An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Page 31
“Speaking for myself, I want to sell the house; I have never been attached to it – quite the reverse – to me it has always been my wife’s tomb. I could not make myself return there for years after her death. Bakul has always resented this, I know, but I could do nothing about it. If she does decide to sell the house, I would appreciate your help. Once the sale money is in hand, we can begin to repay you – your generosity over this house in Songarh weighs heavily on me and I cannot rest until I have paid you back, though that would still not be enough to thank you for saving my home.
“Bakul would be extremely annoyed if she knew that I’d asked you for help. She refuses, as you know, to take help from anyone, even her own father. But to me you are like a son and who would I ask if not you? I’m writing this letter at night and will post it on my morning walk so that she doesn’t know of it: I would be very grateful if you could go to Manoharpur, as if by accident, and help her through this.
“I have to be in Songarh: I have to stay here because of my dog – only other people as attached to their dogs will not think me irrational – but she cannot survive without me. Also, as you may have gathered, I’m hardly very practical in matters of land and money. But I am worried about Bakul trying to deal with this by herself. So I hope this letter reaches you in time for you to be there for her.”
There were many things in the letter that worried me, but what occupied my mind to the exclusion of all else for the moment was this: what was Bakul doing at her grandfather’s ruined house in Manoharpur? Where was her husband, and why had he not accompanied her?
Immediately my mind began to fly kites. Had the husband turned out an inept fellow whom nobody trusted? Had Bakul fallen out with him and returned home to her father? Whatever the situation, Nirmal Babu had thought of me, me and nobody else, in this time of Bakul’s need. I clung to this simple knowledge – in his eyes I alone could help her. I would finally meet her, and she would be by herself, just as I had fantasised.
She would be there by herself. The thought also struck me with dread. Bakul in that secluded spot, that wilderness, with those sharks moving in? I remembered how far away the house had been from the shops and the railway station, how the grounds stretching around it shielded it from other people. If she shouted, nobody would hear. I tried not to think about that, but I knew better than her father how dangerously she would be out of her element. The dealer from Calcutta who had renewed his pursuit of the house could be none other than Aangti Babu, although there might be others too.
I plunged my arms into a shirt, took some money from the cupboard, and tore down the stairs for a taxi to the station. The letter was dated four days ago. Bakul might already have reached Manoharpur. I had lost a whole evening while the letter had lain overnight on my doorstep. There was no time to lose.
All that my mind could nonsensically intone as the train chugged out of Sealdah in the harsh ten o’clock sunlight was, “Look up at the stars, look, look up at the stars, look at all the fireflies … ” I tried to remember the name of the poet, but the only name that came to mind was Harold.
* * *
When at last we drew into Manoharpur I leapt off the train before it stopped. The six-hour journey had seemed to me to take eight or ten, as the train stopped at every wayside station for passengers, tea, vegetable vendors, and who knows what else. The engine wheezed and groaned and puffed through the landscape of ponds and greenery I usually found enchanting. On this journey I had leaned out of the door, the wind in my hair, landscape rushing by me, as if peering into the horizon would bring Manoharpur closer.
The sign at the station was new, still black on yellow, but bolder and larger. The station had a concrete platform in place of beaten earth and its railings were now metal, not bamboo. There were more people than I remembered, and I got a cycle rickshaw right by the station gate. When I told the man where to go, he said, “Oh, to Pagla Dadu’s?” He laughed at the surprise on my face. “Oh we always called Bikash Babu that, and he didn’t care. He knew we thought he was half crazy.”
He began to pedal and said, “I hear his house is for sale. So many people going to it these days!”
“Who?” I exclaimed. “Anyone you remember?”
“I just took a man there this morning, a tall thin fellow,” the rickshawallah said. “But others have gone too I hear, Babu, what can you say of the greed people have? God save me from such greed.”
He pushed at the pedals, his checked lungi riding up his thin, hard-looking legs. “So long as I have a little food to eat and some cloth to cover my body,” he said. “I’ll earn by my sweat, Babu, not other people’s deaths, you understand, Babu?”
