Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

She sat down with a thump on her bed and rested her head in the crook of her arm, exhausted.

* * *

The next ten days passed with no further outbursts from his wife, and Amulya began to think he had dreamed what Kananbala had said to him that unbelievable morning. Had she actually said “fucking”? Was that possible?

Was it possible he had imagined it all, a waking dream perhaps? It was true that his memory was wobbling these days. Sometimes, things he needed to remember would slip past him like the morning mist: he saw it, knew it — that fact, that phrase, that word, that name he needed — but when he tried to grasp it, utter it, it was no longer there. Wasn’t it a fortnight ago that he had said to Shrikant, his accountant, “I made the monthly payment to that orphanage. Where’s the receipt?”

Amulya had been meticulous about paying the orphanage the sum he had settled on, to ensure the child was properly looked after.

“You didn’t make the payment,” Shrikant replied, not looking up as he continued to tot up his columns of figures.

“What nonsense, I wrote out the cheque here at this table. I remember doing it along with all the salary cheques.”

“Sir,” Shrikant hesitated, “you said you would, but it was late and you left it … “

“Bring me the cheque book, I’ll show you,” Amulya said.

Shrikant was right. Amulya had not written out the cheque.

In his garden that evening Amulya’s anxiety over his wavering memory prevented him noticing anything, even the baby mangoes that had begun to replace the flowers on the mango trees. He was so troubled by the incident that he remained cocooned in himself all through dinner as each member of his family tried separately to recall if they had done anything to ignite his wrath.

It was the day after his argument with Shrikant over the cheque, he now calculated, that Kananbala had uttered those unspeakable words. She had said nothing unusual since. Amulya found it harder and harder to believe she had indeed said what he thought she had said; perhaps, like the unwritten cheque, it was his imagination alone. Chaos seemed to retreat to the cloudy, cobwebbed corners of the ceiling. Like all the secrets it seemed able to wrap into itself, the house had soaked up Kananbala’s singular outbursts, hiding everything from the world outside its walls.

That was not the end of it, of course, thought Amulya, memory proves all too accurate just when you wished it had failed.

It was two weeks later that Shanti watched as her mother-in-law told Kamal he was a donkey with syphilis.

The very next day she said to Manjula, “Milk-white skin, hm, just like a marble cow. Nobody vainer than this simpering slut in all of Songarh!”

The week after, at dinnertime, Kananbala spoke pleasantly enough to Amulya, but her words were, “If I chopped your head in half with a cleaver, I’m sure I would find nothing but cowdung inside.”

By now it was no longer a secret. Amulya was sure that the two young women, his daughters-in-law, were comparing notes. More than Manjula, he was concerned about Shanti. Picturing her certain disillusionment and bewilderment, he felt especially culpable: a new bride he had brought into the house … to be insulted the way she had been! And then the servants. It was unlikely that they valued discretion and loyalty over the human urge to tell a juicy story — and even less so in Songarh, hungry for happenings, where the illness of some neighbouring cow or a squabble between relatives provided conversation for days.

“Do you know what she said today?” Manjula sighed to Shanti one afternoon soon after as she sat on her bed, folding betel leaves into neat thirds and chewing on a paan.

The fragrance of the tobacco in the paan wafted towards Shanti. She picked up a bolster and put it on her lap, getting comfortable. “What?” she enquired as the paan reduced Manjula to mumbles for a moment.

“I heard her telling Kamal’s father he has the testicles of a goat! And then downstairs, in the courtyard, she stroked Shibu’s head. Imagine! Stroked the servant boy’s head! And said … “

“Oh yes, I heard that as well,” Shanti said, not wanting to hear it again.

“ … that he is her only true child, the only boy who cares! Her other sons are bastards born of the tongawallah!”

Troubled, Shanti looked up at Manjula’s merry face. “Don’t you think it’s worrying?” she said, “What will happen now?”

“Oh nonsense, what’ll happen? Nothing will happen. The old woman is losing her marbles. They all do,” Manjula said. “We’ll have to do a lot of looking after, just wait and see, she’ll get her pound of flesh. Apparently she had to slave for her mother-in-law — and that one was completely senile by the time she was fifty-five. She used to smear her shit on the wall and our ma-in-law had to clean up. No wonder she’s gone mad now — she’s getting herself a five-year head-start, she’s only fifty.”

Manjula stuffed another paan into her mouth and with her mouth full, said, “You know that saying, don’t you?”

Shanti never knew any of Manjula’s sayings and could seldom make sense of them; she thought Manjula made them all up.

“What saying is that?”

“When the silent begin to speak, the mango will fruit in winter.”

* * *

She is not mad, she cannot be, Amulya said furiously to himself that afternoon as he strode along the rutted fields to the edge of the forest, even as Shanti and Manjula sat gossiping on Manjula’s bed. He had not been able to calm himself to do any work at the factory and, to Shrikant’s astonishment, had got up, collected his umbrella, summoned a tonga, and left.

He was on his way to the ruined fort. It comforted him to sit soundless among the fallen stones, thinking of nothing in particular, waiting for his sense of calm to return. The fort was his ivory tower; he went to it whenever he needed to think anything through in solitude. Perhaps it was the suggestion of evanescent empires, the grittiness of centuries-old stone, or perhaps the memory of people who, in those ruined rooms and dark passages, had lived lives as real as his own. It might have been the twisted grey-brown bark of that tree with its suggestion of the Buddha’s face.

He reached the rim of the fort and sat on a block of fallen stone, a tall, greying, angular figure watching the blue and brown flash of a kingfisher swooping into a large shallow pool at the edge, which at this time of year had some water still. The folds of his dhoti spilled wavelike on his stone, lifting a little at times in the breeze, picking up dust. Amulya did not notice. In an hour or so the sun would begin to set. The birds would know and begin to call out to each other.

He willed himself to listen to the birds and think of nothing else, yet wave upon wave of yearning churned his insides as he longed for the Kanan he had known to return. How had he let her slip away? To him she was still the teenager he had married, her collarbones jutting out, dimples piercing her cheeks, her spine ridging her back when she bent, her eyes doubtful when he joked about something, with that second’s delay as she understood, and then laughed. I’ve watched her grow into a woman, a mother. She’s always been so sensible, so full of common sense, so gentle. She’s hardly ever argued with me, never said anything cruel even when scolding the children.

Am I forgetting? Were there signs all along …?

He tried puzzling out what had happened to her, blamed himself, forgave himself, blamed it on her age, her difficult time of life, thought he should have spent more time with her, thought he should not have taken her such a long distance from her family in Calcutta.

At last he stood up and straightened his stiffening back. He began to walk home. She would not be allowed to wander the house any longer, he had decided. He would not let her become the local joke.