An Atlas of Impossible Longing (14 page)

The doctor came, thumped Amulya's chest, and placed a shining glass before his nose. He lifted Amulya's limp wrist and pressed his finger into it, searching for a pulse. He tried once more palpitating the chest, then shook his head, passed a hand over Amulya's staring eyes, and turned away to pack his stethoscope into his hinged case.

Kananbala looked out of the window and exclaimed with a happy laugh, “Isn't that Nirmal coming down the road?”

But Nirmal did not return.

A
mop-haired boy in a thin pullover and flappy shorts entered the puja room, swab cloth in hand. Small statues and pictures of gods and goddesses were arranged on a platform along one arm of the L-shaped room and at the other sat a priest, rummaging in his cloth bag, taking out and making a pile of dog-eared little books of mantras. Prominent ribs striped his bony chest which was bisected by a dirty-grey sacred thread. He had an elastic mouth with long fleshy lips, shaped as if it could accommodate a banana across its width. When he saw the boy enter, the mouth stretched in an expression of revulsion and he rose and stepped with alacrity onto the terrace outside the puja room.

The boy heard the priest muttering “Hari, Hari”, and from a corner of his eye he could see the priest sprinkle Gangajal over himself. He grinned and stuck his head out of the room, calling out, “I'm sure I touched you, purohitmoshai, you'll need a bath now, won't you? And there's no hot water left!” The priest gave him a malevolent look and snapped, “You can stop your gob, you rascal! I'll teach you to be cheeky!”

The boy laughed and returned to the puja room, wiping the floor with his stale, fish-smelling swab cloth. He retreated to the terrace to wait. The morning still felt new; the outline of the building opposite was smudged, the distant line of hill and forest whited out by mist. A moonlike sun had struggled out, too weak still to dry the dew-wet grass. He blew out to see if his warm breath would make a cloud. It did.

A woman's voice behind him made him stop. She was frowning at his thin sweater and scolding. “Can't you see it's cold? Go, put on something more!” She pulled her brown shawl tighter and entered the puja room. She sat down at a distance from the priest and said, “Yes, purohitmoshai, we can start now.”

The priest felt around in his orange cloth shoulder bag and produced one more of his dog-eared books. From the slot between his hairy ears and bald head he took a pencil stub and poised it over the notebook. “First things first,” he said. “Tell me your names so I don't have to keep asking at every puja I do. I know the caste and gotra, of course, so you needn't bother about those.” He was new to the house, taking over the family's duties that morning.

“The head of the house is Kamal Babu,” the woman began, “and … ”

“Slowly,” the priest said, droning out the name at the slow speed he wrote it, tip of tongue edging out between his lips, “Kamal Kumar Mukho … ”

“Then there's Nirmal Babu, his younger brother, but he won't be here today.”

“Won't be here today?” the priest looked up. “Won't be here at Saraswati puja? Too modern for God, is he?”

She said, “No. He just works in a different city.”

“Oh, alright, who's next?” the priest said, disappointed by the bland explanation.

“Then there are the women,” she said. She rattled off the list: Manjula, wife of Kamal; Kananbala, mother of Kamal; Bakul, Nirmal's daughter, still a child, only eleven.”

“Bakul has no mother? And what about Kamal Babu? No children, hm? Barren wife?” The priest looked up from his notebook.

She stiffened and said, “I think that is all.”

“All? What about you? You don't count yourself among the women? What's your name?” He looked her up and down, her off-white sari, her lack of bangles and sindoor, and said, “You're a widow, I see. And childless too? Ah, but whatever God wills has some purpose.”

“My name is Meera and I am not part of this family,” she said, sounding short. “You don't need to include me.” She began to get up, then stopped and said, “But yes, there's also Mukunda.”

“Mukunda?”

“The boy who swabbed the floor just now. He lives here too. He has exams coming so he needs Saraswati's blessings!” She looked out towards Mukunda's silhouette on the terrace with a smile.

“Caste?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Not sure?”

“He's just a child! Does it matter? He's an orphan whom we … ”

“Someone you shelter?” The priest clapped his book shut and reached out for his bag. “Why should he be allowed in the puja room? Charity is all very well, but can it change his caste?”

