Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

She tugged Mukunda’s wrist under the table. They got up and crept out. Once out of earshot, Bakul said, “I know you don’t like it, so I made you leave. You looked scared.”

“Me?” Mukunda retorted. “Me scared? Hah! You’re the coward!”

Some time after they had left, Larissa Barnum pulled off her silk frock and sat at her dressing table in her old lace-edged satin slip. She began to remove her hairpins, regarding her reflection with a quizzical air. A long face, with sharp, narrowed, hazel eyes divided by a prominent bony nose, and thick, arched, greying eyebrows. The skin on her thin neck looked a little as if someone was pulling it down into her collar. She fingered her neck, pinching up loose skin, then pulled her hair out from its net and squinted in the mirror at the grey strands at her temples. She removed the emeralds from her ears and played with them as if she would not have them for long. Her household had for a while been financed by the jewellery she got the khansama to pawn for her.

The house felt larger and emptier in the late evenings, when the khansama retired to his quarters. Mrs Barnum wrapped a dressing gown over her satin slip, went to her chest of drawers, and took out a crystal tumbler, chipped at the bottom. She half filled it with whisky from a squat-looking bottle and then went to the living room to sit at the piano. She thought she would play something with big, crashing notes, crowd the house with noise, imagined people, a party. She began flipping through her music books.

Leaning on the parapet of the roof, Nirmal tore open his third packet of cigarettes. He listened to Mrs Barnum’s piano crossing the road with its clamorous dissonances, and in a tentative, reluctant, uncertain way, he began to feel as if he had come home.

* * *

Bakul moved a piece of fish from side to side on her plate as if that would make it disappear. Mukunda, who was always hungry nowadays, wondered if he could have some more rice.

“The boy will eat us out of house and home!” Manjula exclaimed.

It was a Sunday some weeks after Nirmal’s return to Songarh. Nirmal sat opposite his brother, lingering after lunch, amused by Bakul’s surreptitious efforts to hide her fish under a spinach leaf on her plate.

“So, Nirmal,” Kamal said, with a chuckle. “Quite a comfortable job you’ve got yourself. You don’t have to do anything but stroll down to that office! I wish I had such an easy time. The factory is full of problems. Cheaper versions of our things all over, made with artificial stuff, but who cares? Then this war cutting government budgets and to top it all we’re asked to fight the British … and if that weren’t enough, Salim is now too ill to work.” He drank in a loud gulp of water and put the glass down with a thud.

“We’re starting the dig in a few weeks,” Nirmal said. “Not all work is visible, there is a lot of material to be bought, a lot of organising to do.” Things were going slower than he wanted — too slow, he knew. They did not treat his requests with enough urgency at headquarters; everyone was preoccupied with the war in Europe — he was in a small town, and perhaps nobody else set much store by his dig. Besides, every item he requested had, it seemed, to be cleared by five different desks.

“Oh come, don’t take me seriously, Nirmal, why are you getting annoyed?” Kamal said in a soothing voice. “So is the end of our local tourist attraction imminent? No more ruined castle?”

“You’re digging up the ruins?” Bakul said to her father, accusing. “How can you do something like that?”

“Don’t talk about things you know nothing of, Bakul,” Nirmal said, sharp-voiced, impatient. “And don’t butt into grown-up conversations. I’ve noticed this tendency in you.”

“I’m not butting in, I’m just asking,” she mumbled.

“I’ll explain later,” Nirmal said. “Just eat up now.”

Bakul pushed her plate aside and scraped back her chair, then stopped as she saw Meera’s frown and gesture. She waited for her uncle to get up first, drawing circles on her plate.

“Don’t play with your food, Bakul,” Manjula said. “Crocodiles that play with prey soon get eaten themselves, don’t you know?”

“Don’t you know?” Kamal said, imitating Manjula’s tone as she looked at him angrily, “Don’t you know, Bakul, your father is here to dig up that ruin and see if there’s another ruin underneath. The things the government will spend money on when so many people have nothing to eat in this country!”

“We’re not digging up the ruin,” Nirmal sounded weary. He had had to explain this to countless people. “It’s not done like that.”

“Then how is it done?” said Kamal, plaintive. “If you want to see if something is under something else, don’t you have to dig up the first thing? I may not be an archaeologist in His Imperial Majesty’s A.S.I., but I’m not so stupid, am I? And what do you hope to find anyway?”

“There could be a much more ancient civilisation we don’t know of. The lower hillocks in front of the ridge may be mounds hiding ancient cities, who knows?”

“And who needs to know?”

“If archaeologists had not dug anywhere, we’d have had no idea of India’s antiquity,” Nirmal said, pompously he realised.

“Beheeyoo,” Manjula burped deeply, and then she sighed. “Will you people finish so that Meera and I can eat?”

Nirmal pushed his chair back and started to get up. He looked at Meera who was sitting there, ladle in hand, waiting to serve more food if someone asked. She was thin, he noticed for the first time, her collarbones jutting out, her eyes too large and dark-circled in a small face. She looked fragile next to Manjula’s stout self-assurance. The widow’s diet, he thought, all fasts and hardly any proteins. When would things ever change?

* * *

Nirmal unpacked his collection trunks that same day, after lunch. He was impressed, as he put his things away in rows, by his own tidiness. His shelves used to look so different when he was younger. He had only to open his cupboard in those days for a jumble of clothes and books and digging implements to tumble out pell-mell. But his profession and his travels had made Nirmal methodical. His father had always thought him a scamp beyond reform, even after he was a married man. What would he have thought to see him now?

Nirmal paused and sat down with a cigarette. He thought of the work that lay ahead: he had never been in charge of a dig before. He remembered the times he had spent in the ruins, first as a boy, then as a young man, stealing a smoke, walking all over the crumbling walls pretending to be an ancient king, then scraping in the dust, imagining that he could see the glint of an ancient coin. Once, he had found a curved piece of metal that looked like a weapon. Possibly bronze. It was only after he had excitedly brought it home and washed it that he realised it was ordinary tin, a part of a can. Yet he had kept it for years.

He got up, stubbing out his cigarette. The trunk had rocks and fossils, bits of flint and potsherds, things he had collected during his digs. He unwrapped them from their cotton wool and placed them on the windowsill where he could see them. Something struck him, interrupting his orderly movements. He thrust his head into the stairwell that descended from the roof to the first floor and called out, “Bakul? Are you there?”

After a minute, annoyed now, he called again, louder, “Bakul!”

He saw his daughter’s upturned face emerge at the foot of the stairwell.

“What?” she said.

“Come up here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Don’t ask so many questions, Bakul.”

“Why not?” she said, but he could see she was coming up the stairs.