An Atlas of Impossible Longing

by Anuradha Roy

  There were two sets of folding tin tables and chairs under an awning. Looking around, feeling self-conscious, Meera sat in one of the chairs, hoping it would not tear her sari or leave a stain, rust-brown on white. How odd it would seem to people who knew her, Meera, drinking tea in public with Bakul’s father. What conclusions would they jump to?

  She said, “I brought the children for a treat. They don’t get out much … ”

  “Didn’t you want to go to the bookshop too? I remember you used to read my father’s books. Surely you’ve finished them all in these six years.”

  That he should have remembered how he had come upon her once raiding Amulya’s old glass-fronted book cupboards made Meera smile into her tea.

  “Well, I’m reading some of them for the third or fourth time. I don’t buy too many new ones.” She looked away.

  “Were Baba’s books good enough to re-read? What did he have? I’ve hardly looked really. I remember he read a lot of … botany.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Meera giggled. “Many solemn books. But also romances! Really. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights – those English novels. One called The Satin Roses of Cairo. They all have his name on them.” She stopped, thinking she was being improper. “I wonder where the children are,” she said. “I should go to the bookshop and fetch them.” She started to gather her things.

  “Do you want a cream bun?” he said on impulse. “Did you know Finlays makes very good cream buns? Well, at least as good as any you can get in Songarh.”

  She put her bag down but kept her hand on it as if she would rise any minute.

  “Cream buns?” she said. “At our age?”

  But she ate one, wiping the spilling cream surreptitiously with a white handkerchief embroidered with pink roses. She wondered if the hanky was clean. Nirmal noted it was the only bit of colour in her wardrobe and watched it touch her lips.

  By the end of the cream rolls, the lemony sunlight of the March afternoon had melted without warning into dusk. Meera wondered what she would say at home about the time she had been gone. Who would make the tea before Kamal came home? What would Manjula say about this long absence? And what would they say when they saw all of them return together?

  What was it about darkness, Meera thought, that altered things? Always those injunctions from parents, from husband, from relatives, Come back before dark! What exactly, she had wondered, would happen in the dark that could not happen in the day? But sunset and rising panic had been with her since she could remember. Someone brushed past her. Meera suppressed a shriek. It was a figure hooded in a nocolour shawl.

  “Tonga, Mataji?” the man enquired in a reedy voice.

  At last they were in a tonga. It had two long hard seats back to back, facing opposite directions but united by a common backrest. Meera listened to the quiet creak of the wheels, the brisk clopping of hooves, the happy ringing of the bells. The sharp smell of the horse, its particular mix of dung, sweat, and open air, drifted back to her in the breeze and she breathed it in, relaxed by the rocking carriage. She sat with Bakul at the back, listening to Mukunda chattering with Nirmal in front about horses and whips. They reached the swell of the slope that would turn into the homeward road. The thin, shrouded tongawallah whipped his horse, veins snaking down his wrists, riverlike. The horse glistened with sweat despite the chill in the evening air. The tonga hurtled, gathering speed as the slope charged steeper and steeper down before rising again. Meera took a deep breath of the rushing air and tried to tuck her hair into its pins.

  Divided from her only by a sheet of thin, hard wood sat Nirmal. If she leaned her head just a fraction, she would be able to rest it on his shoulder.

  She shut her eyes for a moment and held tight to the armrest.

  THREE

  Ever since that tea with Meera, Nirmal found he was unable to focus on the paperwork before him by the time the tea boy came in at four each day with his steaming brown cups. What kind of theodolite? How many? Tents or no tents? Were there enough labourers available locally? He had requisition forms to fill out, letters to write, but his mind kept returning to the ruin, or if he was honest with himself, to his knowledge that Meera was perhaps at the ruin at that moment, alone, feeding the dogs, making her drawings.

