An Atlas of Impossible Longing (30 page)

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?

“Haraami,” Noorie would screech, breaking into my thoughts and dropping the chilli in her beak. “Gaandu.”

“Not for long, Noorie,” I would say on days that were harder than the others. “I'll save some money and then I'll look for a different kind of job. I wasn't made for this.” She would make quiet clucking sounds, matching my tone, nuzzling my hair with her beak.

Noorie's swear-words had begun to sound like endearments. In my friendless world, she was all I conversed with, and swearing was to us a kind of communication. Once, on an idle evening, especially amused by her squawked vulgarities, I wondered if Kananbala had died and been reborn as a parrot. Noorie's wizened face did in some ways resemble the old woman's. What would Bakul have said to my outlandish notions?

But I could not allow thoughts of Bakul. That was something I never permitted myself. I picked up a chilli and returned to Noorie. It was she, not Bakul, who was my constant companion. It was only to her that I could confide how my success made me afraid that perhaps I was changing into someone my old self would have despised.

* * *

Some time after I had settled in at Aangti Babu's and was looking after quite a lot of his affairs, Barababu, the head clerk from the old tannery, dropped in at the office to see me. When we had finished sharing our disbelief over the day's heat, he began to fumble inside his old cloth bag and eventually fished out a white envelope stained ochre at one corner with turmeric.

“Daughter's wedding, Mukunda, no easy matter. It'll be a load off my mind when it's done,” he chuckled as he handed over the invitation.
“You will come, won't you? It's a village wedding and we are village people, but it would give me great pleasure if you took the trouble.”

I reached their village a day before the wedding. I had only just put down my bags and was asking Barababu how he was when a young girl came in with an elaborately arranged plate of food which she placed on the table before me. Her other hand held a covered bell-metal tumbler of water. I caught only a glimpse of her face, for she had her sari aanchal demurely over her head. She was accompanied by her mother, who said to Barababu in a loud voice, “Your daughter, my goodness what a stubborn child she is! A busy day and yet she cooked all these things! Wouldn't listen to me when I said, let's send for some mishti and shingara! No, Ma, she said, Baba's friend probably always eats shop food, living alone, he must have good home food!”

I sent a polite smile in the direction of the young girl's sari-covered face. “Come, Malini,” her mother commanded, and turned to leave the room. Obedience itself, the girl followed, but then at the door, seeing her father's back was turned, she gave me a deliberate, long, almost cheeky stare, her sari falling off her head to her shoulders. If I had not thought it inconceivable, I would have said she stuck her tongue out at me.

The following evening, after the wedding and a big feast, I sat with Barababu and his relatives, sharing their post-wedding euphoria and a hookah that was going around. Barababu said, “Everything in life has an apposite time, my boy, everything has an apposite time. Now you, for you it is time for grihaprastha – do you know?”

“Grihaprastha,” I repeated, drowsy from too much food.

“Yes, grihaprastha. How old are you now? Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-one! That was another life,” I said. “I'm twenty-three, I was born in '
27
.”

“Proves what I'm saying,” Barababu said, crowing. “You should become a householder now. It's time for you to have a wife, children. Are you going to wait till you have dentures?”

“Children,” I said. “I don't even have a bride in mind. And I don't have parents to find a bride for me.”

“I admit it will be difficult getting a bride for you – you have a
good upbringing, and yet nobody knows your caste,” Barababu said. “But I don't believe in such things.” He looked around at his somnolent audience. “I say, judge a man by his actions. And by your actions I would say … ” He looked around again. “You are fit to be the husband of my own daughter, yes, my own daughter, though I am a Brahmin as ever a Brahmin lived and breathed.”

* * *

I had never been conscious of needing a wife, yet I had never felt as contented as I did after I married Barababu's middle daughter, the girl who, when she became my wife, told me she had indeed stuck her tongue out at me that morning in the village. After our son was born, I felt there was nothing left for me to want or need. My wife laughed when I marvelled at his ten tiny toes, his pudding-soft bottom.

“I'll go back to that rascally astrologer,” I said to her. “‘You'll have no children,' he said. I'll show him my son!”

My wife smiled and said, “Perhaps he is not a child. You worship him like a little god, after all.”

She was right. I was fascinated by my son, by the fact of having a child. We had named him Goutam, after the Buddha I remembered in Songarh's banyan tree. But I never called him that, using instead a range of sweetly ridiculous endearments. He was a year old now, and for eleven months I had celebrated his birthday every month, just as I remembered Mrs Barnum doing. On the twelfth of every month I made my wife cook payesh and light a ghee-lamp before my son and I brought home something special – fish fry, or cutlets – for our evening meal and a slice of sweet pastry for him. “More celebration is better than less,” I told my wife when she protested at my extravagance. “We'll spend our entire lives celebrating, the three of us.”

From the floor where I was sitting, I looked up at my wife as she lay on the bed with her face at its edge, her long, untied hair trailing my knee, her rounded face dimpled with laughter. My son lay by me on the cool floor trying to suckle his toe. I twisted a strand of her hair
around my forefinger. It was two years since we had been married, two strangers who had only her father in common. She had been brought up in a little village and had not read beyond folktales and children's stories, while I was now a city man who had over the years read everything in Suleiman Chacha's collection. In many ways she was still a child, spontaneous, playful, and as eager to please me as it was difficult to please her. Our early days had not been easy: strained silences, sulks, and misunderstandings, followed by long nights of lust-filled apology. Gradually, we had grown accustomed to each other, companions in a lonely big city. There were still many things we could not share with each other, but there were others I knew I could share with nobody else.

I let go of her hair and stroked her cheek. She held my finger in her hand and put it in her mouth, caressing it with her tongue.

