment. Then she rushed to the gate and ran in.

  Fortunate, Kananbala thought, that she does not let the watchman lock the gate the nights she
is out.

  The murdered man lay on the road, a dark, shining puddle forming beside his stomach as the owls resumed their soft night-time exchanges.

  Kananbala lay down beside Amulya on the far edge of their wide bed and, trying to breathe as quietly as her panting would allow, in her head she began to make up a story.

  * * *

  The next morning Amulya was sitting at a table in the bedroom, drinking his first cup of tea and unfolding his newspaper, when Nirmal raced in.

  Amulya looked over his newspaper with a frown.

  “What is the matter, Nirmal, can’t you walk? Must you always run? Who’d believe you’re going to be a father?”

  Amulya took a sip of his tea with a grimace, “This tea is overdone, it’s bitter. Who made it?”

  “Do you know, Baba,” Nirmal said, breathless, “there’s been a murder in the house opposite. They think the woman killed her husband. He was left dead on the road last night, and she was sitting upstairs brushing her hair, as cool as you please.”

  “What? Barnum?” Amulya exclaimed. “That can’t be!”

  “No really, Baba,” Nirmal said, “It’s true. Haven’t you looked out of the window at all this morning? There’s mayhem. I saw some police high-up go in and there are three more policemen in the house, searching for the weapon.”

  “Weapon? How was he killed?” Amulya asked, standing up to go to a window, curious despite himself.

  “Knife,” Nirmal said with satisfaction. “In the stomach and ribs, apparently. The police are taking the lady away for questioning. She keeps saying she was out for the evening and when she came back she went straight upstairs, didn’t know anything about this, hadn’t expected her husband back for another week.”

  Nirmal stood at another of the windows and looked out, his tall body in its thin, night-crumpled kurta outlined by the sun. Kananbala went and stood beside him. She noticed that her head did not reach his shoulders and looked up at Nirmal with a surge of pride and indulgence.