An Atlas of Impossible Longing

by Anuradha Roy

  Bakul went up to her and stroked her head. “O Thakuma,” she said. “Wake up, you’re dreaming.”

  Kananbala mumbled and groaned and Bakul shook her a little harder.

  “Wake up, there’s no lion, it’s me, Bakul! Get up, I have to go to school soon!”

  A little later, Bakul stood behind Kananbala, combing out her white hair. It had thinned in patches, enough to show bits of scalp.

  “You’re going bald, Thakuma.”

  “I’m not a young beauty, am I?” Kananbala replied, closing her eyes with pleasure at the comb going over her scalp. How good it felt when … the comb went hard over her skull. Kananbala winced and exclaimed, “Unhhh!”

  “Did that hurt?”

  “What do you think?” Kananbala sounded irritable. “Not so hard!”

  “Your mother had such a head of curly hair,” she said. “You’ve inherited it. Poor child. Didn’t live to enjoy anything. Never saw you.”

  Bakul, who had heard this before, felt impatient with her grandmother for repeating things. Sometimes she ticked Kananbala off and said, “Yes, yes, you told me.”

  “Your father was so different before,” Kananbala continued, her eyes still closed, feeling the light touch of Bakul’s fingers in her hair and on her shoulders. “Such a light-hearted, playful boy. He never walked, only ever ran. He never spoke without eyes full of laughter. Who would know him now?”

  Bakul scowled behind her and made a face.

  “I didn’t tell anyone then,” Kananbala continued. “But I’ll tell you one day. I know who killed that man in the house opposite.”

  “You!” Bakul laughed. “That’s what you always say. You don’t know anything.”

  “And then I went on a picnic,” Kananbala went on in her nostalgic voice. “You would never know one like it. It was … ”

  Through her semi-somnolent stupor, Kananbala heard someone come into the room and scrabble around somewhere close behind her. She opened her eyes as she felt her bed jerk and wobble. “Oh Bakul,” she called out, quavering. “It’s an earthquake, help me!” She looked around in alarm, clutching the sides of her shifting bed.

  She saw Nirmal’s hunched form straightening out from under the bed. He had dragged her trunk out. As she watched in horror, he opened it and began to toss out her saris. He seemed not to notice his mother at all.

  “What? Nirmal? What are you … ”

  From beneath Kananbala’s saris, Nirmal dug out Bakul’s precious box.

  “What are you doing, Nirmal?” Kananbala said, frantic. “What’re you doing under the bed with my trunk?”

  “I’ll show you what it means to lose something precious,” Nirmal said in clipped accents towards Bakul as he picked her aluminium box out of Kananbala’s trunk. “You’ll know how to be responsible with other people’s things now.”

  “Don’t take that,” Bakul screamed and lunged out. “It’s my box, don’t touch my box.”

  She dived across the bed to Nirmal and tried to grab the box from him. “Nirmal!” Kananbala exclaimed. “What are you doing, have you lost your mind?”

  “Lost my mind, Ma?” he said as he left the room. “Is there anyone in this house still sane?”

  * * *

  Nirmal’s new office was at the edge of Songarh, a small building that, besides him, contained two other officers, a junior assistant, a clerk, and a man who doubled as peon and tea boy. Nirmal’s desk was empty but for a small pile of papers on one side, and a few books. The other officers, Sharma and Negi, were chatting by the window. Office politics, Nirmal could tell from the odd snatch that drifted towards him. “Mr Bullock is very partial to Banerji,” one of them was saying. “Arre bhai, don’t you know Banerji was his student. That’s why he gets the good postings, always.”

  Nirmal took another sip of water, trying to calm the fury that still raged inside him. How many years of collecting had it been? Twelve? Fifteen? When had he started it? That oak he had sat under when walking through the western Himalaya. That maple, the rhododendrons, all of different colours. Most of them were leaves from high altitudes, times when he had left his digs on getaways to walk through the hills, even if the hills were a train- and bus- and then cart-ride away.

