An Atlas of Impossible Longing

by Anuradha Roy

  The overtapped mines were close to drying up anyway and were shut down in the next few years; the British managers left. A dark fungus of desolation and poverty inched over the town. Where people had earlier come to it looking for work, now they started to leave.

  Dulganj Road, always isolated, was to have become a rich suburb. Now, after the expatriates had gone, leaving empty houses, Finlays stopped stocking treacle and suet, gardens went back to wilderness, the road was pitted for lack of repair and after dark it was difficult to get a tongawallah to agree to come that way. At 3 Dulganj Road, after Amulya’s death, the garden was tended for a time, but by an itinerant gardener who had to be sacked after it was found he was nurturing a flourishing field of cannabis in a sunny corner. Soon the grass was knee-high again, and wild bushes of berries at the edges were attracting birds and noisy monkeys.

  Mrs Barnum’s house, opposite Amulya’s, was regarded as the house of Sahib Bahu, mad, bad, alone. Only Amulya’s family still referred to her by her real name; any others who had known her as Larissa Barnum had left Songarh for other places. She lived alone, the khansama her only servant. There were two houses beyond hers, which, after the passing of the British, had acquired a multitude of Indian tenants. One of these, Afsal Mian, was a young, melancholic musician who taught singing. He went about town with the air of being a man whose talents were wasted upon Songarh’s philistine air. He had reason to feel as he did; while he tried to impress upon his students the necessity of riyaaz, and of perfecting one note by practising it day after day, his wards’ parents asked, when giving him his salary: “How many new songs this month Ustad? How many will she know before her marriage proposals start coming in?” In the evenings, sitting on the wide, old verandah in his lungi, he sang out his frustration in a rich, sad-sounding voice that carried all the way to Amulya’s house.

  People said nothing ever happened in Songarh; if there were no clocks you wouldn’t know that time had passed. They said if you wanted to make something of your life, you had to leave. Leave, Mukunda, Mrs Barnum always said after a few of her special lemon sherbets, leave before the rot sets in, leave before you’re no good for anywhere else.

  Mukunda could not imagine anywhere else yet. Songarh was all he and Bakul knew, the town that defined all others for them. Their world was circumscribed by Arunagar on the left, with its knot of shops and small houses, Mrs Barnum’s opposite, with the fort and ridge beyond it, and Finlays and Apsara Cinema further away, where they were not allowed to go on their own. Narrow streets meandered over the town’s undulating terrain, passing through little leftover villages. Town and country were impossible to separate; shops and houses made a straggly line hemming mustard fields.

  Bakul and Mukunda had populated Songarh with their own secret places and people. To them it throbbed with magic and meanings which only the two of them could share. They had been together always, ever since Mukunda had joined the household when he was six and Bakul four. They had agreed they were both orphans: after all, Bakul had reasoned, she was an orphan too because her mother was dead and her father, an archaeologist, was away on digs in other parts of the country for such long years at a stretch that she forgot his face in between.

  TWO

  “It’s a dark night. You’re a one-eyed tomb robber creeping up to rob a pyramid in the desert, I’m following, I’ll catch you.” Mukunda’s gaze slid past Bakul.

  “It’s not night, it’s afternoon, and why should I have one eye?” Bakul sounded suspicious.

  Mukunda had not heard her. He pointed to a mango tree in the centre of the garden. It stood innocuous in the afternoon sun, sheltering a family of birds that flew in and out of it, chiding each other as he approached. “That’s the pyramid,” he said, excited, “All around there is just sand. And look, I brought something – this is all we have to eat for the days we are in the desert.” He held out two onions and a handful of dried-up peanuts.

  It was a Sunday afternoon. The rest of the family, heavy with eating, floated in the half-awake realm of afternoon sleep as the two of them wandered their garden of old trees and tall grass. Tangles of wildflowers nodded under the weight of pausing butterflies.

  “Peanuts?” Bakul said scornfully. “Did robbers eat peanuts in ancient times?”