  On the fourth afternoon he gave up the struggle and left the office early, saying he was going for a site survey. He walked right round the ruin, but found no evidence of Meera. He walked into the dome but heard only mewling sounds and a low snarl. Thinking she had gone further afield he wandered towards the dry stream-bed, but he did not find her there either. Disconsolate, and now edgily aware from his feeling of disappointment that his trip had had no professional basis at all, he began to walk back towards the entrance to the fort.

  This time there she was, walking rapidly towards the dome as if she were late, shredding rotis as she went. Her cloth bag swung and bounced off her hip with each quick step she took.

  He stopped and crept back behind a broken-down wall, sweat beading his forehead. What was he thinking? Why had he come? It was ridiculous. She was a distant relative, a widow; if she sniffed a trace of longing in him she would be offended and shut him out. If anyone in his family or neighbourhood got to know, there would be turmoil; Meera would certainly be ostracised, and perhaps he would be too.

  He peeped around his wall, realising the absurdity of his situation: how could he leave without her seeing him? If he did not walk out now, he would have to skulk around for as long as she decided to stay there drawing. He could see she had settled down, leaning against the banyan tree. The dog sat next to her, alternately scratching its ears and sniffing its rear.

  He took a deep breath and tried to emerge as if taken by surprise. She saw him and put down her sketchbook.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have realised this has become a workplace now – I really shouldn’t idle here.”

  Her words triggered an idea in Nirmal’s head and he blurted it out before he had even thought it through.

  “You’re not idling, actually. What you’re doing could be work!”

  “What do you mean?” By now he was next to her, bending down to the dog in an effort at friendship, to which the dog was responding with the most imperceptible of tail wags.

  “I mean that we need site sketches before we start, detailed ones. Do you think you could do them for me?”

  “Wouldn’t you need a professional?” Meera said. “I only sketch, I’m not a draughtsman.”

  Nirmal sat beside her and said, “If you’d agree to show me some of your drawings I’d know.”

  With some trepidation, she opened her sketchbook and began to turn the pages. There were drawings of trees and flowers, a few of the dog. The lines were sharp and fluid. She had also drawn the ruin from various angles. Nirmal saw that the drawings were more atmospheric than accurate. How, for instance, did the dome look exactly? How large was it in relation to the pillars? Meera had smudged away some lines, softening the drawings in the style of charcoal sketches, hidden away architectural details behind pastelly trees and clouds. He wondered how to tell her she needed to change her style for the drawings he required. Of course he would also get a professional to draw it, and photographs would be taken every day.

  She was looking at his face as he turned the pages. When he turned the tenth page, Meera almost snatched her book away.

  “Did I see something I shouldn’t have?” Nirmal sounded offended.

  She laughed nervously and said, “I think that’s all, there are blank pages after that.”

  “These are wonderful sketches, they really convey the feeling of this place.”

  Meera looked away, unable to hide a smile. She had been drawing ever since she had come to Songarh, but she had not thought anyone would be interested.

  “Could you try to do this a little more systematically?” Nirmal said. “Do the front first, then one side, then another, keep the lines clean as if it’s a diagram, give as exact a sense of proportion as possibl
e. Just draw the building as if you were drawing a map.” He would not ask for more, he thought, or she might be frightened off.

  “I’ll try,” she said, “but I only have a little time every day, so it won’t be quick enough for you.”

  Nirmal got up and dusted his trousers.

  “A little time every day is enough,” he said. “For a start.”

  * * *

  Over the next few days Nirmal turned to his papers at the office with something like his old single-mindedness, rejoicing in long hours of work as he planned the Songarh dig. He was suffused with contentment of a kind he had not felt since his return. It was a rare feeling, one that usually came to him, if it did, high on a mountain ridge, the immense folds and humps of hills and valleys falling away before him, edges muted in the evening air. At such times, he saw himself as if from the sky, an infinitesimal speck on a gigantic fold of earth, and yet as significant, as inseparable a part of the mountains, pink sorrel and trees as were the flying squirrels that scampered up the deodars beside him.