Sitting on the door, Noorie clucked down at us like a wise, worried old hermit. The only scar on our smooth existence was my wife's dislike of Noorie and her fear that the bird would peck the baby. But I was sure this would change.

My childish fantasies of adventure and romance were now so absurd I never recalled them at all. This room, with my wife, my baby, and my bird, seemed everything I could have wanted. I looked around then and thought that if I could catch life and imprison a little bit of it to have again and again, this was the bit I would trap in a glass jar, to shake like those foreign cottages with falling snow, and to enter at will.

* * *

By this time, Aangti Babu had begun to look for opportunities further afield. He talked of towns near Calcutta that were changing: some were becoming district headquarters; some, it was rumoured, would become capitals as newly independent India was organised into different states. Aangti Babu seemed to be collecting information on a variety of such places.

One afternoon, he summoned me to his room.

“Bring your things tomorrow, we will travel out from the office. One night, maybe two.”

I had gone on trips with him before, but this is the one I recall most clearly. We took a train on a metre-gauge line, I in the third-class compartment with Aangti Babu's luggage, and he in the first. I did not resent this. I enjoyed the solitude of the third-class crowds where village women sat on the floor, baskets of produce by their sides, full or empty depending on the time of day, their windswept faces watching the speed-blurred world outside with an exhausted, absent look. I liked the sense of having nothing to do but watch the green, pond-filled, banana-leafed countryside pass by, sipping tea scented with the damp earth of its terracotta cup.

I was soothed and refreshed by the time we got off the train at a kutcha platform made of beaten earth and shielded from the world outside by one metal railing on which hung a sign with the name of the station in Bengali and English:
MANOHARPUR
. I rolled the name round on my tongue, sure I had tasted it before. Manoharpur. Had Suleiman Chacha mentioned it? Or maybe … had I heard of it from someone in college? I only knew that I knew the name.

We were not able to get a tonga or a rickshaw; there seemed to be none at the station. We began to walk, Aangti Babu cursing the lack of transport while I mouthed Manoharpur, Manoharpur with every step I took, trying to remember. We had to walk through the small town, through its little bazaar, out into the countryside, down a beaten-earth road past mud huts and rice fields with white egrets meditating among the rushes, before we reached a grand iron gate that was out of place in its surroundings. We walked up a long drive shaded with trees of jackfruit, coconut, bael, and mango. The boxes and bedrolls that I was carrying had grown so heavy by this time that my shoulders were on fire. Once we reached the deep verandah that fronted the house, I set down our luggage with a sigh and wiped my sweat-streaming face.

Aangti Babu sat in one of the cane chairs and said, “Go, see to things, call someone.”

I walked around the garden to the back of the house and, without warning, came upon a river. It went right past the house, a wide,
pale-brown expanse. I walked down to the riverbank, astonished by the nearness of it. The edge of the bank was only a few feet away from the steps that led up to the back verandah, which was deeper and grander than the one in front. It was empty – no chairs, no tray of tea left over from the morning. You would have expected such a verandah to be the chosen spot, whether for conversation or solitude, but it appeared to be abandoned. On the opposite bank I could see the tops of small huts and the occasional brick building. But they were far away. I forgot my errand as a low flat boat passed me, pushed along with a pole that the boatman flourished with ease. A breeze came up from the river, cooling my heat-flushed face. For some reason the whole scene made me feel inexpressibly sad and filled me with a sense of having been there before, in a past life, a feeling so powerful that I felt almost afraid of its force. Had I been a river frog or mouse in that house in my last birth? Why had Aangti Babu come here, I wondered in a sudden surge of sick panic. Was he planning to take it over and knock it down as well?

Before I could earn Aangti Babu's ire for my absentminded – and, I must remark, uncharacteristic – delay, someone came up to me and said, “Aah, the people from Calcutta?”

I thought we would walk in through the house to the front where Aangti Babu waited, but the man led me out the same way I had come. So, I thought, the house is not yet empty. I studied the back of the man I was following. His grey-white hair was cut in a circle as if the barber had set a bowl on his head and then wielded his scissors. Beneath the circle of hair was bristly scalp where shaved hair was rapidly growing back. He was not tall – the top of his head was well below my shoulders – but he had that self-important, bustling air with which many short people try to make up for their stature. He looked back every so often to see if, like an errant puppy, I had strayed somewhere. At these times I took the opportunity to study his face, which was pockmarked and dull, with one eye oozing a purulent infection. I decided I would not look at him any more, for fear of catching his disease.

Aangti Babu said to him, “Well, will you not invite us in after this long journey?”

“I would, I would,” said the self-important man, turning obsequious
now. “But it is such a ruin inside, I am ashamed! Ashamed, huzoor!”

“Nonsense,” Aangti Babu said, heaving his portly body out of the cane chair. “I insist.”

“Please, huzoor, it is more private to talk here!”

“The old man is in the bedroom, isn't he? He is sick, isn't he? I insist! I must see!”

Where Aangti Babu insisted, few could resist. I knew this from experience, and had already begun to move towards the closed main door.

The room inside was truly in ruinous shape. I had seen many old, ill-maintained houses by then, but this one was the worst. Its curtains had rotted and smelled of mould; its floor had worn away in patches to reveal the brick beneath; the furniture, like fallen soldiers, was maimed, some missing legs, some arms, some thrown aside as if just so much wood. An enormous framed mirror hung askew, so dusty that it was impossible for us even to discern a shadow of our faces in it. Moth-eaten blankets covered some of the furniture. Portraits, I supposed of family elders, hung in ornate frames. Both frames and portraits were grey with fungus. Even the staircase that went up one side of the room, a sweeping arc of a staircase, looked as if the step of a mouse would cause it to sigh and collapse in a heap of dust. The only thing that was relatively intact was hanging from the ceiling: a chandelier of enormous size, festooned with gigantic cobwebs.