An Atlas of Impossible Longing

by Anuradha Roy

  I spent the next few days ruminating over Barababu’s advice. For hours I leaned over Kalighat Bridge, watching the murky waters below. At low tide there was hardly any water and the banks revealed years of filth. But at high tide it was brimming, a quiet, liquid brown. A mud hut perched halfway down its right bank, and coconut trees peered into the water. It was a world away from the city’s clanging trams, jostling crowds, rotted odours, and streets crowded with emaciated beggars who all said they had not eaten for many days. As I leaned over the bridge I thought of the unthinkable, of betraying Suleiman Chacha’s trust. I could sell the house, or rent it out and make it a tenement. I could live like a zamindar, I could work for pleasure. I could write books, compose music, travel. I could be a real gentleman.

  The next morning when I uncovered Noorie’s cage, she was speaking. Something – it would be too pat to say it was some change in me – but something had provoked her to speech again, and she was repeating the imprecations I had hurled at her all those weeks. “Bastard,” she was squawking. ‘Sister-fucker, bastard, sister-fucker.” Spoken in that nasal, unmodulated parrot voice the words sounded grotesque, even though they were part of my normal, daily conversation. In a distant corner of my mind, it rang bells I did not want to hear. I remembered an old, half-mad woman in a tiny room in Songarh, Kananbala, whose swear words I used to parrot for fun. I did not want to be reminded of that world.

  I took care when speaking to Noorie after this, but she had already mastered my obscenities, and to my discomfort, uttered them almost to the exclusion of anything else.

  TWO

  When I think of the man I worked for next it is his hands that I visualise first of all. They were pale and long-fingered, with a slight tremor. Each finger had at least one ring on it, and each ring had a different, potent stone – I could identify a topaz, a cat’s eye, a ruby, even a diamond. In all he wore twelve. A year into my employment, when I was able to enter his room without prior permission, I found him at his polished desk, twisting one of the rings round and round. He looked up as I came in and said, “Do you know what these rings are? They are my destiny.” He fisted his hand and held it to his chest. “With these rings I keep my destiny imprisoned in my own hands.”

  I had got this job only because of Barababu, after long months of searching when the city had seemed filled with Inter pass boys like myself, all unemployed. I had been tempted then, by the seduction of ease, of living a landlord’s life off Suleiman Chacha’s house. Aangti Babu’s job had come just in time to stop my zamindari fantasies. I was afraid now and said, eager to please, “The rings are your destiny, and you are ours, Sir.”

  In private we called him Aangti Babu and joked that ten fingers were too few for him. The word always went around the little office very quickly when Aangti Babu left for a mysterious errand in the afternoon. Nobody suspected a woman, save possibly a woman astrologer. He never let on which astrologer he had just discovered, but we found out all the same. There was a man in Bhowanipore, not far from where I lived, and I went to him as well after I discovered he was Aangti Babu’s latest find. I had never believed in future-telling, I was simply curious about Aangti Babu’s passion.

  The astrologer sat at a bare desk in a small room. He was an old man in thick glasses which shone. I could not see his eyes behind the lenses. The glasses covered most of his small, pouchy face. He did not smile a welcome. He hardly even looked up as he said, “Birth chart?”

  I was uncomfortable, for the curtained-off door behind him was open and I felt sure someone was eavesdropping. Despite my scepticism, I began to feel the astrologer knew everything about me and it was important that nobody else find out.

  “I have no birth chart,” I mumbled.

  He reached into a drawer with a sigh and took out pen and paper.

  “Time of birth?” he asked me, like a government clerk.

  I told him I did not know.

  “Date of birth?” he continued in tones laden with the same weariness.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure.” The man let out a high, startling sigh that ended in a laugh, and picked up a glass of water from the windowsill near him. “Moshai, I am an astrologer, not a magician. I need some details.” He sipped his water as if he was already done with me. I half expected him to look over my shoulder and say, “Next!” although there was nobody else waiting to see him.

