Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“I ought to leave,” he said to Kananbala. “My practice must be suffering. But you have not been letting me go! And this child!” He chuckled at his young son, who was hunched outside at the table glowering over a book. “He’s got so fond of you!”

He showed his topaz ring to the boy and said with the growl that usually accompanied this ritual of his, “See that’s the eye of a tiger I hunted and killed in the forest last night. The other eye is still in the tiger’s head. Both the eyes can still see, and they find naughty boys!” The boy, now nine and lost to make-believe, looked at his father with disdain.

* * *

The upper dining room had along its length large windows that washed it in the still-cool morning light. It was the morning after Chotu-da had left. Kananbala had finished bathing and changed into a fresh sari. She began the walk towards the stairs, holding the walls and chairs along the way and then the banisters for support. She climbed down the thirteen stairs of the first flight and the fifteen of the next. The walls seemed to tilt too close to her. On the landing, she paused and panted, staring unseeing out of the window that lit the stairs and framed the tree over the small terrace on the first floor. She could hear Shanti singing in the kitchen. The girl was petite and soft-spoken, but when she sang it was a low, rich voice that emerged, as if from a much larger body. She was singing of holidays, and clouds in the sky.

Kananbala dragged herself towards the kitchen, then paused outside in the corridor to get her breath back. She could hear Manjula, who sat chopping vegetables, saying, “Ah, I used to sing that too, long ago when I still had a voice. Sing another one. At least now there’s some entertainment in this dull old house. You’ll know in a while how stifling this little hole of a Hindustani town can be. How I miss all my relatives, I hardly see them once in three years.”

Shanti’s quiet voice said, “I’m used to small places. Whenever I went to Calcutta I always felt like running back to my village by the river.”

“Oh, just wait and see. You’re happy now, all newly married, Nirmal rushing home to come to you, sitting with you, talking and doing God knows what else, hm …?”

“Oh, no!” Shanti seemed to giggle.

“But wait until you’ve been married a few years, then this place will show you its true colours.”

No-one spoke for a while. Kananbala heard the grinding stone going across its slab, a soft sound, as if something wet was being crushed. It must be the mustard for the fish, she thought. She wondered, trancelike, if the fish had been cut. Her mind rehearsed the daily ritual. Gouranga would come early in the morning with the fish he had bought — in Songarh it was usually carp — and he would show it to Manjula for approval. Manjula would stand away from it, protecting her fresh, post-bath sari from fishy impurities. Her lips would curl in an impatient sneer, and she would say, “Rui again! And Gouranga, couldn’t you find any smaller? Or more dead? Eh? Tell me: did they starve these fish before they sold them to you? Did they suck out the blood first? Oh, for some live fish that swim in a bucket for a while and show real blood when they’re cut!”

Kananbala swayed, sickened by her memory of the daily fish-cutting ritual. She held the door to steady herself. She had delegated that work to her daughter-in-law as soon as she had one. She had always been nauseated by the raw, fishy smell, by the sliminess of cut fish. She had never been able to make herself wash or cook it, though she ate it — all parts but the head — with tolerance if not relish.

Now, with that old sensation of tossing her head out of water for air, she gasped and became aware of her daughters-in-law’s voices in the kitchen.

Manjula was saying, “Go on now, sing us another.”

Again, that low, husky voice snaked out from the kitchen, this time with a melancholy song. Kananbala edged closer. Shanti sang on, cutting a messy jackfruit, as if oblivious of her oily hands and of the others in the kitchen. Damp, hessian bags of vegetables lay around her, spilling out their contents. Ponytails of spring onions stuck out of one, alongside creamy heads of cauliflower. She sang as if transported to a different place and time, chin resting on her raised knee, eyes focused on the jackfruit she was cutting, but far away from it, from Songarh and from Manjula who sat slicing potatoes nearby. Shibu ground the masalas just outside in the courtyard, trying to make less noise than he usually did.

Kananbala stood by the door, massaging her knee and looking at the tranquil scene. “What a voice,” she said. “You whore, why don’t you get a job on the streets?”

Manjula’s bonti clattered and fell to the floor. Shibu ran in from the courtyard and stood at the door, his mouth open. Shanti’s song stopped and turned into a brief, horrified gasp as she leapt up and ran out of the room, her oily hands smearing her new sari.

“Is the jackfruit cut? Let me see what spices you’ve ground, Shibu. Why is everything such a mess today?” Kananbala went on as if she had said nothing at all out of the ordinary.

The next day, as Amulya was dressing to go to the factory, Kananbala asked him, “You dandy, who’re you fucking these days? Is it a Brahmo lady in a georgette sari?” She turned away before the stunned Amulya could say anything, and went into the verandah. Amulya rushed after her. Nirmal was sitting at the dining table at the far end of the verandah, the Statesman crossword beside him, abandoned again without a single square filled.

“ Do you know what you said? ” Amulya looked at her as if at a monster who had sprouted four heads in place of two.

Nirmal got up from his chair so quickly it almost fell back. He lunged out to stop it falling. “Baba,” he quavered, “I didn’t say anything.”

Amulya paid him no attention. He seized Kananbala’s arm. Nirmal stared at them in disbelief. In his twenty-four years, he had never seen his parents touch except once, a lifetime ago, when he had run into their bedroom one afternoon in pursuit of a marble.

Amulya was shaking Kananbala’s arm. “Do you know what you said?” he repeated, his face contorted beyond all recognition, inches from hers. Strands of his waxed hair stood up where he had clutched it.

“I just asked when you’d be back,” Kananbala said, looking bewildered. “Why are you so agitated? Will you be very late?”

“That is not what you said!” Amulya shouted.

“Why are you shouting? What did I say?”

“What did you say? Don’t you have any shame? How can I repeat it before other people?”

“But there’s no-one here,” she said, “Only Nirmal. Do we have secrets from our children?”

* * *

Shanti had stopped singing.

She had stopped singing once before, when her mother died. At that time she had thought she would never want to smile again, let alone sing.

But slowly the songs had come back. Her father had coaxed her as soon as he felt able. “I need to hear your songs,” her father would say. “It’s bad enough having to get used to your mother’s absence, why your songs as well?” She had tried, her voice breaking every few lines at first, but then she began fiercely to school herself, walking alone by the river every afternoon, singing to the water. Unknown even to herself, she had begun to hum under her breath as she did her chores. One day, catching her father looking at her, she realised what she was doing and turned away to hide her shame at being happy again.

My mother-in-law called me a whore. Her mind churned with the thought. She saw me singing to her son, she burst into our room, not once but twice, and the next day she called me a whore. That servant boy, what must he think? Being called a whore before everyone by my mother-in-law. And Nirmal — how can I tell him this? Would he believe me? He adores his mother. And he hardly knows me. And I? I hardly know him, really. Despite all the things he says to me and all the things we do. They’re all strangers. What is this household I’ve been married into? What am I doing here, without a single friend? If I could run back for a day and see everyone and be in Manoharpur in my own room! I wonder if they’ve changed anything in that room. And Mala, Khuku, Bini, do they ever think of me? Has some new friend replaced me for them? Do they still walk along the river laughing about everyone in Manoharpur? Should I tell Baba about this? No, that would only worry him. Is he all alone? What is he doing with his time all alone? Does Kripa remember that he liked the lemon pickle I made? And his mango saplings? Does he still measure them every week with that foot ruler?