Mukunda, the baby Amulya had placed in the missionary orphanage, was now thirteen. But with Amulya had died all knowledge of Mukunda's parentage. His place in the family was an ambiguous one. He ate their food, but on a demarcated plate; he lived in their home now, but in a room out in the courtyard; they gave him clothes, but hand-me-downs; he had homework, but he also had household chores. He was awkward, lanky, easy to upset. Sometimes he felt all edges, each edge sore. He knew he was from nearby, perhaps born of a Santhal mother. Certainly, his high cheekbones and tea-dark skin made him compare himself to the tribal people he saw, but he had no way of being sure. Would someone appear out of the forest one day and claim him as her own?

Meera looked anxiously at the terrace. She was sure Mukunda could overhear them, felt something throbbing at the base of her neck, the familiar anger, and knew she should say nothing or else …

“Please,” she snapped, despite herself. “I don't need advice on Mukunda.”

“Oho, what do we have here? A real red-hot chilli!” The priest's banana mouth twisted in annoyance and he said, “If you don't keep these people in their place, soon they'll be in yours! But that's your business, just keep him away from me and from this puja room.” He
lowered his voice and hissed, “He almost touched me once already.”

Before their argument could go any further, the rest of the family trooped into the puja room to the picture of the goddess Saraswati, who gazed out large-eyed and tranquil from her seat of pink lotus in a sea of turquoise waves, unaware of the weight of hope and yearning in the oddments of paint tubes, books, ink bottles, and pens piled before her for her blessings. Bakul's books and pencils, of course, but also Kamal's account books just in case the goddess of learning had blessings to spare. Meera had added a few of her own books to the pile.

The priest stretched his twisting mouth again and enquired of Manjula – large-hipped, loud-voiced, neck noosed by a thick gold chain, clearly the matriarch – “Are you sure that boy's books are not here?”

“Ah, purohitmoshai, of course not,” Manjula said. “Why would they be?”

The priest murmured some mantras in his nasal voice and returned to shredding marigold flowers and bael leaves for the puja. From somewhere downstairs a high-pitched voice shrieked, “Warty toad, miserable scum!” The priest looked up in alarm, but the voice subsided as suddenly as it had erupted.

From the terrace, Mukunda heard them begin to chant the hymn to Saraswati with the priest leading. “
Jaya jayo devi, chara chara shaarey, kucho jugo shobhita mukta haare, veena, ranjita, pustaka haste …
” He felt a fireball of rage somewhere inside his thirteen-year-old body, felt it spinning, growing, gathering heat. He walked away to the furthest point of the terrace, where he could no longer hear them, and looked out towards Songarh's fort, imagining he could spot from that distance the ancient banyan tree that stood near it. He climbed onto the roof's parapet and stood at its very edge, holding his arms out like wings. He felt dangerously weightless, between falling and flying. There, outside the goddess's line of vision, the sun still struggling behind him in the damp sky, he screwed his eyes tight and chanted too.

“You're not my god, you haven't done anything for me,” Mukunda was saying. “But despite you, I'm going to be better than all of them. One day I won't need them any more. One day it'll be me giving them shelter.”

* * *

That afternoon Mukunda crept out of the gate, willing its latch not to squeak, and then ran across the road and let himself into the other house where nobody but Bakul knew he went at that time of day. He knew that afternoons – when schools, offices, and factories emptied much of the house – were for secrets. When Manjula sculpted on a face pack and Meera daydreamt about escape. When birds quarrelled and berries plopped unnoticed from tree to dusty ground. When cats rummaged unwatched in the lunchtime rubbish pails for fishbones.

Mrs Barnum's house stood bare in the unsparing afternoon sun. The two-storeyed house had once been yellow, but in the eleven years since Mr Barnum's death it had not been painted and was now scabby with black mould. The wooden gate had sections missing that had not been replaced, and the gaps gave passers-by a clear view of the
portecochère
that had been Mr Barnum's refuge from the street. From cracks and crevices in the walls, sturdy little peepal trees had begun to send out leaf and stalk. It was only a matter of time before the trees cracked open the house and brought it down.

