Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Well,” Bikash Babu said, “I just wanted to grow the U.P. Dusseri in my little Bengali garden. The trees looked healthy enough until the river drowned the far end of the garden.”

Potol Babu sighed. “What a sad irony,” he intoned in English, “that the water that is our Saviour is so easily turned into Destroyer. Truly, like Lord Shiva … ”

“What happened to that project you had, Bikash,” Ashwin Mullick interrupted, “of building a dam, or was it a dyke?” He sucked his pipe. The tobacco was fragrant, imported.

“Can anyone hope to stop the mighty Ganga?” Potol Babu attempted in a mournful tone. “I do believe that … ”

“That engineer came, from Braithwaite & Sons,” Bikash Babu replied. “He said … ”

“Did they send a Sahib or a local?” Ashwin Mullick enquired, knowing the answer.

“They sent Dr Mitra, a very bright engineer,” Bikash Babu said quickly, aware that Braithwaite had not given the problem its due, had not seen fit to send its Scottish Chief Engineer. Bikash Babu’s sense of being ridiculed was still fresh. People had turned up to look at the engineer after word got around that Bikash Babu had hired an English firm for his problem. But the man looked much like them. He was short and bulged in both directions. His bald head gleamed in the hot sun. He was not even in a suit, just a dhoti like everyone else.

“He got his degree in Scotland,” Bikash Babu told his sceptical listeners. “They think very highly of him. He was here for several days and examined the problem — oh, he was at the riverbank at all sorts of odd hours, with complicated instruments. He thought such a massive river changing course cannot be stopped. But he said that at its current rate of movement, the river —”

“These engineers,” Ashwin Mullick sniggered. “Do they know geology as well these days?”

“ — will not endanger the house for the next two generations.”

“A fine house it is,” Potol Babu said, noticing Bikash Babu’s face grow darker. “A fine house that future generations will see and admire. That Burma teak central staircase, those great Roman columns, the Belgian mirrors, that billiards room! There is no equal in Manoharpur — except Ashwin Babu’s wonderful home, of course.”

They fell silent, each irritable for a separate reason they found hard to identify. Ashwin Babu suspecting a slight, knowing his house was newer and had a staircase of mere brick and marble, not Burma teak, because of one fatal moment’s economising; Bikash Babu knowing people saw him as an old eccentric who needed to be placated; and Potol Babu wondering if he had sounded craven when truly he admired the architecture of both houses.

The afternoon sky dropped lower over the three, the warm air clasped them closer, damp and unbreathable, like a sweaty embrace. A fat, turquoise-coloured fly killed itself in the dregs of the tea.

* * *

As the smell of roasting corn scented the afternoon air, the women who were bent in their rice fields, the children squabbling in the hard-earth courtyard of their small school, their teacher brandishing his cane, the egrets poking about for food, all paused and looked up at the sky. Every day it came down a little closer. Today, its high, flat blue had swelled and darkened. It had become warmer, the air more palpable, more inert. It smelled of moisture.

Shanti lay looking out of her window, unthinkingly caressing her stomach, picking at jamun that multiplied into more purple berry shapes against the sides of her silver bowl. From her window she could see sociable tufted bulbuls trilling to each other from different branches of the bakul tree. The tree had now reached the first-floor window. What a little tree it had been, Shanti thought, when she used to water it, a young girl wandering the unruly garden looking for pretty weeds. She rolled the jamun around the bowl with her fingers and picked a fat, gleaming one to suck on, anticipating its acid hold on her throat.

Bikash Babu sat in his room downstairs, a book on his lap. He was not looking at the lines in the book but at the thin, white ones on the polished red floor of the study. They looked innocuous, like chalk outlines drawn by an untidy child and left unwiped. But he knew it was the water. It had soaked through the earth, crept up the roots of the house that burrowed deep in the soil, and was now leaving a damp trail on the red floor. At the edges of the rooms the water was spreading dark, irregular shadows, which made their way up the walls, puffing the plaster up as if there was something behind trying to get out. Bikash Babu did not need to touch the patches again to know they felt clammy, like a sick forehead, and cool like a dead one.

Some time early in the evening, the trees began to bend and sway, and a fresh breeze that smelled of sea and weeds, earth and distant places, rummaged through the papers on Bikash Babu’s bureau, moved like a spirit through the still curtains, disarranged strands of hair on the sleeping Shanti’s head, and banged the verandah door shut.

Kripa the maid, chewing a paan on the verandah and looking with a vacant post-meal gaze at the expanse of leaden sky over the river, saw a distant cloud that grew dark and bulbous, gathering speed and force as it rushed across towards the house. Before the tobacco in the paan had even begun its work, the cloud covered the sky. The surface of the placid river shimmered and then shattered as water hit water. The wind gathered strength. The coconut palms at the house’s side bent like mad women with wild hair trying to touch the earth. Somewhere nearby something crashed and fell.

The servant boy went up the stairs two at a time, trying to restrain the rebellious saris drying on the roof on clotheslines strung from end to end. He yanked them off and bundled them onto his shoulders, stopping only to lean over the parapet and call down to Kripa, “Look, the rain!” It got heavier as he ran down, each drop big enough to make a flower shudder and droop with the force. Sky and river had merged.

By the time it had been raining for three days, people were commenting on how heavy and relentless it was, unnaturally so. The thatched roofs of mud huts had flown far away in the wind and the lightning streaking across the fields had scorched a whole clump of supari trees.

Bikash Babu called the servant boy and the gardener to the verandah. His mild face was distorted by a scowl. “Don’t any of you notice anything?” he roared. “Can’t you see the armchairs are standing in water?”

They looked at their toes.

“What are you looking at the floor for now? Remove them! Put them inside! Their legs will rot. Here,” he said, starting to lift one of the heavy chairs, not making much headway.

“No, no, Babu, what are you doing?” the gardener exclaimed, rushing to the chairs, shouting in turn at the servant, “Come along, boy, they won’t go in on their own!”

The chairs were large and heavy. They reclined back, far enough for a comfortable siesta. The servants struggled under the weight.

By the end of the week, the carpets had to be rolled up and put away. Bikash Babu began to wear his dhoti a little higher, exposing a length of thin, smooth calf. Shanti tried not to stare when her father came upstairs and sat down on the edge of a chair beside her, distracted by his thoughts.

They looked out of the window and then, as people do, spoke together.

Bikash Babu was saying, “How are you feeling? If only your mother were alive, I would not be worried.”

Shanti was saying, “Baba, do you think the house is in danger?”

“Why should it be? Is it built of clay?” Bikash Babu sounded sharper than he intended. “Haven’t you seen with your own eyes how strong the walls are? Don’t you remember how the workers’ solid iron tools broke when they were trying to take down the old kitchen wall?”