  Bakul had destroyed it all.

  He scraped his chair back. It fell. “I have to go,” Nirmal said to the room.

  They watched him leaving. “The man is peculiar,” Negi said. “Doesn’t talk, doesn’t like company.”

  Nirmal strode out. He took out his flat silver cigarette case, one of his brother’s rare birthday gifts. He lit a cigarette and breathed out with a deep sigh. The band around his forehead seemed to loosen its grip. He noticed that the verges of the red-earth road were piled here and there with slabs of mica, bright mirrors for the morning sun.

  Why had Bakul chosen to destroy the collection he valued so much? She knew what it meant to him, he had told her just the day before! He could not imagine such malevolence in a child of eleven … or was it twelve? That morning, when Meera had told him what had happened – what had she said? “Dada, I think Bakul has ruined one or two of your books” – he had felt as if he would explode. One or two of my books!

  * * *

  Not far away, Mukunda sat at Mrs Barnum’s table trying to read. Mrs Barnum had not emerged that afternoon, and he felt the page float away from him again and again. The words were hard and unfamiliar, and the bit he had reached in the Library of Literature Volume One did not interest him. All he could think of was the turmoil in the house that morning. He had seen Nirmal on his knees before his torn books, particles of crumbling, old, dry leaves and bits of paper tossing around him in the light morning breeze. Mukunda dreaded the anger that would certainly stifle the house. Why had Bakul done this?

  He slapped the book shut and wandered to the back window overlooking Mrs Barnum’s garden, a garden like no other. More a wild forest of tall trees with a large pond at one end, filled with fleshy water lilies. A hidden pond, right at the back of the house, difficult to spot except from one of the upper windows. Today, looking down, Mukunda saw something move in the pond. He ran down the stairs and out into the garden as fast as he could. He was sure Bakul was in it and he knew she could not swim. He was irrationally certain she was trying to drown herself because of the morning’s troubles.

  He tore off his shirt and as he tried to wade in he realised the water went quite deep, too deep for paddling. He let himself float, sheathed by the sudden silence of the water. Weeds waved around him shadowy, weightless. Something, a fish he thought, brushed past. He could see Bakul struggling a few feet away and struck out towards her. The stalks of the lilies swayed, dark and fat. He reached her and took hold of her hand, trying to force her out of the water. She came out spluttering and spitting, pushing him away.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled. “Leave me alone! I was just starting to float!”

  She dived back into the water, flailed about, emerged spitting water and retching, “I think I swallowed something.”

  Bakul’s hair was plastered to her skull in strands. She had a water weed over her ear that she flung at Mukunda. Her thin summer frock clung to her new peach-sized breasts. Mukunda stared at them, the darkness of the nipples, the swelling they topped. As if independent of him, his hand reached out to touch them.

  “Don’t do that,” Bakul said, slapping his hand away. “It tickles.”

  Mukunda gently squeezed her breasts. “It’s not soft,” he whispered, “I thought it would be.”

  * * *

  When they reached home they tried to slide in unnoticed, knowing their wet clothes would earn them a scolding. But Manjula was waiting outside and so was Meera. “Do you know how late it is?” Manjula asked. “And how disgraceful you both look? Why are your clothes wet? What were you doing?”

  “You’ll catch a cold, Bakul, go and dry your hair at once,” Meera said, wanting to smooth over Manjula’s acrid disapproval.

  “I fell into the pond,” Bakul said, scowlin
g at Meera, “and he had to come in and get me.” She slipped past her aunt, who had a swift and stinging slap when she had a mind to use it. Manjula’s voice followed her from the garden: “This time I’ve had enough. I’ve told Nirmal once and I’ve told him again, they need some discipline, they’re not babies any more, but does anyone listen to me in this house? Do I count for nothing?”

  Bitterly she muttered, “God’s ways are strange, that He should give children to those who don’t care for them and leave me childless.”