  Nirmal felt now that the house was getting used to having him back, and Bakul was less truculent. In the evenings, she sometimes followed Mukunda to Nirmal’s rooftop and stood by while Nirmal showed Mukunda how to identify constellations. Sometimes when he sat with the boy, showing him picture books with photographs of the Acropolis and the tomb of Tutankhamen, he noticed Bakul looking over his shoulder. He said nothing to her. If he did, she would leave, he knew. He had returned her box to its place under Kananbala’s bed but had not forgotten his plan to take her to Manoharpur. One evening he said, “When do your summer holidays begin?”

  “Oh, a long long way off,” Mukunda said. “I don’t know the date.”

  “I know,” Bakul said. “We get a calendar of events right at the start of the year. It’s from May the tenth. Right up to the end of June!”

  Nirmal got up and went to a calendar on his wall. He put a big red circle around 12 May and smiled at the two of them. They looked at him with questions in their eyes.

  “How would you both like to go to Calcutta? And then to Manoharpur? We’ll have a first-class compartment all to ourselves, with four bunks, with a bathroom and a mirror. We’ll go to the zoo and the Indian Museum. We’ll ride a tram and clop on horses in the Maidan, what do you think? We’ll visit Bakul’s grandfather and take a boat down the river at Manoharpur.”

  * * *

  That night, Mukunda lay awake in his tiny room out in the courtyard. Mosquitoes sang around his ears in their high-pitched whine. He swatted them against his skin almost without noticing. He heard in his mind the train’s far-off whistle, urgent, destined for more important places than anywhere he had ever gone. The sound had been a refrain in his orphanage, which was not far from the railway line. All day they could hear trains going up and down. They would rise to the sound of the Sealdah Goods and stumble out, chewing on neem twigs to clean their teeth. At midday it was the Danapur Down, and if that train was late, lunch was late. At night, tossing and turning, fists clamping down hungry, hollow stomachs, they would listen to the sound of the train whose name they did not know; it went so late at night, it could have been a spectre in their dreams, and so they called it Bhoot Rail, imagining it transported ghosts across the country.

  It was he, Mukunda, who had hatched the plan to run away on a train. He had convinced three older boys they could do it: he knew he could not do it alone. He and the others – Birsa, Subhas, and Michael – stole out of the orphanage one mid-morning and raced down the path behind their building. A small distance away was the jungle that separated them from the railway track. They were not allowed there, but today they ran, tearing through scrub and grass, butterflies rising ahead of them like petals, insects buzzing angrily. Ran through patches of damp, stabs of nettle, dense shade broken by pools of brilliant sunlight, thrust out at clumps of bright flowers as they passed, tugging them off and waving them as they sprinted, shouting and laughing. At last they reached the edge of the forest and saw a narrow road across which the railway track went. It was quiet but for the alarmed chatter of a family of monkeys and their own hoarse breathing. Even as they wondered if the train would come, they heard the tracks hum and sing, heard the far-off agitation of its whistle. Before they knew it, it was upon them, a blur of chugging metal and smoke, and they were jumping up and down, waving frantically at the train to stop, slow down, so they could get on, make their plan work, run away, reach another city. But at the windows of the train people were leading their separate train-lives, peeling a banana, looking out unseeing, or reading as they tunnelled through towns and waving boys, hardly aware how they had been waited for, watched with yearning; indifferent people close enough for the four boys to see but evanescent, vanishing with each clack of wheel and belch of black soot. A child in the last coach waved back at the boys, and after that there was emptiness where the train had been, and the quiet, filled once more with the chatter of monkeys.

  Mukunda remembered the caning they got when they returned, and the ache in his stomach from hunger. The warden had made them stand in the corner and watch the others eat: they were to get no food that day or the next. That would teach them.

  A journey on a train! Mukunda had known that day that he would travel, go far away, very far.

  * * *

  Despite the lateness of the hour, Bakul was announcing to Kananbala, “Do you know, we’re going to see my mother’s house, on a train!”

  “A train, eh? You little tadpole, who’ll take you on a train? Don’t you know nobody leaves this house? Look at me.”