Mukunda did not notice any of it. He let himself in through Mrs Barnum's tall, open front door and ran up the stairs two at a time, as always. He pushed open the door of the empty living room and went straight to a shelf in the dark corner by the old fireplace. He took out a book, the third from the left-hand side, with a blue, gilt-embossed spine, sat at the dining table, and, opening it to a page he had marked, bent over it. His finger began to follow a line of print and his lips began to form the words in a whisper.

Some time later Mrs Barnum entered the room and peered over his shoulder to see what he was reading. “Getting along with Nelson?” she said in her smoke-deepened voice. She placed a hand on Mukunda's shoulder. Her long fingernails played with strands of hair at the nape of his neck. “Look up what ‘mizzen' means, won't you? And ‘masthead'.”

“His backbone is shot through,” Mukunda said. “He's going to die.”

“Of course he's going to die,” Mrs Barnum laughed, lighting
a cigarette, “If he didn't, how'd he have had a square with him in London?”

Nelson had been Mukunda's hero ever since he had reached the Battle of Trafalgar in
The Book of Adventure Stories
, yet Mrs Barnum always seemed to be laughing at him. Mukunda returned to his book, trying to overlook her mocking presence. He had to finish the chapter that afternoon and also memorise the poem for that week before stealing home in time to make the tea. There was not a moment to waste.

Two years earlier, Mrs Barnum had caught Mukunda in the act – he had taken down a book from her shelf when he thought she was not looking, and was trying to read it, with no success. Don't you go to school, she had asked him. Why can't you read this book? It's not so difficult.

He had mumbled something, tried to slip away. She had caught his arm and stopped him. Tell me about your school, she had said, I asked you a question and you will not be rude, boy.

His school was a shed, he had said, and his classroom a blackboard shared by boys from four years old to fifteen. There was just one teacher who caned them when he felt inclined to, and then went off to drink tea at the shop round the corner.

What about Bakul, Mrs Barnum had wanted to know. Couldn't she read either? Bakul went to a different school with many teachers, all nuns, he said. She also had a tutor who taught her every other evening. Mukunda had tried to learn by eavesdropping, but it hadn't worked. He had not dared to ask Manjula and Kamal for tuition too.

Mrs Barnum had said nothing, but her neck felt taut with anger. You will study with me, she had said, from tomorrow. I'll make you as good as anyone else, better.

Mukunda had stolen away since then, afraid of being forbidden, to Mrs Barnum's house each afternoon. Mrs Barnum's method was simple. She told him to search her shelves and read anything that pleased him, and to ask her if something was difficult to understand. She showed him how to use the big dictionary that her husband had got many years before as a free gift with something. She chuckled
with him over things he found funny and wiped away fake tears when they read bits of Dickens where children died. Sometimes she pulled out big picture books and showed him ships and kangaroos and cities in Europe.

Mrs Barnum's shelves had an assortment of books: Barnum's old books on coal-mining, romances and mysteries, anthologies of great literature, yellowed issues of women's weeklies with knitting supplements and pot roast recipes. Mukunda made his way through all of these with indiscriminate diligence while Mrs Barnum looked on, a speculative smile curling her rose-tinted lips. At times she rang a bell that stood on a tray by her table and summoned the khansama for lemon sherbet, hers with a splash of gin, Mukunda's without.

* * *

The year was
1940
. It had been eleven years since the Barnum murder. Amulya's house in Songarh was now one of the older ones in that part of town. The '
20
s and '
30
s had passed, the prosperous years when Dulganj Road acquired large houses inhabited by the white men in the mining companies and their memsahibs, those who occupied the empyrean heights, never having to step down into the coal pits that kept them in Scotch whisky and soft, white shirts. Then, in
1935
, one of the coal mines a few miles away caved in. Forty-eight miners were trapped under the ground for five days, until all efforts to rescue them were exhausted. There was a scandal. It was thought that since the labourers in the mines were poor Indians and the managers of the mines were expatriate British people who came and went, safety had not been a priority. One manager, who considered himself different, felt himself filling with compassion after the disaster and went to visit a dead miner's family with compensation money. He was almost lynched. The police swiftly disciplined the labourers.