An Atlas of Impossible Longing (41 page)

“ … but never mind, these are futile things,” Chacha said. “It's been so many years, a lifetime. What could we have expected? You have a life to live, could you have waited forever?”

“What will you do now?” I asked him. “Will you stay on here in Calcutta? I can find you work. You could work with me. If you don't want to work, it's all right, I will look after you. I have nobody else, Suleiman Chacha, let me! Come and live with me for a change!”

I was looking at their tired faces with desperate urgency. Nothing else seemed more vital for me now than to look after them. First I would take them to my terrace room and make their beds and cook them hot rice and daal. Then, after they had rested the night, I would look for a house with enough space for the three of us, like before. I would not let Chacha work, I would buy him books and music and watch him live a life of leisure. I would buy Chachi pretty saris and a harmonium. She had always wanted a harmonium. We would live together, as we had before. I would make it up to them.

Chacha looked at me with an amused smile. He stroked his bald head. “I don't know, Mukunda. I've just come, let me see. I have some people to see first, friends we have not met for so many years … Bashir, you remember, who lives in Tollygunj? We have told him we're coming.”

I looked down, disconsolate.

“Why do you say you have no-one?” Chacha asked with concern. “Have you not married? Don't you have any children?”

I rubbed my hands over my eyes and lied to them about my wife and my son: I said they were having to live in the village because I had to travel so often and Calcutta's climate was no good for my son's skin allergy. Chachi's eyes scrutinised my face so hard I had to turn away. “Once we are settled here again,” she said, “I'll make some neem oil to massage the child with. This is no way for a young family to live, separately, and you looking so terrible.”

The waiter in the restaurant began to give us exasperated looks, wiping our table every now and then to make us get up. Chacha sighed and stirred.

“It's quite late,” he said, looking at Chachi with a raised eyebrow. “We ought to go, I am not sure I will find Bashir's house easily after so long.”

I picked up the trunk with the roses when they got up to leave. They had a few other bundles that Chachi anxiously counted. She
looked up at me and touched me again on the cheek saying, “Don't blame yourself, what else could you have done? At least you waited all these years. There are those who sold homes while the pillows were still warm from their owners' heads.”

We walked to their bus stop. The crowds had grown and the evening air was stewy thick and yellow with lamplight. I screwed up my eyes, peering into the distance, and said to Suleiman Chacha, “Let me get you a taxi. Don't go in a bus.”

“Arre bhai, Mukunda, when have I ever taken a taxi?” Chacha laughed, “I wouldn't know how to direct one either … can't find my way about, everything so changed! What number bus should I take? Is it still … ”

I saw their bus lurching over the cobbled tramlines in the distance, behind two others, and said, “It's coming. It'll take you straight to Tollygunj.”

Chacha asked, almost shyly, “There was just one thing – I was wondering … about Noorie … ?”

Chachi said, “Come on, how long does a parrot live?”

“She was happy,” I said. “She was happy and healthy, but would keep asking for you the way she did when you were here.”

“And then?” Chacha looked at me with trepidation.

I began to confess before he could ask, “Chacha … I am … ”

The traffic signal changed and their bus surged in our direction.

“It's alright,” he shouted, making his way towards the bus. “She was happy with you! That's enough.”

“Chacha!” I called out in the confusion, “What's Bashir's address? How will I find you? And you haven't taken mine either!”

He had begun to climb into the bus. Someone was pushing him. He wobbled dangerously, balancing a bundle, and Chachi, frightened, grabbed his arm.

“The address, Chacha! The address!”

Suleiman Chacha pushed his head over the shoulder of another man and tried shouting out the address. The man barked irritably, “Arre Dada, if you want to chat, get off the bus and let me get in!”