  “I don’t know.” Mukunda sounded troubled. “We can pretend they are whatever the robbers ate.”

  “You don’t know? But I thought you knew everything!”

  “I have work to do. Do you want to play or not?”

  Mukunda was offended. He tossed an onion at Bakul and strode towards the well. It was a large stone-walled well that went deep. In the thirty or so years since Amulya had dug it, it had never gone dry, though in the summer months the water became a distant circle of light far below and the thick rope played out and played out until it felt as if the iron bucket would never find the bottom, and when the splash of water meeting bucket at last sounded, it came from very far away. In the monsoon, the water in the well rose every day, a little and then more, until it was so close it felt as if only the rim held the water in and anyone could reach in and bail out water, as if from a pond. The well was overhung by a creeper of white jasmine that dropped its fragrant flowers into the water all day.

  It was one of Mukunda’s chores to see that the bathrooms and kitchen were always stocked with full buckets of water from the well. It was he who wheeled water out of the well several times a day, iron bucket clanging down as the wheel screeched and squeaked. Now, annoyed with Bakul, he flung in the bucket and played out the rope faster and faster so that the squeak drowned out her voice.

  Neither of them heard the gate open.

  Neither of them saw a man pay off a tongawallah and step in, looking around as if unsure where he was.

  He was thin, his half-sleeved shirt too large, as if he had shrunk within it. His eyes cast shadows of grey underneath and his hair stood out dry and irregular. His height made him slouch a little, or perhaps it was fatigue. He looked too tired to move beyond the gate down the long, overgrown path towards the house. He stood there flanked by two large trunks and a bedroll, as if trying to decide what to do, as if he did not know the direction he needed to go. He saw the pair by the well and began walking towards them across the garden, stopping every now and then as if he had seen something that called out to him.

  Bakul was shouting above the squeak of the wheel and the clang of the bucket, “Why can’t we play the crocodile game? You never want to play that.”

  “That’s a boring game,” Mukunda said scathingly. “That’s for babies.”

  Bakul looked at him, unsmiling, and turned away.

  As she turned she came face to face with the man. She had seen him before. She knew she had. The man bent down and sat before her on his haunches. When he smiled, the grey shadows seemed to darken as his eyes almost disappeared, and a long deep line appeared on each cheek.

  “Don’t you remember who I am?” he asked her almost in a whisper.

  Bakul regarded him with a wordless stare. A strand of her hair was in her eyes, it tickled, but she did not remove it. A fly buzzed about her face. The man flicked it away.

  “Nirmal Babu,” Mukunda said.

  Nirmal had not seen his daughter for five years – since she was six – and then it had been for a few weeks, and he had not known what to say or do. He had carried that image with him on his postings and travels, of Bakul at six, following him around, not amused by anything he had to say to her, but near him, and watchful all the time. Confronted then with her childish roundness of limb and her silences, he had been as nonplussed as he felt now. Now he saw she had become a girl, a thin, long-limbed girl in a frock that slid off her shoulders, with a nose that had a little bump at its tip, a head full of straggly curls, a solemn mouth, and thick, straight eyebrows that now frowned, focusing her strange-coloured bright eyes at him. He had remembered what colour her eyes were: Shanti’s colour. He had carried that colour inside him on his travels and now he drew something out of
his pocket and, holding Bakul’s hand, placed a small object in it. She looked down at it. It was a stone.

  “It’s a rare colour of quartz,” Nirmal said. “I remembered your eyes when I found it so I had it cut and polished for you.”

  Bakul closed her fist over it.

  “Did you get me the weapon?” Mukunda said. “You said you’d get me a Stone Age weapon!”

  “I think I have something for you,” Nirmal said with a smile. “But it may not be a prehistoric weapon. Call someone to help with my trunks, and then we’ll see what there is.”

  “Alright, Nirmal Babu,” Bakul heard Mukunda shouting. And then, “How long will you be here?”

  “Forever,” Nirmal said. “This time I have come back for good.”