  “Oh, you’re just jealous! You don’t know what a train is! Just because you’ve never even left this house!”

  “A train! I went on a train, I went on many trains, but that was long ago.”

  * * *

  In another room, Manjula was saying to Kamal, “When did we last have a holiday? I tell you! What a rotten day it was when my father decided to marry me into this family, so far from any city, any excitement. Why don’t we ever go anywhere?”

  “Why, we went to Varanasi just three years ago. Have you forgotten already? And that trip to Puri and Dakhshineshwar? Who took you on that?”

  “Those trips were all to pray for offspring, they weren’t holidays, just days of fasts and mantras. And the prayers didn’t work. Nothing’s worked in my life!”

  “Stop grumbling,” Kamal said. “Stop sounding as if I’m responsible for everything.”

  “Who is, if you aren’t?”

  * * *

  In her bed next to Bakul, Meera lay restless in the driftland between sleep and waking. She and Nirmal were together in a tonga, returning from town. Her head bobbed near the collar of his crumpled blue shirt, his eyes laughed down at her and she could see the shadow of stubble growing away from his chin, darkening the lines of laughter that went down his cheeks. Like all tongas, this one was cramped and their hips and shoulders jolted together with each rut in the road. The horse panted on the uphill stretches. There was no sound but the hunh hunh of the horse’s breath. Overhead, the fleshy ears of semul swayed bloodshot against the blue, breezy, springtime sky.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, now properly awake. It had been about twenty days. She had finished three drawings of the ruin. They were becoming more useful, more accurate. Every afternoon she left the house furtively after lunch and went to the ruin. Manjula had grown accustomed over the years to her ill-timed, eccentric walks and asked no more questions. The children were either at school or playing. This time had always been her time alone.

  But now, Meera knew, at some point every afternoon, the time was no longer entirely hers. She no longer sat contented with her dogs. She waited. Nirmal would appear sooner or later. He would look at her drawings and comment on them and tell her which part of the ruin to draw next, which detail to emphasise. He would sit back, light a cigarette, and tell her about his work that day, about his travels years earlier. He would ask her about the life she had left behind, a li
fe so long ago now it seemed to be someone else’s.

  Meera knew that their conversations would lead nowhere – they could lead nowhere, and if anywhere only to disappointment. But for the brief time they sat there among the ruins, with the dog and its tubby puppies gambolling around them, she did not want to look into the future. It was enough to be happy in the present, to inhale the smell of his smoke, the smoky smell of him.

  * * *

  The trip Nirmal had planned was still far off, but Bakul had a calendar in one corner of the tuition room on which she had ringed a date two sheets below. She had begun to cross out the large printed numbers on the sheets on top, one by one, every day. At mealtimes she talked about the food they would carry on the train, and at other times she informed Mukunda of the delights of Manoharpur and Calcutta. That she had only a dim, imagined notion of both did not cramp her style.

  At Mrs Barnum’s, on the mantelpiece over the fireplace, stood the globe made of glass. Mrs Barnum never let them touch it, but today, when Bakul begged, “I must see where Manoharpur is, please Mrs Barnum, let me look at the globe,” Mrs Barnum smiled, her thin face creasing.

  The globe was hollow, filled with a liquid within which floated green ferns and weightless rocks. If spun hard, the blues ran into the greens and the yellows became browns, seas tumbled into the mountain ranges, and the Americas merged with Asia. Bakul sat hunched over it at the dining table, now spinning it, now turning it more slowly until she located India, distracted in between by the tiny giraffes and zebras that were painted into parts of Africa. Mukunda said, “Silly, your Manoharpur won’t be on the globe, the globe is for big places.”

  “It will!” Bakul was passionate, “Thakuma said it’s near Calcutta, just some distance away, through rice fields and lotus ponds. First we have to find Calcutta.” She spun it again.

  Mrs Barnum came over to the table and with a long, amber fingernail tapped a point on the globe next to the turquoise of the sea: “There,” she said, “there’s your Calcutta.”