He stopped pedalling and, sitting on his saddle, wiping his face on the sleeve of his shirt, he turned to look at me. “The old man dies all alone, alone, you understand, Babu,” he continued. “And now those very relatives who never took any care of Pagla Dadu in his lifetime, they want to sell his land and house and make off with the money.”
“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” I tried to edge in. “Could you … ” I would have got off and walked to the house if I had remembered where it was. He turned back to the road with a sigh and pushed the pedals again.
“Human beings are vultures, Babu, take my word for it, you understand?” he panted. “That son-in-law of his – they say he was a good enough fellow – but can you fry and eat a good enough fellow? Did he look after his wife’s only father when he was dying?”
“Didn’t he?” I said, struck by this image of Nirmal Babu as a callous villain.
“No, he did not, you understand, not a bit! Poor Pagla Dadu even had to be cremated by his old servant’s son, nobody from his family. Now tell me, is this right? Even if a man is a bit crazy.”
I clutched the handle as the rickshaw crested a hillocky part of the dirt road.
“But what can you say, he only had that one daughter, and she’s dead, poor girl. Even if she were alive, what good would it have done? Could she have lit his pyre? What’s a man to do without a son? I’m telling you, Babu, I’m a poor man, not a landowner like Pagla Dadu, but God above has blessed me with two strapping sons. To throw me a handful of rice when I can’t pull this rickshaw any more. To touch a flaming torch to my pyre.”
We were approaching the same drive, now looking even more unkempt. The rickshaw set me down before the same deep front verandah that Aangti Babu and I had sat in. The same cane chairs stood in the verandah, and I could have sworn the brown discoloration on the verandah wall was the spot Aangti Babu’s betel juice had splattered on. The rickshawallah took his money and cycled away.
Only one thing was different: one of the cane chairs was occupied by Harold.
* * *
He was dressed as usual: shiny old suit, narrow blue tie with bright yellow stripes, the trousers two inches too short for him, showing worn, black socks over thin ankles, despite which he looked respectable enough, more like an elderly schoolmaster than a thug. He looked up with a beaming smile when he saw me and exclaimed, “Oh, Mukunda, m’ boy, I’m bloody glad to see you! Didn’t know the boss was sending reinforcements.”
He dropped his voice and said, “I tell you, m’n, this job’s got me foxed. The boss said to go an’ hunt for the deed – the old bugger who’s kicked the bucket stuffed it in some hole somewhere in this whackin’ big bledgy mansion of his. An’ I’ve got to pose as a buyer and just look around like, and then find it! An’ y’know what, m’n? For a change the boss sez don’t get rough, you got a girl here to work on, just find the dashed deed, he’s already paid some bugger an advance for the house and he just needs the papers quick and quiet – but tell me how? Give me a straight job and I’ll do it m’n, it’s easy to beat the stuffing out of a man and make him cough up a bloomin’ deed, but dealin’ with dames? I wasn’t brought up to bully the gentle sex, no, m’boy.”
At this point Bakul came into the front verandah. I don’t know if she had overheard Harold, but she gave no sign of recognising me. She gave me a q
uick, somewhat cold look and said to Harold, “If you and your colleague are ready … ?” She turned and walked back in without waiting for us to follow. Harold made a face behind her back, mimicking her frown, and motioned me to follow.
“The ground floor is a mess, I’m sorry to say,” Bakul had begun, her voice echoing in the almost-empty room. “You see the river has been flooding it every year and there have been hardly any repairs, no upkeep. My grandfather lived upstairs till he died.” She spoke with a measured politeness, a calm impersonality that confused me. Did she actually imagine I too had come to dupe her? Or was this part of some elaborate plan?
We went from room to room, Bakul providing explanations for each, with apologies for the all-pervading dust. She spoke in the same passionless, descriptive way, not pausing to let us respond. I recognised the mildewed portraits on the ground floor from my visit with Aangti Babu, and the chandelier he had been eyeing still hung from the ceiling, too grey with dust and cobwebs, surely, to make light. We passed through an enormous wood-panelled billiards room, the table piled high with legless chairs, broken boxes, and pictures in frames. I wondered who had used it in the past – it was certainly never going to be usable in the future.