  Bakul turned away from their fading voices and looked at the shiny stone in her hand. It was a colour between brown and cream, and its chiselled sides reflected the afternoon sun. In places it was translucent enough to show its depths, which seemed to be made of shards of the same brown. If you held the stone up at the sun and looked into it, there was a city of tall buildings inside, glinting, living a secret stone life.

  It made a small, distant splash as Bakul held her hand high above her head and flung it into the well.

  * * *

  More than most children, Bakul had reason to believe she was a foundling, motherless, effectively fatherless. It was part of family lore that her father had disappeared after her birth and been given up for dead. He had returned briefly after seven months and sixteen days, then gone again, this time for a new job, and ever since, he had only returned for short holidays. Every month, from a money-order he sent home, they knew where his latest archaeological wanderings had taken him, but that was all.

  Nirmal had introduced two new people to the house: Meera, a distant relative who was a widow in need of a home, and Mukunda, who, until he was six, had lived in an orphanage unaware of Nirmal’s existence. Kamal’s favourite joke was that having provided Bakul with a mother who was not a mother and a brother who was not a brother, Nirmal had thought his duty done and made good his escape.

  Bakul clung to herself, her solitude seeming to her both romantic and inescapable. Yet she was not altogether solitary. She had Mukunda. And she had her grandmother. From babyhood Bakul had known that though other people came and went, her grandmother was there, always in the same place, alone in a little room carved out of a verandah, which she did not leave except to bathe. Bakul had never known her grandfather, never known how, by dying, he had changed her grandmother even more than he had by living. To her, Kananbala had been this way forever – her collarbones jutting out at her neck, her eyes invisible behind her glasses, a network of veins snaking green under skin as thin as that on milk, her borderless white saris catching the light from the window.

  Her grandmother had not fulfilled the conventional grandmotherly duties – like telling her folktales or teaching her rhymes. Instead, Bakul had picked up a rich store of curses from her, words which she still rolled round her mouth, though she no longer blurted them out innocently at school. When Bakul was little, her grandmother’s knee had still been strong enough for her. Seated there, the lisping toddler traded curses with the old woman and giggled with delight. If Kananbala called her a pat of cowshit, Bakul would call her an old donkey; if Kananbala replied with, “And you’re an ugly owl,” Bakul, suddenly unsure it was a game, would suspect she was being laughed at and shout, “You too!” And so it would go, until Manjula heard them and swept Bakul out of the room wailing in protest.

  When Bakul came to her room, Kananbala would reach out for one of four dented tins in which she kept things Mrs Barnum sent her every month: bull’s eyes, nougat, biscuits, even chocolate. Although the two women had met just once, each month the household knew Mrs Barnum’s shopping trip to Finlays had taken place when a brown paper packet, borne by Mrs Barnum’s khansama, arrived filled with exotic goodies. Behind the first row of tins on Kananbala’s shelf were others that had come from across the road – Milkmaid condensed milk, Hartley’s marmalade with orange rind suspended as if in limbo – containers Kananbala never dared open.

  Bakul had her own tin too, which she kept under a layer of old saris in her grandmother’s trunk. She opened it on days she needed reassurance, and the afternoon Nirmal returned was one such. The box had some oddments Bakul had to push aside to reach underneath. There was a large, frayed envelope in it, from which she took out a picture.

  It showed a house. Her mother’s house. The picture had been taken from across the river, or from a boat mid-stream, Bakul thought, because between her and the house in the picture there was a stretch of river water. The house looked like the ones she had read of in stories: there were tall pillars, a deep verandah, long windows, columns of trees at its sides.

  Bakul’s black-rimmed forefinger, the nail bitten into a ragged edge, traced a way to the upper floor. When she was younger and able to believe fairy tales, Kananbala had told her it was a magic picture, even convinced Bakul that her mother actually lived in the picture and could see them, could hear everything they said; only Bakul could not see her or hear her voice.

  “There,” Kananbala had told her, “behind that bakul tree – the tree after which you are named – can you see a window, my little grasshopper?”