  “I thought you could read my palm,” I said, now not wanting to leave without some knowledge. “Or maybe my face.” I said. “There are those who read faces.” What had I come for? I was no longer sure. I had forgotten my curiosity about Aangti Babu by then. Perhaps, like others who go to such people, all I wanted was attention. I felt disappointed, as if I had been denied a gift.

  The shining lenses turned upward towards me. He regarded me for a second without comment. I looked away from his unspoken ridicule.

  He held out his hand. I put mine forward, saying, “I don’t know if it should be the right one or the left … ”

  He scrutinised my palm for long minutes, and I looked with him, as if I had never seen it before. It was creased, untidy, crowded with crosses and wild strokes slashing it in two. I have seen palms that have scarcely any lines. Mine was not one of them, far from it. I waited as if for a verdict.

  “A veritable atlas,” he said, his fingers tracing the longer lines on my palm. “What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition!”

  “I wanted to … I mean I was hoping … ”

  “Want, want, hope, hope,” the astrologer parroted, “this is what your palm says too, moshai, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings.” He poked my lifeline and said, “Nothing but longing.”

  For a while after that he said nothing. My arm was cramped from holding it over the desk. The ornate wooden clock on the wall counted out the hour. My hard chair had no armrest. His bent head, his opaque glasses, gave nothing away. I began to wonder if he was asleep. Or dead. I coughed as if I needed water and moved my chair to make a scraping sound. The astrologer jumped up and exclaimed, “Tuesday’s train! Tuesday’s train!” Then he shook himself a little, and as if he was continuing a conversation, he said, “Life is made of brick and stone, brick by brick.”

  “I am a builder’s assistant,” I informed him. “I have been working there for almost a year. Now my boss has started sending me to negotiate with people.” I was proud of this. Just a few days before, Aangti Babu had sent me to talk to some prospective buyers.

  “Hm.” He mumbled something and then said, “Have you come to talk about yourself or to listen?”

  I shut up, ashamed.

  “What d’you want to know, eh?” he said. “Let me tell you. Your past is cloudy, but your future clear. Your past shows homelessness, your future shows homes, this is most visible. Yes, you will be married. Yes, you will do very well in your job. You will have money. You will go far beyond your beginnings. You will not have a child. No, you will not travel very much. Anything else?”

  I felt a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. But suppressing my impulse to be rude I asked him in a humble tone, “Anything else you could tell me about how my life will be … ”

  “No more. But wait.” He squinted at my palm again and bringing out a magnifying glass, examined one part of it. The top of his head was near my nose. Strands of copper-grey hair poked upward out of his balding scalp like new saplings in a brown flowerbed.

  “I see you standing on some steps, there is water before you, but will you step into it and swim? Or will you keep standing on the bank?”

  He dismissed my palm and pushing his chair back he said, “It’s late, that’s all.”

  Before I could ask him what he meant, he had disappeared behind the faded curtains that hung limp at the inner door. The newspaper on the desk came suddenly loose in the air from the fan and scattered all over the room as I rushed about trying to gather it in my arms.

  * * *

  Aangti Babu was indeed noticing me more. Fo
r the first year or so in the office I had been hardly more than a tea boy who recorded Letters Received and Letters Sent, Affidavits and Powers of Attorney Drawn Up in a large red ledger. I would watch Aangti Babu enter the office self-absorbed, apparently unaware of the flurry of sycophantic gestures made for his benefit by the head clerk, the supervisor, visiting contractors. Sometimes, I later noticed, he would deliberately drop something at his feet so that whoever was near him had to bend to pick it up. So great was our desire to oblige him that we would all dive together, knocking each other about in the attempt to reach the elusive pen or paper clip. I observed during one of these dives that although his hands were white and long-nailed, the little finger’s nail even painted red, his soles were cracked and dirty. Even so, that Durga puja, I went to his house to touch his feet and get his blessings.

  He looked at me as I rose from his feet and said to a man sitting next to him, “This is the boy I told you about.”

  I touched that gentleman’s feet as well, my heart racing. Aangti Babu had been telling someone about me!

  Aangti Babu said, “So, do you feel like a change? Can you abandon the ledger and come with me to a site tomorrow?”

