Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

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Nirmal left for Manoharpur that night. The household began a vigil for its motherless infant.

They waited a fortnight, then it became a month. Nobody came.

On the thirty-first day, Amulya wrote to Bikash Babu with a polite enquiry: “If you could find out from Nirmal what his plans are, it would be a great relief to us,” he wrote. “He was in a state of shock when he left Songarh, and we, his mother and I, have been anxious. Of course we know that as long as he is with you, he is in the best possible care, but still, parents worry. We wish we could also be with you through this grief that has devastated both our families … ”

They counted the days for a reply. Five or six days for their letter to reach Manoharpur … or maybe seven or eight since it was going from one mofussil to another, and then the same time for a reply to arrive. In two weeks it would be reasonable to expect news.

Every day, when the postman passed along Dulganj Road jingling his bell, Kananbala waited at the window, willing him to stop at their gate. Amulya searched through his mail every morning when he reached the factory before he even hung his umbrella on its hook. Every morning he began with hope but was ready for disappointment.

At the end of twenty days, there was a reply.

“This is very puzzling, and extremely worrying,” Bikash Babu’s blue ink said, foregoing the standard greetings and enquiries about health.

Nirmal was almost unable to look at his baby. He was disturbed when he was here, and did not speak much. He was incoherent when he did speak. He refused to come away from the room where Shanti had spent her last day. We could not intrude. Nirmal was here for that night, but the next morning when we woke up, he had already left. He said nothing to us. All this time, through this month, I have assumed that he returned to you — to calm down — and that he would come back to us for his baby when able … I understand his grief, I feel it myself, I have lost my daughter, my only child. But it is greater for him, losing the mother of his child, and we are broken-hearted for the little one who will never know her mother.

Shanti’s old maid, Kripa, is taking care of the baby. Please have no worries on that count. For the rest, what is there to say? God’s ways are inexplicable, we think of Him as merciful, but in these times when the darkness seems unending, we wonder.

Nobody knew where Nirmal was, neither in Manoharpur, nor in Songarh. He had not been seen for a month.

Should they inform the police? Enquire in hospitals? In morgues? In which city? Ask their relatives in Calcutta? Search out his college friends? Where could they begin to look?

Kananbala and Amulya spent the next three weeks staring down at the empty road, as if Nirmal would materialise on it. They looked up every time someone was at the door. Amulya attempted to mimic normality: he went to his factory every day as usual but sat at his desk forgetting what he had meant to do. He took out his old Roxburgh and Hooker volumes and looked up illustrations of plants, but the page stayed open on the same spot for hours. It was as if a cold, dead hand was squeezing him inside, making it difficult for him to breathe. He began to dread leaving the house, and eventually stopped going to the factory.

The house echoed silence. Everyone crept about. The maid and the gardener stopped fighting, feeling the silence devour everything.

One afternoon, the stillness was broken by a guttural groan that came from deep within Amulya. He gasped that a lion was clawing his chest apart. His pulse faded, came back, and faded again, this time for too long.

The doctor came, thumped Amulya’s chest, and placed a shining glass before his nose. He lifted Amulya’s limp wrist and pressed his finger into it, searching for a pulse. He tried once more palpitating the chest, then shook his head, passed a hand over Amulya’s staring eyes, and turned away to pack his stethoscope into his hinged case.

Kananbala looked out of the window and exclaimed with a happy laugh, “Isn’t that Nirmal coming down the road?”

But Nirmal did not return.

A mop-haired boy in a thin pullover and flappy shorts entered the puja room, swab cloth in hand. Small statues and pictures of gods and goddesses were arranged on a platform along one arm of the L-shaped room and at the other sat a priest, rummaging in his cloth bag, taking out and making a pile of dog-eared little books of mantras. Prominent ribs striped his bony chest which was bisected by a dirty-grey sacred thread. He had an elastic mouth with long fleshy lips, shaped as if it could accommodate a banana across its width. When he saw the boy enter, the mouth stretched in an expression of revulsion and he rose and stepped with alacrity onto the terrace outside the puja room.

The boy heard the priest muttering “Hari, Hari”, and from a corner of his eye he could see the priest sprinkle Gangajal over himself. He grinned and stuck his head out of the room, calling out, “I’m sure I touched you, purohitmoshai, you’ll need a bath now, won’t you? And there’s no hot water left!” The priest gave him a malevolent look and snapped, “You can stop your gob, you rascal! I’ll teach you to be cheeky!”

The boy laughed and returned to the puja room, wiping the floor with his stale, fish-smelling swab cloth. He retreated to the terrace to wait. The morning still felt new; the outline of the building opposite was smudged, the distant line of hill and forest whited out by mist. A moonlike sun had struggled out, too weak still to dry the dew-wet grass. He blew out to see if his warm breath would make a cloud. It did.

A woman’s voice behind him made him stop. She was frowning at his thin sweater and scolding. “Can’t you see it’s cold? Go, put on something more!” She pulled her brown shawl tighter and entered the puja room. She sat down at a distance from the priest and said, “Yes, purohitmoshai, we can start now.”

The priest felt around in his orange cloth shoulder bag and produced one more of his dog-eared books. From the slot between his hairy ears and bald head he took a pencil stub and poised it over the notebook. “First things first,” he said. “Tell me your names so I don’t have to keep asking at every puja I do. I know the caste and gotra, of course, so you needn’t bother about those.” He was new to the house, taking over the family’s duties that morning.

“The head of the house is Kamal Babu,” the woman began, “and … ”

“Slowly,” the priest said, droning out the name at the slow speed he wrote it, tip of tongue edging out between his lips, “Kamal Kumar Mukho … ”

“Then there’s Nirmal Babu, his younger brother, but he won’t be here today.”

“Won’t be here today?” the priest looked up. “Won’t be here at Saraswati puja? Too modern for God, is he?”

She said, “No. He just works in a different city.”

“Oh, alright, who’s next?” the priest said, disappointed by the bland explanation.

“Then there are the women,” she said. She rattled off the list: Manjula, wife of Kamal; Kananbala, mother of Kamal; Bakul, Nirmal’s daughter, still a child, only eleven.”

“Bakul has no mother? And what about Kamal Babu? No children, hm? Barren wife?” The priest looked up from his notebook.

She stiffened and said, “I think that is all.”

“All? What about you? You don’t count yourself among the women? What’s your name?” He looked her up and down, her off-white sari, her lack of bangles and sindoor, and said, “You’re a widow, I see. And childless too? Ah, but whatever God wills has some purpose.”