An Atlas of Impossible Longing (38 page)

The letter was folded around a stiff card printed in the obligatory red with the usual stain of auspicious turmeric on one corner.

It invited me to Bakul's wedding.

The wedding had taken place the day before, when I was on the train back to Calcutta.

I stared at the card longer than I knew, and though my vision had clouded over, what the card said was clear as daylight. Bakul now was a married woman.

* * *

A white heap of rice steamed before me, one side of it cascading with yellow daal, the other side still pristine. A bowl with one small piece of fish in a red turmeric gravy, a green chilli topping it, stood by my plate. My wife sat beside me, her fingers deep in her heap of rice, which was already half gone.

“What is it?” Her voice startled me out of my thoughts. “Home food not to your taste after all? I even managed to get fish.” She looked hurt more than annoyed, and this shook me out of the stupor induced by the wedding card. I broke open my rice pile and began to mix a part of it with daal. In honour of my return, there was a vegetable as well. We never had all this at a single meal these days; she must have saved her household money over the period I was away.

“I'm tired,” I said, putting the first bit of food into my mouth. “It catches up unawares. Hours in the sun, the chaos of travelling, shouting at labourers all day.”

With my first mouthful I began to feel my throat stop. I had to cover my mouth with my palm to keep the food in and make it go down. My wife had turned her attention to deboning her fish. Her head was bent, and where she had sat cross-legged on the floor beside me before, now she adjusted her position to hunch closer to her plate.

“It's even worse,” I said, “because I have to travel out again tonight. Not a moment's peace.” I put my left hand on the floor to feel its reassuring stability and coolness as I spoke.

“What?” she exclaimed. “Out again, tonight? Where to? You said nothing about this before!”

In the minute I spent sitting on the bed after opening Nirmal Babu's letter, I had digested the fact that Bakul's groom was from Bombay: the card made that clear. That meant she would leave Songarh soon after her wedding. How would I ever see her again after that? I had to see her before she left – if indeed she was still in Songarh.

I had decided to leave for Songarh by the night train. I did not stop to work it through, to give myself a rational reason for going. It was an incontrovertible fact, a given: I had to go, I had to see Bakul once more before she left my life for good.

* * *

Going across the Hooghly that evening, caged by the soaring steel girders of the bridge, surrounded by a mass of strangers too busy to notice me, I felt as if after many months under observation I had been set free – of wife, child, parrot, home. For a while I was alone, a man who might do anything with his life. I looked at the river and allowed myself to linger over the memory of the pond at Mrs Barnum's. I thought of the saltiness of Bakul's lips, the cut-grass scent of her breath came back to me, the hard shoulder blades under her blouse, her hair which tickled my nose and made us laugh.

I had chosen an upper berth so that I could lie and think my thoughts in solitude. The train was surprisingly empty given that I was in a third-class compartment, normally packed to rubbing sweat on sweat. Today, there was only one other man in my compartment of four
berths, a large, walrus-moustached man in a dhoti, with a folding table, a plant in jute sacking, two tin trunks, and a pink-eyed white rabbit in a hutch that he fed with leaves and sliced carrot as soon as he came in. I observed him for a while, then when the train gave a thudding jolt and at last pulled out of the platform – delayed by an hour – I closed my eyes, shut him out, and lost myself to Mrs Barnum's lily pond. If I tried hard enough, I could shut out the wedding card I had seen earlier that day and fill my mind with Bakul playing the flute, then kissing me on the eyelids as I protested. I could almost smell her hair, her soap, and that talcum she had used the evening she cooked dinner for me.

But my compartment was pervaded by another smell, and now the moustached face was beside me saying, “You must be hungry, Dada, the train is late. Would you care for some poori and aloo and achaar?” He spoke in Hindi. The smell of the foods he mentioned permeated every particle of air in the cabin. The mustard oil of his mango pickle all but coated my tongue.

