Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

It was one of Mukunda’s chores to see that the bathrooms and kitchen were always stocked with full buckets of water from the well. It was he who wheeled water out of the well several times a day, iron bucket clanging down as the wheel screeched and squeaked. Now, annoyed with Bakul, he flung in the bucket and played out the rope faster and faster so that the squeak drowned out her voice.

Neither of them heard the gate open.

Neither of them saw a man pay off a tongawallah and step in, looking around as if unsure where he was.

He was thin, his half-sleeved shirt too large, as if he had shrunk within it. His eyes cast shadows of grey underneath and his hair stood out dry and irregular. His height made him slouch a little, or perhaps it was fatigue. He looked too tired to move beyond the gate down the long, overgrown path towards the house. He stood there flanked by two large trunks and a bedroll, as if trying to decide what to do, as if he did not know the direction he needed to go. He saw the pair by the well and began walking towards them across the garden, stopping every now and then as if he had seen something that called out to him.

Bakul was shouting above the squeak of the wheel and the clang of the bucket, “Why can’t we play the crocodile game? You never want to play that.”

“That’s a boring game,” Mukunda said scathingly. “That’s for babies.”

Bakul looked at him, unsmiling, and turned away.

As she turned she came face to face with the man. She had seen him before. She knew she had. The man bent down and sat before her on his haunches. When he smiled, the grey shadows seemed to darken as his eyes almost disappeared, and a long deep line appeared on each cheek.

“Don’t you remember who I am?” he asked her almost in a whisper.

Bakul regarded him with a wordless stare. A strand of her hair was in her eyes, it tickled, but she did not remove it. A fly buzzed about her face. The man flicked it away.

“Nirmal Babu,” Mukunda said.

Nirmal had not seen his daughter for five years — since she was six — and then it had been for a few weeks, and he had not known what to say or do. He had carried that image with him on his postings and travels, of Bakul at six, following him around, not amused by anything he had to say to her, but near him, and watchful all the time. Confronted then with her childish roundness of limb and her silences, he had been as nonplussed as he felt now. Now he saw she had become a girl, a thin, long-limbed girl in a frock that slid off her shoulders, with a nose that had a little bump at its tip, a head full of straggly curls, a solemn mouth, and thick, straight eyebrows that now frowned, focusing her strange-coloured bright eyes at him. He had remembered what colour her eyes were: Shanti’s colour. He had carried that colour inside him on his travels and now he drew something out of his pocket and, holding Bakul’s hand, placed a small object in it. She looked down at it. It was a stone.

“It’s a rare colour of quartz,” Nirmal said. “I remembered your eyes when I found it so I had it cut and polished for you.”

Bakul closed her fist over it.

“Did you get me the weapon?” Mukunda said. “You said you’d get me a Stone Age weapon!”

“I think I have something for you,” Nirmal said with a smile. “But it may not be a prehistoric weapon. Call someone to help with my trunks, and then we’ll see what there is.”

“Alright, Nirmal Babu,” Bakul heard Mukunda shouting. And then, “How long will you be here?”

“Forever,” Nirmal said. “This time I have come back for good.”

Bakul turned away from their fading voices and looked at the shiny stone in her hand. It was a colour between brown and cream, and its chiselled sides reflected the afternoon sun. In places it was translucent enough to show its depths, which seemed to be made of shards of the same brown. If you held the stone up at the sun and looked into it, there was a city of tall buildings inside, glinting, living a secret stone life.

It made a small, distant splash as Bakul held her hand high above her head and flung it into the well.

* * *

More than most children, Bakul had reason to believe she was a foundling, motherless, effectively fatherless. It was part of family lore that her father had disappeared after her birth and been given up for dead. He had returned briefly after seven months and sixteen days, then gone again, this time for a new job, and ever since, he had only returned for short holidays. Every month, from a money-order he sent home, they knew where his latest archaeological wanderings had taken him, but that was all.

Nirmal had introduced two new people to the house: Meera, a distant relative who was a widow in need of a home, and Mukunda, who, until he was six, had lived in an orphanage unaware of Nirmal’s existence. Kamal’s favourite joke was that having provided Bakul with a mother who was not a mother and a brother who was not a brother, Nirmal had thought his duty done and made good his escape.

Bakul clung to herself, her solitude seeming to her both romantic and inescapable. Yet she was not altogether solitary. She had Mukunda. And she had her grandmother. From babyhood Bakul had known that though other people came and went, her grandmother was there, always in the same place, alone in a little room carved out of a verandah, which she did not leave except to bathe. Bakul had never known her grandfather, never known how, by dying, he had changed her grandmother even more than he had by living. To her, Kananbala had been this way forever — her collarbones jutting out at her neck, her eyes invisible behind her glasses, a network of veins snaking green under skin as thin as that on milk, her borderless white saris catching the light from the window.

Her grandmother had not fulfilled the conventional grandmotherly duties — like telling her folktales or teaching her rhymes. Instead, Bakul had picked up a rich store of curses from her, words which she still rolled round her mouth, though she no longer blurted them out innocently at school. When Bakul was little, her grandmother’s knee had still been strong enough for her. Seated there, the lisping toddler traded curses with the old woman and giggled with delight. If Kananbala called her a pat of cowshit, Bakul would call her an old donkey; if Kananbala replied with, “And you’re an ugly owl,” Bakul, suddenly unsure it was a game, would suspect she was being laughed at and shout, “You too!” And so it would go, until Manjula heard them and swept Bakul out of the room wailing in protest.

When Bakul came to her room, Kananbala would reach out for one of four dented tins in which she kept things Mrs Barnum sent her every month: bull’s eyes, nougat, biscuits, even chocolate. Although the two women had met just once, each month the household knew Mrs Barnum’s shopping trip to Finlays had taken place when a brown paper packet, borne by Mrs Barnum’s khansama, arrived filled with exotic goodies. Behind the first row of tins on Kananbala’s shelf were others that had come from across the road — Milkmaid condensed milk, Hartley’s marmalade with orange rind suspended as if in limbo — containers Kananbala never dared open.

Bakul had her own tin too, which she kept under a layer of old saris in her grandmother’s trunk. She opened it on days she needed reassurance, and the afternoon Nirmal returned was one such. The box had some oddments Bakul had to push aside to reach underneath. There was a large, frayed envelope in it, from which she took out a picture.

It showed a house. Her mother’s house. The picture had been taken from across the river, or from a boat mid-stream, Bakul thought, because between her and the house in the picture there was a stretch of river water. The house looked like the ones she had read of in stories: there were tall pillars, a deep verandah, long windows, columns of trees at its sides.