I heaved their trunk in after them and lost their faces among the
crowd of passengers pushing each other in their search for footholds and handholds inside. The bus began to move forward in a cloud of black fumes. I ran after it. I would climb in, go wherever they were going, I had boarded moving buses all my adult life. The rear doorway of the bus bulged with people. I managed to get a grip on the steel rod by the door and hung from it as my feet searched for a crevice on the footboard to jam in a toe. There were four other men at the door, trying to haul themselves in as well. The bus gathered speed, I felt the smooth rod slipping, I felt my feet meet the road at a run and then stumble to a stop, my arms hanging useless by my sides.

The bright lights darkened with the shadows of people who blundered mothlike against me. I stood still in the middle of the street. They milled around me, crowds of strangers who had friends and family to go home to. Beyond this street were others, and beyond those still others, a spreading web of streets, teeming with strangers, hundreds, thousands, an infinity of strangers in a city where I no longer had a friend, where nobody ever waited for me to come home.

* * *

I walked a long time that evening. I paused at Kalighat Bridge to look at the river below, dark as buffalo skin in the night, the lights it reflected struggling to wink on its scum-slicked surface. It was not water any more, but greasy, stinking, rotting sludge. I did not know why I had walked so far, all the way from Bowbazar to Kalighat. My legs ached. Unexpectedly, I was reminded of the time I flew a kite with my wife in the Maidan. It had been a winter afternoon a few months before our marriage ended. We had had a long quarrel the night before and I woke up determined to make amends. I thought I would take my wife and son out for a day in the Maidan. They never got out. I went and bought a few large kites and all the kite-flying paraphernalia from a shop down the lane. I came home and, affecting enthusiasm, said, “Come on, Sankranti is around the corner! We must fly these kites! Up, up!”

My wife had looked at me bewildered. The quarrel the night before had been only one of many that had crowded the week.

“I'm tired,” she said, “I've been on my feet all morning. Besides, when does a woman ever go running out to fly kites?”

“Oh come!” I said. “I'm trying to do something we'll enjoy. We'll get out of the house, take a tram.”

We reached the Maidan. There was hardly a breeze. My son pranced about with delight, lisping, clapping with glee, looking at the other kites that dotted the sky, waiting for ours to join them. I told my wife to pick up the kite and set it aloft so that I could pull the string and make it fly. She could not get it right, though it was a simple enough thing to do. She would let it go too low, or too soon, or simply too lackadaisically. She kept adjusting her sari and saying, “Oh Ma! Is this something a woman can manage?” Or she would look around and say, “Everyone is laughing at me. Can you see any other woman here, doing this in public? This is terrible.”

The kite would not fly. It would stay aloft a few seconds then begin its precipitous dip which brought it crashing down. Perhaps I too had lost the knack, but I got more and more frustrated and scolded my wife each time she made a mistake. My son lost interest and sat on the grass, picking at it and amusing himself. After many attempts, during which she managed to tangle up a kite in her sari and tear a gash in it, I lost my temper and shouted, “You're useless. Have you never done anything apart from housework in your life? There are women who climb trees and swim!”

I was struck with remorse as soon as the words had left my mouth and abandoned the kite string to go to her. She collapsed on the grass and began to cry. “I'm tired,” she whimpered. “I've been working all day, my legs ache, I can't run any more, I'm tired.”

* * *

I stayed up late that night, tidying in a frenzy. My cupboard had not been cleaned for years. I made a big bundle of old clothes so torn and filthy that I could not imagine a beggar accepting them. I threw in
the few saris my wife had left behind. I paused some moments over my son's clothes from when he was newborn. He would be nearly six now, and I had not set eyes on him since he was three. But then I stuffed those into the bundle as well. The kitchen shelves were stacked with dusty, mouldy containers of greyed spices, damp papads stuck to each other, and unidentifiable powdery things in paper packets crawling with weevils. I threw them all out. Cockroaches skittered out from their long-undisturbed hideouts. I stacked all the utensils neatly in a corner and stood gazing at them for a while. There was the brass kashi my wife and I had bought together at a mela. The grinding stone I had had carved with a smiling fish especially for her. I put aside the silver jhinuk I had bought just after my son's birth to feed him milk with. We had hardly ever used it; he had gone straight from breast to glass.