I refused and frowned, shutting my eyes again. I could hear sounds of the man's contented chewing and slurping. It must be past eleven, I thought, why is he eating now, on an overnight train? But of course people felt the need to eat the instant they got onto a train.

The thought occupied me for a moment and then the despondency that had overtaken me that afternoon had me in its grip afresh. I closed my eyes and saw Bakul's impish smile. I smiled sadly into the darkness. How must she have looked at her wedding in red and gold? Had she thought of me? Had she managed to tie her wild hair back so that she looked like a demure, conventional bride?

“Dada,” the man was saying, his face bobbing near mine. “The lower berth is empty also, why not come down? I feel uneasy sleeping alone down here when the other berth is empty and the train is so empty.”

“But I am in the same cabin,” I protested. “Please go to sleep, you are in no danger.”

The man beamed and said, “At least you are awake, that gives me some peace of mind. I tell you, I cannot sleep so soon in trains. I have to talk, for some time I have to talk. Dada, what is your name? What do you do?”

I looked at his eager face. He was leaning against my bunk, his elbows providing him support as he stood in the swaying train, his face only inches away from mine. Impossible to turn away and lose myself in my daydream again.

“I'll come down,” I said. “If that makes it easier for you to sleep.”

“And do you live in Songarh?” he continued, helping me to lay out my sheet on the wooden bunk next to his.

Without waiting for a reply, he said, “I've been there now for fifteen years. First I was in the timber trade, now I am in mica mining, you know mica?”

I nodded.

“During the World War, that was when I started, mica was in great demand then. Then it faded away when the British lost interest. But now after Independence, when we are ruling ourselves, we are exploring mining everywhere. The British did not care. Did they care?”

“They didn't care,” I repeated after him.

“Panditji cares,” he said. “He is nation-building – temples to modern India, mines, dams – all this he has promised.”

He took my lack of interest for disagreement and said, “I know, you Bengalis are very anti-Panditji, you say Nehru is bad, and you say Gandhiji is bad. When Gandhiji was killed and the killer was Maharashtrian, I was amazed. Not a Bengali? See, you too are annoyed at the mere mention of these two leaders.”

“I am not annoyed,” I said. “Forgive me, but I'm very sleepy. I'll sleep now.”

“Right, you are right,” the fat man said, pulling a sheet over his head. “It's late, and we must sleep.”

Air swept in through the window, cooler than before. All I could hear, now that the man had gone to sleep, was the clack-clack of the train rushing me towards the newly married Bakul – and her husband.

The man's voice said into the darkness, “Are you asleep, Dada? I am sensing you're not.”

I sat up, resigned. He sat up too, and from his pocket dug out some
sweet supari which he offered to me. He spoke about his wife and how she disliked Songarh. He spoke about their childlessness. “It is making me even more devoted to the Mrs, Dada, we have no-one else,” he said. “But who will look after her when I am dead, who?”

“She may die before you,” I said, touched by his sentiments, but wanting him to shut up.

“A few years ago, I almost died,” he said, his voice less ebullient. “Shall I tell you the strange thing that happened to me? You know mica is not found deep in the earth, you do not have to drill mines, it is close to the surface. It is lying about all shiny and waiting, just a few feet below. I was camping in the middle of wild land not far from Songarh. What year was it, now let me think … can't recall, but maybe fourteen years ago, around
1940
. I was camped there, wild emptiness all around me. No wonder my wife worries for me. All night I hear foxes and owls and strange sounds I can't place. My adivasi labour is all half drunk or doped, sitting or sleeping by their fire. It is late, but not very late. It is probably early evening, but we are very tired because we have just ended a day begun at dawn. I am resting in my tent before dinner and then, commotion! Commotion!”

“What happened?”

“I rushed out to see. My labourers were all speechless with fear, pointing at the sky. I look up, and what do I see, Dada? What do I see? It was a spaceship.”

“A spaceship?”

