Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Mrs Barnum had said nothing, but her neck felt taut with anger. You will study with me, she had said, from tomorrow. I’ll make you as good as anyone else, better.

Mukunda had stolen away since then, afraid of being forbidden, to Mrs Barnum’s house each afternoon. Mrs Barnum’s method was simple. She told him to search her shelves and read anything that pleased him, and to ask her if something was difficult to understand. She showed him how to use the big dictionary that her husband had got many years before as a free gift with something. She chuckled with him over things he found funny and wiped away fake tears when they read bits of Dickens where children died. Sometimes she pulled out big picture books and showed him ships and kangaroos and cities in Europe.

Mrs Barnum’s shelves had an assortment of books: Barnum’s old books on coal-mining, romances and mysteries, anthologies of great literature, yellowed issues of women’s weeklies with knitting supplements and pot roast recipes. Mukunda made his way through all of these with indiscriminate diligence while Mrs Barnum looked on, a speculative smile curling her rose-tinted lips. At times she rang a bell that stood on a tray by her table and summoned the khansama for lemon sherbet, hers with a splash of gin, Mukunda’s without.

* * *

The year was 1940. It had been eleven years since the Barnum murder. Amulya’s house in Songarh was now one of the older ones in that part of town. The ’20s and ’30s had passed, the prosperous years when Dulganj Road acquired large houses inhabited by the white men in the mining companies and their memsahibs, those who occupied the empyrean heights, never having to step down into the coal pits that kept them in Scotch whisky and soft, white shirts. Then, in 1935, one of the coal mines a few miles away caved in. Forty-eight miners were trapped under the ground for five days, until all efforts to rescue them were exhausted. There was a scandal. It was thought that since the labourers in the mines were poor Indians and the managers of the mines were expatriate British people who came and went, safety had not been a priority. One manager, who considered himself different, felt himself filling with compassion after the disaster and went to visit a dead miner’s family with compensation money. He was almost lynched. The police swiftly disciplined the labourers.

The overtapped mines were close to drying up anyway and were shut down in the next few years; the British managers left. A dark fungus of desolation and poverty inched over the town. Where people had earlier come to it looking for work, now they started to leave.

Dulganj Road, always isolated, was to have become a rich suburb. Now, after the expatriates had gone, leaving empty houses, Finlays stopped stocking treacle and suet, gardens went back to wilderness, the road was pitted for lack of repair and after dark it was difficult to get a tongawallah to agree to come that way. At 3 Dulganj Road, after Amulya’s death, the garden was tended for a time, but by an itinerant gardener who had to be sacked after it was found he was nurturing a flourishing field of cannabis in a sunny corner. Soon the grass was knee-high again, and wild bushes of berries at the edges were attracting birds and noisy monkeys.

Mrs Barnum’s house, opposite Amulya’s, was regarded as the house of Sahib Bahu, mad, bad, alone. Only Amulya’s family still referred to her by her real name; any others who had known her as Larissa Barnum had left Songarh for other places. She lived alone, the khansama her only servant. There were two houses beyond hers, which, after the passing of the British, had acquired a multitude of Indian tenants. One of these, Afsal Mian, was a young, melancholic musician who taught singing. He went about town with the air of being a man whose talents were wasted upon Songarh’s philistine air. He had reason to feel as he did; while he tried to impress upon his students the necessity of riyaaz, and of perfecting one note by practising it day after day, his wards’ parents asked, when giving him his salary: “How many new songs this month Ustad? How many will she know before her marriage proposals start coming in?” In the evenings, sitting on the wide, old verandah in his lungi, he sang out his frustration in a rich, sad-sounding voice that carried all the way to Amulya’s house.

People said nothing ever happened in Songarh; if there were no clocks you wouldn’t know that time had passed. They said if you wanted to make something of your life, you had to leave. Leave, Mukunda, Mrs Barnum always said after a few of her special lemon sherbets, leave before the rot sets in, leave before you’re no good for anywhere else.

Mukunda could not imagine anywhere else yet. Songarh was all he and Bakul knew, the town that defined all others for them. Their world was circumscribed by Arunagar on the left, with its knot of shops and small houses, Mrs Barnum’s opposite, with the fort and ridge beyond it, and Finlays and Apsara Cinema further away, where they were not allowed to go on their own. Narrow streets meandered over the town’s undulating terrain, passing through little leftover villages. Town and country were impossible to separate; shops and houses made a straggly line hemming mustard fields.

Bakul and Mukunda had populated Songarh with their own secret places and people. To them it throbbed with magic and meanings which only the two of them could share. They had been together always, ever since Mukunda had joined the household when he was six and Bakul four. They had agreed they were both orphans: after all, Bakul had reasoned, she was an orphan too because her mother was dead and her father, an archaeologist, was away on digs in other parts of the country for such long years at a stretch that she forgot his face in between.

“It’s a dark night. You’re a one-eyed tomb robber creeping up to rob a pyramid in the desert, I’m following, I’ll catch you.” Mukunda’s gaze slid past Bakul.

“It’s not night, it’s afternoon, and why should I have one eye?” Bakul sounded suspicious.

Mukunda had not heard her. He pointed to a mango tree in the centre of the garden. It stood innocuous in the afternoon sun, sheltering a family of birds that flew in and out of it, chiding each other as he approached. “That’s the pyramid,” he said, excited, “All around there is just sand. And look, I brought something — this is all we have to eat for the days we are in the desert.” He held out two onions and a handful of dried-up peanuts.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The rest of the family, heavy with eating, floated in the half-awake realm of afternoon sleep as the two of them wandered their garden of old trees and tall grass. Tangles of wildflowers nodded under the weight of pausing butterflies.

“Peanuts?” Bakul said scornfully. “Did robbers eat peanuts in ancient times?”

“I don’t know.” Mukunda sounded troubled. “We can pretend they are whatever the robbers ate.”

“You don’t know? But I thought you knew everything !”

“I have work to do. Do you want to play or not?”

Mukunda was offended. He tossed an onion at Bakul and strode towards the well. It was a large stone-walled well that went deep. In the thirty or so years since Amulya had dug it, it had never gone dry, though in the summer months the water became a distant circle of light far below and the thick rope played out and played out until it felt as if the iron bucket would never find the bottom, and when the splash of water meeting bucket at last sounded, it came from very far away. In the monsoon, the water in the well rose every day, a little and then more, until it was so close it felt as if only the rim held the water in and anyone could reach in and bail out water, as if from a pond. The well was overhung by a creeper of white jasmine that dropped its fragrant flowers into the water all day.