  * * *

  In his room on the roof the next day, Nirmal lay in his bed trying to read a translation of a story by Chekhov, “The Steppe”, but its vast open spaces and the characters’ wanderings under the enormous Russian skies made him feel even more stifled than usual in Songarh. He longed for the desert sky in Rajasthan again, where eyes could not look far enough to reach the horizon. He flung the book aside and got up, wondering what to do.

  An office holiday. The two other men in the office loved holidays though their working days were indolent enough. They went home to wives, the demands of children, the muddle of large families. So much seemed to happen in the lives of Negi and Sharma that they revelled in: relatives’ visits, weddings in the neighbourhood, trips to the bazaar; even illnesses seemed to be the cause of drama and gossip. By contrast, Nirmal thought, he had been a bystander for years. People thought him aloof, he knew, arrogant perhaps. He was content with that. And yet, sometimes, he yearned for the populous cacophony of other people’s lives despite the knowledge that it would certainly make him unhappy.

  He walked around the room hunting for his box of matches, an unlit cigarette between his fingers, and his eyes fell on the aluminium box. Bakul’s box! It was on the windowsill. He had forgotten all about it. He picked it up. It rattled. He took the box to his bed and looked at it: dented in one corner, the aluminium surface scratched, its latch askew.

  Bakul’s box contained many things she had herself forgotten the provenance of. Nirmal picked out, one by one, a pink plastic necklace, some flat, brown seeds he recognized as tamarind, a sad-faced rag doll in a red sari, a small tram car – beneath its windows a smiling girl with starry eyes and yellow hair said “Perkins Nougat” in a speech bubble.

  At the bottom of the box he found three envelopes. On one, to his astonishment, he recognised his own handwriting. The postmark said Bikaner. He opened the envelope and saw he had written in large block letters: “Dear Bakul, I am in a place that has animals called camels, and trees called palm.” Something like a camel was drawn next to the words, standing under a palm tree.

  There was another envelope, and when he shook it three photographs slid out. The smallest one, curled at the edges, showed Shanti’s house in Manoharpur. He had not looked at it, or at a picture of it, for twelve years. He had almost forgotten – wanted never to remember – that house. But it all came back, every last detail, the moment he saw the picture. There was the tree next to Shanti’s window, the one she had named Bakul after. There was the verandah he and his father-in-law used to sit in to chat over tea, and then those neighbours of Bikash Babu would drop in and begin their interminable conversations about the same things every day: the impending flood; the Scottish engineering firm; the mango and coconut trees; how the neighbour’s court case was progressing and whether it had reached the district judge.

  Nirmal gazed at the picture for longer than he knew. Then, putting it aside, he turned to the other two. One was of Shanti: the one that had arrived with the marriage proposal. Nirmal paused, smiling at the recalcitrant look on Shanti’s face. What was it like, having your picture sent to a stranger for his approval? He wondered if other men, other prospective husbands of Shanti, had seen that picture of her. Did some of them still have it lying around in their homes? Or had their eventual wives thrown it away or torn it up?

  The third picture had the two of them staring at their wedding photographer. Nirmal glanced at it and put it aside. That thin, young face, the mop of hair, was that me? He went to the wardrobe mirror and studied the shadowed face that looked back at him. The hair was combed straight back like his father’s. There were deep lines on his cheeks, bracketing his nose. His face was still thin, but not thin as in the picture. Gaunt. Old. An old face. At just thirty-seven, he was an old man. And yet, not a patriarch as his father had been, not even an authoritarian like his brother.

  His thoughts slid back two days. He had heard a knock on his door and prepared himself for another invasion from Manjula, but it was Meera. He was self-conscious about his dishevelment and did not want to call her into his untidy room with its rumpled bed, although he knew it was she who would have it cleaned later in the day, get the maid to make the bed and pull out filled ashtrays from under chairs and bed. He had stepped out onto the roof, shivering slightly in the early morning chill, and said, “Is anything wrong?”