  I looked up from their feet in gratitude and disbelief.

  We were to meet the next day at a site in Ballygunj, which was too prosperous an area to be part of my daily life. I went early and waited for Aangti Babu to arrive. A half-demolished old building stood in a large overgrown garden. The labourers had not yet arrived. I could see they had not progressed beyond knocking out the front windows, which made the building look as if its eyes had been gouged out. Through the gaping holes, you could see darkness and corners, dusty red floors. At the back of the building was a shabby outhouse, two rooms at most, with a broken tap next to it, dribbling water.

  I walked past the outhouse, thinking myself alone, but I was startled by a man who emerged, shaking. His head shook and his body shook, his hands which held the door shook. He had dirty white hair and yellow eyes. His shoulders sloped into a shabby shirt without buttons. The open neck showed bones beneath wood-coloured flesh covered with grey straggly hair. Behind him, a thin young woman appeared, and tried to make him go back in. She was young, but her face had a tired, youthless look. He would not obey. In a reedy voice, looking all the while at me, he protested, “Leave me alone, I will not go. I will not go.”

  I turned away and walked out to the gate, bemused. I forgot him the next instant for Aangti Babu had just appeared, his starched white dhoti and crinkled kurta looking dazzling in the bright, early light. It was already hot. His armpits were circles of translucent cloth. I hurried to him and held an umbrella over his head to shade him from the sun. I was fumbling with nervousness. It was the first time I had been alone with him at a real building site, and Aangti Babu could have a filthy temper. I did not want to put a foot wrong. The overseer had joined us. He was a tall, hawk-faced, monosyllabic man, who did not scurry around Aangti Babu as the rest of us did. He listened to the instructions directed at him without any apparent anxiety that he would forget something.

  “Those mango trees must go, we’ll get space for the water reservoir,” Aangti Babu was saying as we reached a grove at the back. “Tell me what we get for the wood, and don’t sell it to the man who takes the windows, he gives a bad price for wood.”

  Aangti Babu took rapid strides, assessing the work to be done. “Level that earth,” he said, pointing one way; “pile the bricks there,” he ordered, pointing another. “Stack up the windows, count them first! And what about the stair grills? Have to get a better rate than we did last time. There was a carved banister on the upper staircase, I want that fitted in my house. See to it, will you?” I took note of everything on a scrap of paper, uncertain which of the instructions were for me and which for the overseer.

  We rounded the corner and arrived at the outhouse, now with its door shut, the tap outside dribbling as before. “Still here?” Aangti Babu said, sounding tetchy. “See to it, will you?” He wiped the back of his neck with a damp, grimy handkerchief as I struggled to keep the umbrella over his bobbing head. As we were leaving the site, he said his first words to me. “See what we do? Will you be able to?”

  The next time I went to the site, the land around the house looked clean and spacious. There was suddenly a lot of light where a dark tree-and grass-filled garden had been. The trees were gone, the outhouse was gone as well. The tap still ran, wetting the earth around it.

  * * *

  Aangti Babu’s method was to buy old houses, some abandoned in a hurry by those who had gone away because of Partition, some that were owned by too many warring relatives, some occupied by tenants the landlord no longer wanted. As a result he got them cheap. He knew how to get rid of unhappy relatives and lingering tenants. Then, if the neighbourhood was a good one, he might build a mansion and sell it at a profit to a rich man. Sometimes he let it lie fallow for years, saying, “A gold mine, you will see, one day it will be a gold mine.” He would stick his little finger into his ear and with one eye closed prise around until the fingernail emerged with wax rimming the end. As he looked at the wax he would repeat, “You will see, my boy.”

  My workplace, in a building in Bowbazar, consisted of two rooms, one occupied by Aangti Babu and the other by everyone else and a tea kettle and stove that hissed all day. Outside was a street market where slimy vegetable peel rotted underfoot and vendors shouted far into the evening. The building was a dilapidated one, and the rooms were small, painted a mauve that had greased into grey, no advertisement for a builder. There was a narrow, dark patch of corridor outside Aangti Babu’s own room. It was here that I now sat proudly at a table, inkpot before me, register and ruler and house plans ranged by my side, a bulb in a cheap saucer-shaped tin lampshade hanging over my head, conferring on me a yellow halo.

