Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

The woman stepped back, holding her chin. The driver, frightened, cowered by the car.

“The real man, as always,” Mrs Barnum said, in a voice as clear as the sound of spoon against glass.

Barnum paid her no further attention. He returned to the closed gate. “Ramlal, you sister-fucker, open up! Can you hear me? You’re sacked!”

Mrs Barnum strolled up and down the road as if none of it mattered to her. Her husband continued to shout. Amulya mumbled, “Bloody Sahibs, think they own the whole country.”

Kananbala wanted to say, “They do.” But she had almost stopped breathing so he would go back to sleep. Amulya turned on his side, and in a minute Kananbala heard his snore again.

The gate creaked open. Barnum pushed the spindly watchman aside so that he fell, and he and his wife went in. The car followed. The watchman got up, yawned and dusted himself off.

“Bastard,” the watchman spat in Hindi towards the house. “Drunkard,” he said, closing the gate again.

* * *

The windows were Kananbala’s only view of the world. If she traversed the length of the room and looked through all three windows, tilting as far as she could, she could see to the end of the road’s curve on both sides. Kananbala was at the windows all day, and often most of the night.

Almost at dawn, when the air still retained a memory of the cool of the night, she waited for the brinjal colour of the sky to grow lighter and brighter. When the sky turned properly blue there came the man who promised that his papayas were from Ranchi, and then the bhuttawala, fine wisps from corn sprouting like golden hair out of the basket on his head. In the early days, when they had first lived in Songarh, vendors never came that far. Now, she had heard, there was a new cluster of houses further down, with Indian people, clerks and teachers, those who would buy from carts.

Kananbala could tell the time from the calls of the vendors, the flower-seller just after dawn, the fruit-sellers in the morning, the vegetable man in between. Bread from a bakery in the market came in a tin box welded to a creaking bicycle. A bangle-seller, handcart glinting red and gold, stood at the gate sometimes and called out for a long five minutes, seeing a woman at the window and scenting a sale.

She could not go to the gate to buy bangles, she knew.

She had not left the house since Nirmal’s wedding, nor even her room very often. She knew she had said things she should not have. She could not think where the words had come from, nor could she precisely recall what they were. But from people’s faces she could always tell when something wrong slipped out. They did not look so appalled any longer, but all the same they did not let her meet outsiders. The roof was out of bounds too. They were afraid she would jump, as she had once threatened to.

Amulya came back from the factory every day at noon, and sat with her as she ate her lunch, returning to work in the afternoon heat after settling her in for her nap. Each evening, after the gardener had left, he led her down the stairs and out into the garden to walk forty-three steps this way and forty-three that, for a long half-hour. She got tired and breathless, her knees felt weak, so he had often to hold her through the latter part of the walk. He would encourage her, saying, “You must do this, make yourself do this, or else your muscles will rot.”

“Why?” she would beg. “Why do I have to walk in this heat? I don’t go anywhere. Why must I walk?”

“One day you will find you can’t even get up from your bed,” he would say.

At times, enraged by her fatigue, she stood still and hissed at him, “You carbuncle on a cow! You stinking hyena!” He would grimace, but continue to direct her forward.

After the half-hour was over, he would sit her down on the swing and light his pipe. Then he would tell her all that had happened during the day, and about the two new houses in their immediate neighbourhood. One of the houses was indeed occupied by Indian rather than English people, he said once, a retired couple from somewhere, no children. “See, I told you it was the right decision to build here.” He had exhaled a cloud. “Just watch how this area changes now.”

She listened, sometimes responding with a comment, sometimes spitting out “son of a donkey” or “tail of a sewer rat” or “frog with warts” — words her mind concocted unbidden. If she did that, Amulya would clench her hand to make her stop. When she felt the pressure of his hand on hers, she knew she had said something she should not have, and tried to be quiet. She wondered about the irony of his belated tenderness, but she did not question it aloud.

Manjula, observing them every day on the garden bench, said to Shanti, “Look, now the old woman’s got it made. She has us to serve her night and day, and her husband’s discovered romance in his old age. Oh Ma, what wouldn’t I give to be her? Don’t you know what they say? Ripe fruits get cotton-lined baskets.”

Shanti now thought hard of other things when Manjula spoke with her customary venom about her mother-in-law. In two months, Nirmal would take her back to Manoharpur and she would walk by her river again, waiting for her child. Until then, she would close her ears, hum the old songs, and shield her stomach with her hands as if to shut the ears of her unborn baby. Inside, just under the tight-stretched skin of her belly, she felt she could hear a minute heart gallop like a horse, an unformed mouth trying to form words to say to its mother.

* * *

Some weekends there were parties in the Barnum house, and on those evenings first the van from Finlays would come, then the electrician for the lights, and then the smells of alien food. In the evening there were fairy lights in the lawn and the indistinct, shiny forms of the Barnums’ friends who came and went in cars that never let them down outside the gate, but always under the covered porch you could not see into. Kananbala waited, and watched, and waited, hoping to see someone, something.

Only Mrs Barnum was now regularly visible. She had taken to swaying out of the car when they returned from their parties and stopping at the gate for the watchman; then she would walk the length of the drive, making a detour across the lawn before she agreed to enter the house, her long silk gowns trailing in the grass, her white shoulders gleaming in the darkness. Kananbala would watch her with eyes full of greed.

Every few months Digby Barnum went away for a week or two, maybe to the mines in the interior. Those weeks, in the afternoons, Mrs Barnum would leave the house alone and return in a different, long car, driven by a young man who could have been Tibetan. On one such night Kananbala watched as Mrs Barnum leaned through the car window and talked to the strange man before she began to walk towards her house. She happened to look across and saw an Indian woman’s face drinking hers in at a window on the other side of the silent black road.

“How extraordinary,” she muttered, and yet, perhaps because she was only half English — the other half unknown — she turned again, and waved at Kananbala’s dark, immobile shadow.

Kananbala had never in her whole life waved at anyone. She was confused about what to do. Her hand would scarcely rise. But in a rush she stuck an arm out through the bars of the window and awkwardly, like a child in a bus, waved as well.

The day after, when Mrs Barnum returned with the strange man, she pointed Kananbala out to him and he looked up and waved too, a wide smile crinkling his eyes. He and Mrs Barnum looked at each other and, laughing, Mrs Barnum said something to him in English. The night was still and quiet and Kananbala could hear each word, but she understood no English.

Mrs Barnum said, “Poor old thing, Ramlal says she’s completely mental, babbles dirty words at people; fun, don’t you think, darling? Would you like it if I did that to you?”