  “I … ”

  In the soft light of the morning, her skin seemed luminous. He saw she had already bathed, and her hair loose, wet, had painted a ring of damp over her shoulders. Little specks of water hung diamond-like to it. She usually had a direct gaze, but today she would not look at him.

  “Actually I came up to put the clothes out to dry … ”

  Nirmal noticed a small iron bucket with wet, wrung-out clothes next to her. He waited, still wondering why she had called him out. “ … and I thought I should tell you … please don’t be angry with her, she’s young, and doesn’t know … Bakul, she has damaged some of your books … ”

  “Books? Which books?”

  “The staircase cupboard, books there, I … ”

  Before she could finish what she was saying, he had rushed down the stairwell to the landing. Someone had begun to move the shredded books to one side, making piles of the scraps. Nirmal had knelt on the floor, tossing the scraps this way and that until the small space of the landing was covered with torn paper, in the middle of which he sat, inchoate with rage.

  He felt sheepish about it now, about Meera watching him, trying to calm him, trying to salvage whatever little seemed retrievable. That evening when he came home from work he had seen that three of the books, painstakingly stuck back together, had been left on a windowsill in his room. Nobody but Meera would have done it.

  What did she think of him? he wondered. A middle-aged man, sentimental about pressed leaves? A stupid man who had tried to punish his daughter by descending to the level of the child? Sticking back those pages must have taken Meera all day. Why had she done it? And Bakul, did she hate him so much that she had lashed out the only way she thought would hurt?

  He looked at the photographs in his hand again, and for the first time weighed his own culpability. That little aluminium box contained all of Bakul’s memories of her mother, her most precious belongings. What had he done to add to them? Could he possibly make up for his neglect? Nirmal sat alternately smoking, looking at the pictures, and smoking again. Then, all at once, he seemed to reach a decision and got up from the bed.

  I must show Shanti’s house to Bakul, he thought. That’s the only way I can give her some real connection with her mother. I ought to have taken her there long ago. She still has a grandfather; she must meet him.

  He felt as if something had loosened inside him, given him space to breathe again. A surge of excitement made him push the box away and go out to the verandah. He would book railway tickets, it would be their first journey together. He would take Mukunda too, open up the boy’s world. They would stop in Calcutta on the way, he would show them the Victoria Memorial, he would show Bakul a real tram, not a tin box.

  And since he couldn’t possibly manage the two children alone, he would take Meera too. He could barely wait to tell her, to see her eyes widen and her face light up.

  Charged up by the thought of travel, yearning already for the familiar clacking of a train, Nirmal put his shoes on and went down the stairs. Why spend the entire holiday at home? he thought, and began to walk rapidly towards Finlays, looking for a tong
a he might hail on the way.

  * * *

  Meera was running her fingers through a sari that was draped over a mannequin at Finlays. The mannequin was on a pedestal by the door, two feet taller than Meera, a pasty white with apple-red lips. An orange sari with a gold border rode its buxom body. Meera looked down at her own sari, her usual off-white, this one with a narrow brown border. Some day, she fantasised, I’ll again wear sunset orange, green the colour of a young mango, and rich semul red. Maybe just in secret, for myself, when nobody’s looking, but I will.

  Unknown to her, Nirmal was watching from outside. It had brought him to a standstill, to see her doing something so ordinary, looking at a sari, the kind of sari that a widow could never wear. Beside the outsized orange and gold mannequin, Meera looked shrunken and drab, clutching her cloth shoulder bag as people milled around looking at things, buying things. Shop assistants and customers brushed past, indifferent to her. It was clear to them, as to Nirmal, that she was not there to buy anything. He was overcome by an unexpected twist of tenderness at her awkward presence, at her solitude in that crowded shop.

  He went in and said, “What a surprise!”

  Meera sprang away from the mannequin as if tainted by association.

  “I … um … I had to bring the children out … it’s a holiday … ” she stammered. “They’re just over there, in the bookshop.”

  Nirmal hesitated, wondering if he should, then sidestepping his misgivings he said, “There’s a tea stall outside. Will you have some?”