Harold was darting about like a long-legged insect, peering here and there. When he noticed Bakul’s ironic gaze levelled at him, he said hurriedly, “Termites, ma’am, one can’t be too careful, don’t want to take on property with woodworm. If you’ll excuse me … ” He rapped a knuckle on the wood of a cupboard as if to make sure it hadn’t rotted.
We went up a creaking staircase to the first floor. Upstairs, where I had never been, there was Victorian furniture, and everything was as if the occupants of the house had just gone out for a walk. There was a typewriter on a grimy rolltop desk, with a sheet of paper flapping in it. An empty cup and saucer, brown with dust, stood on a side table. I passed a huge framed mirror so opaque with dust that all I could see of myself in it was a shadowy form – it was like looking through the eyes of a half-blind man. We stepped through clouds of grime and cobwebs, passing ghostly chairs and tables, four-poster beds and sideboards, pictures on the wall that showed nothing but black fungus and dirt, and spiders’ legs drifting streamers for a ghoulish party.
In one of the rooms there was a carved, glass-fronted cupboard in a corner, and Harold bent almost double to look into it. He gestured to me. “Bledgy hell, look at that, m’n, wouldn’t the boss like that?” Inside the cupboard were five glass shelves, each containing delicate figurines of men, women and gods, children and animals, dozens of them, all in ivory. Even the wood of the cupboard was inlaid with ivory. Some of the figures stood upright, some had fallen on their faces in the dust that coated the shelves.
“Exquisite, aren’t they?” Bakul’s voice startled me. “And priceless. It shows the five days of Durga puja and all the different things that happen each day. Only, the key to the cupboard is lost, so when the figures fall, they remain forever fallen.
“As you can see,” she continued, moving into the next room, “the upstairs is in better condition, structurally. I had planned to get everything cleaned before you came so things would look better … but never mind, you’re earlier than I expected. The damage downstairs isn’t as terrible as it could have been, considering the house had two feet of water in it every monsoon. Prospective customers are likely to know this from the locals – they call it the drowned house, so there’s no point trying to hide the fact. Of course,” she turned to me and Harold with a raised eyebrow, “your customers – or you – may not want to keep the house at all.” She shrugged. “You may want to demolish it. If that’s so, you’re in trouble. This is a sturdy place. It won’t go down without a fight.”
By now we had rounded the corner of the wide verandah that ran the length of the house. Beyond it we could see hardly anything but trees, and only bakul trees. Soon they would be in flower and the air heavy with their scent. This part of the verandah appeared to have been swept and cleaned. It looked as if someone lived there.
“This is one of the upper bedrooms,” Bakul said in a smaller voice than before. “There are four more.”
The room was clean and smelled fresh, as if still in use. There was a single, green-sheeted bed with a simple headboard, an ordinary wooden cupboard, and a dressing table with a long mirror. The window opened onto a tree whose branches almost came into the room. Another bakul tree. On the wall was a picture of Bakul’s mother, Shanti. There was a thin, dried-up garland around the picture and the ashes of incense on the table before it. She looked exactly as Bakul had when we made love in Songarh that afternoon – her refusal to recognise me now made it all seem too far away to be true any longer.
For a moment Bakul and I stood in the room, not speaking, forgetting Harold. I remembered how she had longed for her mother all through her childhood, how she had tried to hide it. I felt wretched, but could do nothing. I could not hold her and tell her, “It’s me, you can say what you like.”
The moment passed. Bakul’s voice returned, “I’m afraid the other bedrooms aren’t quite so clean, but of course you must see them. The one that used to be my grandfather’s has some spectacular carved cupboards and a very striking four-poster bed.” Then she said, “What happens to the furniture? Is that part of the deal?”
“That’s for you and your daddy to decide, ma’am. We’ve no preferences … ” Harold turned to me and said, “ … though the boss may fancy some of it, yeah? Likes a bit of good carved wood, does the boss. That ivory cupboard … D’you fancy some of this for y’self?”