  The window was not visible in the picture, but Kananbala made her believe it was there.

  “Your mother’s there in the room behind that window you can’t see. But she can see you.”

  It was out of that window, Bakul knew now, that her mother had looked all those last weeks as the water rose, higher and higher, until there was no escape. She longed to push aside the tree, open the window, and enter the picture, enter that room. It would have a large bed on which her mother lay and she would lie in the bed nestling against her mother and listening to her breathe.

  “Your mother had curly hair,” Kananbala had told her, lifting a strand of Bakul’s hair. “Just like yours. Her hair was untidy too. Do you know what her teachers called her in her school?”

  “What?”

  “Pagli, that’s what the teachers called your mother,” Kananbala had said, “and that’s what they’ll call you if you go around looking as wild as you do.”

  Her mother had curly hair which spread out in a black cloud on the pillow. She smelt of Jabakusum hair oil and Pears soap and paan with scented tobacco. And her voice? What did she sound like? She would hear her telling her things, stories, things her father never did, even when he was in Songarh. Bakul had tried when she was younger, asking Nirmal about her mother and about Manoharpur, but he had always changed the subject or become more remote than usual.

  It was something Mrs Barnum said to her that had in the end explained her mother’s absence to Bakul, and reassured her that it was only a matter of time before she and her mother were reunited. At Mrs Barnum’s, on the wall above the fireplace in the drawing room, were two clocks. The clocks showed two different times. Mrs Barnum had explained that time was different in different places in the world. Her clocks told her what time it was in Britain, and what time it was in Songarh. She liked to know what the English were up to, she said, through the day – when she was eating lunch they were stumbling out of bed, when she was at her dinner they had barely begun their tea. “Our past is their future,” she liked to say. To Bakul this meant only one thing: that in Manoharpur it was still time past, in which her mother lived waiting, waiting for it to become the future in which Bakul would come to her.

  * * *

  “You don’t dress the same way any more. What happened?” Nirmal asked his brother. All his adult life Nirmal had seen Kamal in trousers held up by braces, shirts with ties that matched.

  Kamal looked down at his white kurta and dhoti. He chuckled and said, “Gandhi and all that, you know. What with so much nationalism in the air, I thought that as a manufacturer of traditional remedies I’d better look the part.” But he had drawn the line at rough, handspun khadi. His kurtas and d
hotis were the finest mulmul in summer and tussar in winter – both traditionally woven too, he reasoned. Today his dhoti had a narrow wine-red border and a matching burst of red poked out from the pocket of his kurta, which rose in a hillock over his stomach and then subsided. He would leave for the factory in a little while, he thought – it was almost eleven but, as on every other day, he did not feel up to going. It bored him, all those pills and potions in poor-looking packaging.

  “And your suits?” Nirmal said. “Did you throw them into a patriotic bonfire?”

  “Oh no,” Kamal said, widening his dead-fish eyes. “Are you crazy? They’re expensive suits, I might need them again. All this swadeshi high talk will evaporate soon – and then? I can’t afford to look like you.”

  Nirmal looked at his own bush shirt and loose trousers in puzzlement.

  “For that matter, I don’t think you can afford to look like you any more either. Your attire certainly doesn’t go with your new position.”

  “I still have to spend my time supervising in the trenches,” Nirmal said. “I could hardly go down on my knees in the dust wearing a pinstriped suit.”

  “Strange,” Kamal said after a pause. “If the Archaeological Survey was going to look for lost civilisations in Songarh, why wait so long? After all, the ruin’s been around for some centuries, hasn’t it? There’s a war in Europe and the way Hitler’s going we’ll all soon be part of your lost civilisations!”

  “Well, it’s only been budgeted now because I wrote a proposal to dig, and it was accepted.”

  “Proposal accepted, eh?” Kamal said, “And by the British Burra Sahibs no less, I suppose! So why didn’t you write the proposal earlier then? At least you could have lived here and looked after your daughter instead of spending half your life gadding about the wilds of India.”