I went to the other room and pulled all the books from the shelves onto the floor and began to sort them. Most of them were Suleiman Chacha's. He had read bits out to me from many of them, and all were annotated in his fine handwriting. Letters fell from a couple, a dried-up leaf from another. Stuck between books on the shelves were statements of accounts to Aangti Babu, across one of which I had scrawled: “Must tell him, we can get the old man out of the Dharmatolla house for less. Also, cheque for Sushanta may bounce.” In one of the books I had written in English, “Dear Suleiman Chacha, with best wishes for your birthday, many happy returns, Mukunda.”

Amongst the books, in a brown envelope, was my Intermediate exam certificate. And a letter from Nirmal Babu, his last before I cut off contact with him.

My dear Mukunda,

I am so very pleased to hear you have passed your exams. When I told Bakul about it she laughed, and wouldn't believe me until I showed her your letter. What are your plans now? I hope you will carry on and do a B.A. and then study further. Education is really the best thing life can offer. Now look, I am
lecturing you, but forgive me, I'm an old man. I've known you since you were a child. You were a bright-eyed, clever boy and now you're turning out to be an intelligent, well-read man. It makes me stupidly emotional to see you've reached this milestone in your life. I wish we could have celebrated it together, but I hardly travel now. Perhaps you will come to Songarh one day to see us all, and then we will talk of old times. Meanwhile, when you know where you are going to stay, send me your address so that I can visit you if I ever I come to Calcutta.

My love and blessings,

Nirmal Babu

P.S. I am enclosing a little cheque, please use it to buy yourself something nice as a present. Why do you ask me to stop sending you money now and then? I do it out of affection.

I do not know when I finally slept that night, sprawled amidst the debris. My head ached, my eyes hurt, I wanted never to wake up again. But the cawing of the crows broke into my sleep as usual. I opened my eyes a crack and then sat up straight, wide awake.

I would give up my line of work. It was not too late, I could not have rotted all the way through, there was still time. I was not yet thirty. I would learn to make my living some other way, think of something else, even if it meant a few hard years. That very day I would go to Aangti Babu's to settle accounts and then call it quits. I would stop myself turning into him.

* * *

When I woke up the next morning and opened the door to the milkman, he was holding out a letter along with the milk. “It must have come yesterday, Babu,” he said. “It was lying on your doorstep.”

After the milkman left, I slit open the stiff, large envelope addressed
to me in Nirmal Babu's hand. A night after I had re-read his old letter. We had not written to each other since he had sent Bakul's wedding card and changed my life forever. I wondered what new bombshell was enclosed in this envelope.

What first slid out of it was a photograph showing a large house, almost a mansion, that seemed to have a spacious verandah in its centre and rooms on both sides. The sides were framed by palm trees. Tall pillars of the kind that had been fashionable once upon a time towered right up to the first floor, reminding me of buildings like the town hall in Calcutta. Above was a folly of a roof. In the foreground was water: at the pillars, waves and eddies.

It was, I realised with a jolt, the house Aangti Babu and I had visited some six years earlier, the house by the river which he had tried to buy with fake papers. The house in … Manoharpur, that was it: I could visualise the name, black on yellow on that long-ago railway platform. It was the only time I had seen Aangti Babu lose money and face.

“The enclosed photograph is of Bakul's mother's old home, which is by a river,” Nirmal Babu's letter said after a few lines of pleasantries. “The river changed its course over decades and finally flooded it in the year of Bakul's birth. My father-in-law tried many things to stop the disaster from happening, but to no avail. I read a lot on rivers at that time, and one writer who said: ‘In a deltaic country, floods are inevitable; they are Nature's method of creating new land and it is useless to thwart her in her workings … the solution lies in removing all obstacles that militate against this result.' This was absolutely true of the house in Manoharpur.