I walked quickly ahead, wanting to distance myself from Harold’s predatory interest in Bakul’s furniture. I went out to the verandah and took a deep breath, wondering, hoping this was some complicated game Bakul was playing. Sooner or later Harold would get tough, demand the deed, then begin his search – and how would she stop him? He would find it eventually. For all his languor and his poetry, I had never known him to fail.
Quite far from the house, from the verandah, I could see the river, a sluggish stream now. It had retreated some distance from its original bed. “There’s a dam upstream now,” Bakul’s voice suddenly said next to me. “So this house is a viable proposition again. It once had two acres of garden, most of which has been under water all these years. Now it’s surfaced again. There are a good many acres of fields as well.”
* * *
We reached the head of the stairs, having completed our survey of the upper floors. Harold held back, saying to Bakul, “If you don’ mind, ma’am, I’d like to look around alone, at leisure. Investment of this size, y’know. Need to take a good long look.” He turned before she could say anything and ducked into one of the rooms.
I followed her down the stairs and into the front verandah. She was stalking ahead of me, as though hardly aware of my presence. Now that we were free of Harold for a few minutes, I had to ask her what it all meant: How could she really think I was here to wrest her house away from her? She had to know I was on her side, not Harold’s. How could she possibly doubt it? I had to warn her that Harold was no innocuous or trustworthy buyer, that he was in there trying to find the property papers, that it was dangerous to give him the run of the house – she needed me, Nirmal Babu was right, and regardless of how she perceived me, she needed to be told this.
“Bakul,” I began as we reached the front verandah, “I need to talk … ”
The verandah was no longer empty, however. Sitting in one of the cane chairs as if he owned it as well as the house was a man about as old as Nirmal Babu. He had a prosperous face that shone with fat and sweat. He wore a crisp, white dhoti with a fashionably crinkled kurta that had diamond buttons twinkling in it. Next to him stood a shrivelled up, sorry-looking servant waving a palm-leaf fan over his master’s balding head.
We stopped short. He got up when he saw us and said in a booming voice, “Namaskar, Shaheb! And you too, Bakul. You don’t know me, but I know you!”
Bakul gaped at him.
“I had not heard,” Bakul said.
“Do sit down,” the man said, inviting Bakul into her own verandah as though it had always belonged to him. She followed in a daze.
“Oh well, it’s natural, how would you know me? You, poor child, have hardly ever come to this house! Strange,” he said opening a silver paan-case and passing it around “No? Don’t want paan? Well, as I was saying, strange indeed. You hardly know anything about this house, and I know every inch of it and all your grandfather’s family and friends. I played here as a child, floated paper boats in the river, and in your ground floor when it started flooding. What fond memories! And the wonderful jackfruit dalna your grandfather’s cook made! Even your mother … Shanti and I – for some years, we played together, in this very verandah! She was a timid sort. Whenever she lost a game she would burst into tears, floods of tears! Ah, but Rathin Mullick, stop, you must not use the word flood in this house, a bad word, a disastrous word! After what the house has been through!”
I was staring at the man dumbfounded. He sounded and looked like something out of a cheap film or jatra, laughable, yet somehow menacing.
Bakul was beginning to look impatient. In the crisp tone that I knew from years ago, she said, “How can we help you, Rathin Babu? This gentleman,” she looked at me, “has come here on some work, so I’m sorry, but … ”
“Ah, the young,” he said with regret, “always, always in a hurry. I know why this gentleman has come, child, and why the other gentleman with him has come. And that is why I have come. Dear child, for years and years, my father had been telling your grandfather, ‘Bikash Babu, sell this monster house, it will swallow you up, sell it, and if you like, I will buy it!’ My father even gave him money for years as a down payment, and Bikash Babu, your good grandfather, took it – otherwise how do you think your grandfather lived, eh?” The man sounded suddenly truculent. Then he softened his tone again, and continued, “My poor father, God rest his soul, looked after your grandfather, sent him food during the floods … and now I’m hurt, my trust in humanity is gone, my child! I hear – from other people – that this house is to be sold – behind my back! Behind my back, when my family has already paid lakhs of rupees for it! Can it be true, I asked, and came to see for myself.”