Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Nirmal was writing a letter of application to the Archaeological Survey of India. “Dear Sir … ” he began, and then paused, fingers poised over his typewriter. “I beg your indulgence with regard to my application for the post of … ” He crossed that out, and tapped the keys again, “Dear Sir, I have the honour to … ” He stopped, restarted, “I am a lecturer in History at Songarh Degree Coll … ”

It was five years since John Marshall had written in the press about the discovery of ancient civilisations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and at that time Nirmal had cut out and kept Marshall’s article from the Statesman . He had then collected clippings from whatever he could lay his hands on, though few newspapers came to Songarh. The particular edition of the Illustrated London News in which Marshall had first published the discovery in 1924 had been the hardest to find. Eventually, by asking a friend of Amulya’s who knew a man in the Indian Civil Service, Nirmal had obtained a copy of the paper with its lavish pictures of all the Indus seals and the enormous mounds.

Inside the packet for Nirmal, the man from the Civil Service had also enclosed a letter that a British official had written some years earlier. The letter described hillock-like mounds all over northern India that people took to be natural formations when, in truth, they were the accretions of ancient civilisations. “When wolves still howled where Notre Dame and St Paul’s now stand,” the letter went, “and the very names of Athens and Rome were unheard of, there lived and toiled on these sites the remote ancestors of the villagers who tenant them today. It is with some feeling of reverence, then, that the Western parvenu should view these populous ruins and know himself to be but a creature of yesterday.”

In later years Nirmal wondered at the disproportion between the brevity of the note and the conceptual apocalypse it had caused inside him. He had read it once, looked at the pictures in the Illustrated London News of seals and pots and bricks glimmering against a dark background, then gone back to the note and read it again and again. It was as if he had simultaneously been robbed of all individual will — for his future had been decided for him at that moment — and charged with an energy he had never known. For the next three years he went on private expeditions, modelling his techniques on whatever he had been able to glean from reading articles here and there. He went to the Songarh ruins and looked at the hillocks behind it afresh, as if a layer of fog had been peeled away from his eyes. He began to call them mounds instead of hills and yearned for the day when he could start digging to find what they concealed. He went to the outskirts of Songarh, where there were old temples and scattered ruins, and scrabbled around with a garden khurpi and measuring tape until knots of village children gathered and chattered to each other and laughed at him.

He had recently read that with the discovery of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, the Archaeological Survey had received more funds for its work in the valley of the Indus. If they had the money, Nirmal reasoned, they might take on apprentices. He had no experience, but he did have a degree in history. But why would they employ him, a small-town college teacher, when there must be Sanskrit scholars, experts in numismatics, and scholars of other kinds struggling to be a part of the Indus Valley’s three-thousand-year-old past?

“They could start me off somewhere , even if not at the Indus,” he reasoned. “Then by degrees … ” The thought of his probable rejection by the Survey filled him with gloom in an instant. He lit a cigarette and fiddled with the cigarette tin. He yawned and looked at Shanti’s hair, a dark storm across pillows and sheet. She was almost asleep. He took a deep drag, blowing smoke out through his nose, and gave his typewriter an irritable glance. Then he pushed it away and went towards her.

“Don’t you think,” he murmured, caressing her hair, “it’s possible to make a habit of almost anything?”

“What do you mean?” she said, her voice sleep-thickened.

“Here we are, you and I,” he said. “We didn’t know each other a year and a half ago and now I can’t write a letter for looking at you … ”

“Go back and finish your letter,” Shanti said, raising her head. “Go on, archaeologists need persistence. How will you ever dig out ruins from the earth if you don’t persist?”

“I’m persistent about things I want,” Nirmal said. He felt under her sari in the region of her stomach. “Now imagine if this were the mound at Harappa, how would I go about finding a route to … ”

Shanti slapped his hand away. “If you can get used to anything, you can get used to doing without that !” she giggled, hiding her face in the pillow. Then she looked up, her face still half hidden, and said, “And I’m not sure it’s even safe any more, with the baby coming.”

“Imagine,” Nirmal said, lying back against the headrest and taking his cigarette from the ashtray. “A year and a half ago, I wasn’t even married. Now I’m going to be a father in some months. A year and a half ago, I didn’t know you. A year and a half ago, my mother was normal. Now for a year and a half she hasn’t left her room … and it all seems routine. I even feel happy. I forget about her, that she’s imprisoned. I feel trapped if I’m stuck in the house for a day and I forget she can never go out and meet other people or see other things.”

Shanti felt fingers of annoyance twist her insides at Nirmal’s sudden change of attention from her to his mother. She tried to smile and touched his hand. “Quiet, let’s change the subject,” she said. “Don’t you know that babies can hear in the womb? Do you want ours to grow up with unhappy thoughts? I want the baby to overhear only music and laughter. Come here to me.”

* * *

One floor below, Kananbala paced her room waiting for the Barnums. Every weekend Digby Barnum went out with his wife. Kananbala, awake most nights, had made a habit of sitting on the windowsill and watching their car leave, mysterious, full of promise, heading for destinations beyond her imagination. They would return very late and honk outside until the watchman woke and unlocked the gate to let them in.

That night, the watchman did not come to the gate despite all the honking. Barnum stumbled out of the car and his driver lunged after him from the other side. It was the first time Kananbala had seen him. She was wide-eyed with disbelief, never having seen a drunk man before.

“Bugger off!” Barnum yelled at the driver, “Bugger off, you black bastards, sleeping on the job!”

He shoved aside the driver, who stepped back, looking uncertain as his boss untangled his legs enough to reach the gate, a gate like a wall of wood, and then began to bang on it with his fists, shouting curses.

Kananbala, not understanding a word, was spellbound. Amulya stirred in his sleep and pulled his pillow over his head. Kananbala willed him to carry on sleeping, leaving her alone to spend the night as she always did, suspended in a world nobody else knew.

Then Kananbala saw Digby Barnum’s wife for the first time, a woman as elongated as a eucalyptus leaf and as pale. She was in a gown that her curves formed into something smooth and flowing, its silk gleaming in the lights of the car. Her shoes had heels that she tottered on as she hurried to her husband, saying something Kananbala could not hear.

Mrs Barnum reached her husband and tugged his sleeve to make him stop banging on the gate.

His arm shot out and hit her across the face.

Kananbala touched her own cheek as if she had been hurt.