“Space. Ship. That is it. Something strange flying in the sky. At that time we didn't know what it was. We wondered: was it a shooting star? Was it a problem of vision? But no, it was circular, it was glowing, and it was floating above our camp, coming down towards the earth.”

He paused and chewed on his supari for a while.

“My labourers are praying and shouting. They will suck out our souls, these are people from heaven they say. I too, I am scared, the ship is now very low, and we can see it is neat and oval and it is not a star or anything like that. But I have to be the leader, say Calm down, men, calm down! All around us the forest has gone quiet. But everything is lit bright in white light from the spaceship. There is a low humming
sound in our ears, like a vibration. At that time I knew no more about spaceships than my men, I thought it was a chariot from heaven that had come to take us.” The man paused and, with glugging sounds, drank water from a bottle he held about four inches above his open mouth.

“Then?” I said, impatient to know.

“Then? Nothing. It floated near us for some time and then it rose and went away. I met many people later and asked them, Did any of you see this thing that we saw that night? Nobody, nobody saw a thing. People started to think of me as a little, you know … ” He tapped the side of his head with a forefinger. “If my labour had not been with me and seen it too, I would also think I am … ” and he tapped his forehead again.

When I woke up in the morning, the train had already been standing at Songarh station for a while. The fat man and his rabbit were gone. If not for the lingering odour of mango pickled in mustard oil, I would have doubted both his existence and that of the spaceship. Had Bakul and I seen what the man had seen that time, long years ago in the starry field? Was it as many as fourteen years ago? In my mind the image of that evening – the light in the sky, Bakul's proximity and our shared terror – was so vivid it seemed as yesterday.

* * *

Outside the station was the familiar rank of tongas, their horses and their drivers hooded with shawls. Although it was already hot and uncomfortable in Calcutta, here on Songarh's high plateau surrounded by forest it was only the end of a chilly spring, and I shivered when my tonga gathered speed and air on the slope down to Dulganj Road. I had decided I would not waste time going to a hotel first. What if I narrowly missed her?

The tonga turned the corner into Dulganj Road. It was empty in the half-light, with the sky still struggling between night and day at the western edge while the east was bloodshot. I was reminded of standing out on the terrace on a Saraswati puja dawn one cold January many
years ago, waiting for Bakul and her relatives, not allowed to enter the puja room during the prayers. I paid off the tongawallah some distance from the house and heard it clopping away. I was alone on the road, but for two labourers huddled near a tea shop in mud-coloured shawls. I could almost hear the dew dripping from the leaves and grass in the profound peace of the dawn. Somewhere a tentative brainfever bird was trying out its voice, unused since winter. I noticed that the roadsides were piled at intervals with shining slabs of mica. Until my companion's discourse of the night before, I had hardly noticed it. I picked up a tiny sliver of mica and put it into my pocket as a charm.

I walked in the direction of the house. My feet dragged. I was not able to think any more of what I would say to Bakul when – if – I saw her. The man in the train kept winking and grinning at me, tapping his forehead. I reached the gate and looked in. There were no obvious signs of a recent wedding – no tent up in the garden, no piles of folding chairs, no rubbish from the feast. Perhaps the ceremony and the dinner had taken place elsewhere, not at the house.

I put my hand on the latch, and at the same moment a window opened on the first floor of the house, first one shutter and then the other. I could see a flash of orange as Bakul leaned out to open the second shutter. I thought I caught a glimpse of loose hair and a corner of her face. Something flashed in the first rays of sunlight that must have been gold.

Before she could see me, I wheeled around and hid next to the wall, my heart thudding against my chest hard enough to stop my breath. When I was sure she was gone from the window, I walked away, then half ran from Dulganj Road, past Mrs Barnum's house, past the new houses, past the tea shop with the peasants – now four of them, not two – past the corner where Nirmal Babu's office used to be. I could not think rationally about leaving without seeing her, speaking to her, when I had come so far. I had come to see her, but to encounter her as someone else's wife? I could not bring the journey to its logical conclusion.