  Apart from me there was a tea boy, assorted contractors, plumbers, electricians and labourers who passed through, and two men Aangti Babu had on hire who were, I suppose, small-time thugs fallen on hard days. He used them when he had to deal with neighbourhood roughnecks and so on. There was a flabby scowling one called Bhim, who was quick to swear and pick fights, and a cadaverous, tall Anglo-Indian called Harold, with a hollow-cheeked face and an overlarge, pockmarked, boozer’s nose. He had been a rugby player and a boxer, his physique exhaled scrimmages and uppercuts. Temperamentally, though, he was a melancholic who in fallow times recited the Lord’s Prayer and a poem he had learned in school that went, “Look up at the stars, look, look up at the stars …” He would intone this every day as evening fell, and sometimes even when the sky had clouded over and the day had dimmed before time.

  I could not imagine what use he was to Aangti Babu until one day a small mouse was caught in the office trap and I saw Harold take it out. He cradled the mouse in his hand and looking at its terrified little face said in a sad, gentle voice, “Wee, sleeket, cowrin’, tim’rous beestie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” As he spoke he squeezed the mouse’s neck, he squeezed it until the mouse’s eyes popped.

  I had thought of myself as sentimental: I remember brooding over things for days at certain times of life, even crying in secret, though boys do not. When tenants had to be ejected by stealth or force, when bribes had to be paid, when I looked at the ravaged faces of people watching their homes being demolished, I would tell myself this was the real world, the one all grown men lived in. When Harold and Bhim were deployed, I would look away, escape in my mind to the Buddha’s gnarled face in the tree at Songarh’s ruin, still a refuge though I had shut out everything else related to that town. I knew we were doing nothing illegal; the tenants being ejected had no legal right to the place, the teary-eyed sister who came for one last look at her parental home had not inherited a share. Compassion had no place in the world of finance, Aangti Babu was fond of saying. There had to be someone who lost, or else how would there be anyone who gained? This was how money circulated. If ever I hesitated he would say, “Who has the legal right? A
ll I ask of you is to do what is legally right.” At times I wondered at the bitter, poetic justice of my work: driving people out of their homes when I had once been shunted out myself.

  I learned the work quickly. There were certain things I enjoyed: seeing a building rise from drawings on a page, finding swift, decisive solutions to problems on building sites, having the labourers look up to me, walking past a building I had put up when lights shone in the windows and curtains rode across them, yellow and red. I found in myself an unexpected capacity for being practical about things, despite my occasional unease. This is why Aangti Babu began to rely on me more and more. I looked on him as a benefactor who was teaching me a trade; he treated me differently from the others. The tea boy now had to bring tea to my table; I no longer sat outside the kitchen on the bench with the peons and Harold and Bhim, waiting my turn. People began to fear and respect my closeness to the boss. After a lifetime of deferring to other people, now there were those who deferred to me. I saw in their faces my old face.

  I returned home only for Noorie. On the way back from work, I bought her chillies fresh each day and fed them to her one by one, telling her about what had happened at work that day. “Aangti Babu sent me on a site visit and I found the local goondas had surrounded the building site,” I would say. “Sister-fucker,” Noorie would say, “bastard.” Her claws digging through my kurta to my shoulder had begun to feel familiar and companionable. “I can call in Harold and Bhim, and you know how menacing they can be together, they don’t have to lift a finger to get results,” I’d say, holding a chilli out to her. “What d’you think Suleiman Chacha would say about my work, eh?”

  I wondered what he would have made of me now, he who could not get himself a share in his own property. I could have solved that problem for him. And Nirmal Babu? I did not like to think of him – Nirmal Babu, who could not let ruins dissolve without combing them with paintbrush and toothpick. What would Nirmal Babu have made of my trade, when he wanted me to bury myself in books and emerge after twenty years, a scholar with a dusty library and a receding hairline?