Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Yes,” Meera said. “Yes, of course. As long as I can go for walks, I’d like anywhere.”

“You came here … when? … the same year as Mukunda, wasn’t it?” Nirmal said. “Yes, it was the same year. I was here in Songarh, waiting — waiting in fact for you to write and let me know if you’d be able to come. I went and brought Mukunda then. I’d been a few weeks at home. I was very restless. And then one day, nothing else to do, I went to the orphanage to see who our family had been supporting so long. I saw him, we liked each other and I came back with him. And you arrived soon after, isn’t it?”

“It’s a good thing he was taken out of there,” Meera said.

“Yes, of course, that is when you arrived,” Nirmal said. “You met him before you saw Bakul and you said, ‘I thought it was a girl I was to look after.’”

“You remember that?” Meera laughed. “I was really taken aback.”

“I left for Rajasthan so relieved,” Nirmal said. “It … ”

Mukunda’s voice floated out to them in the darkness, hesitant: “Dinner is getting cold … Manjula Didi is very angry, she says she’ll put the food away … ”

* * *

That night as the house slept, Meera awoke. She could not be sure, but she felt that Bakul was not in her bed across the room. Maybe in the bathroom, she told herself, and drifted back to sleep. But woke again the next instant. She got up and stumbled to Bakul’s bed to check. Had she fallen off the bed as once she had? The sheet was creased, the pillow flung to one side, the bed empty.

Is she ill? Meera wondered in panic. Why didn’t she wake me?

The room was ominous in the darkness. Meera had never liked the house. It had seemed gloomy and full of foreboding from the start. She was reluctant to open the door that shut their bedroom off from the corridor, but she went to it, and pushed it open a crack. Manjula and Kamal had the next room. She did not want to wake them and made herself navigate in the dark.

The corridor outside was eerie, the high ceiling disappearing into the darkness, the floor bathed in the light of the moon. She could not help glancing backwards, tense at every creak. She could hear something from the direction of the stairs and stole towards it. Could it be true the house had a ghost? Don’t think of all that, don’t be a fool, just find her. She felt her way up the stairs until her eyes got used to the different clarity of moonlight, and she found she was beginning to see quite clearly. She walked up a flight of stairs and came to the landing.

The cupboard on the landing was open and Bakul was on her knees at its base. She sat in the centre of a pile of torn paper and fragments of leaves. Savagely, panting, she was tearing up Nirmal’s books. When she noticed Meera and looked up, her eyes were glittering, unseeing.

* * *

Before school the next morning, as on every morning, Bakul peeped into Kananbala’s room. Her grandmother was babbling in her sleep, drool spilling from the side of her mouth, darkening her pillow. “Take the lion away,” she was muttering. “There it is again, so large, its fangs are red … with blood, look it’s clawing his chest, it’ll kill him like this. Is anyone there, is anyone listening to me? Nobody listens to me … ” Kananbala struggled to open her eyes; she knew she was awake, yet she could not wake up. She could see the sunlight streaming through the window, she was cold and wanted to pull her blanket closer to her chest. She sensed Bakul in the room, but there was the lion to be chased away.

Bakul went up to her and stroked her head. “O Thakuma,” she said. “Wake up, you’re dreaming.”

Kananbala mumbled and groaned and Bakul shook her a little harder.

“Wake up, there’s no lion, it’s me, Bakul! Get up, I have to go to school soon!”

A little later, Bakul stood behind Kananbala, combing out her white hair. It had thinned in patches, enough to show bits of scalp.

“You’re going bald, Thakuma.”

“I’m not a young beauty, am I?” Kananbala replied, closing her eyes with pleasure at the comb going over her scalp. How good it felt when … the comb went hard over her skull. Kananbala winced and exclaimed, “Unhhh!”

“Did that hurt?”

“What do you think?” Kananbala sounded irritable. “Not so hard!”

“Your mother had such a head of curly hair,” she said. “You’ve inherited it. Poor child. Didn’t live to enjoy anything. Never saw you.”

Bakul, who had heard this before, felt impatient with her grandmother for repeating things. Sometimes she ticked Kananbala off and said, “Yes, yes, you told me.”

“Your father was so different before,” Kananbala continued, her eyes still closed, feeling the light touch of Bakul’s fingers in her hair and on her shoulders. “Such a light-hearted, playful boy. He never walked, only ever ran. He never spoke without eyes full of laughter. Who would know him now?”

Bakul scowled behind her and made a face.

“I didn’t tell anyone then,” Kananbala continued. “But I’ll tell you one day. I know who killed that man in the house opposite.”

“You!” Bakul laughed. “That’s what you always say. You don’t know anything.”

“And then I went on a picnic,” Kananbala went on in her nostalgic voice. “You would never know one like it. It was … ”

Through her semi-somnolent stupor, Kananbala heard someone come into the room and scrabble around somewhere close behind her. She opened her eyes as she felt her bed jerk and wobble. “Oh Bakul,” she called out, quavering. “It’s an earthquake, help me!” She looked around in alarm, clutching the sides of her shifting bed.

She saw Nirmal’s hunched form straightening out from under the bed. He had dragged her trunk out. As she watched in horror, he opened it and began to toss out her saris. He seemed not to notice his mother at all.

“What? Nirmal? What are you … ”

From beneath Kananbala’s saris, Nirmal dug out Bakul’s precious box.

“What are you doing, Nirmal?” Kananbala said, frantic. “What’re you doing under the bed with my trunk?”

“I’ll show you what it means to lose something precious,” Nirmal said in clipped accents towards Bakul as he picked her aluminium box out of Kananbala’s trunk. “You’ll know how to be responsible with other people’s things now.”

“Don’t take that,” Bakul screamed and lunged out. “It’s my box, don’t touch my box.”

She dived across the bed to Nirmal and tried to grab the box from him. “Nirmal!” Kananbala exclaimed. “What are you doing, have you lost your mind?”

“Lost my mind, Ma?” he said as he left the room. “Is there anyone in this house still sane?”

* * *

Nirmal’s new office was at the edge of Songarh, a small building that, besides him, contained two other officers, a junior assistant, a clerk, and a man who doubled as peon and tea boy. Nirmal’s desk was empty but for a small pile of papers on one side, and a few books. The other officers, Sharma and Negi, were chatting by the window. Office politics, Nirmal could tell from the odd snatch that drifted towards him. “Mr Bullock is very partial to Banerji,” one of them was saying. “Arre bhai, don’t you know Banerji was his student. That’s why he gets the good postings, always.”

Nirmal took another sip of water, trying to calm the fury that still raged inside him. How many years of collecting had it been? Twelve? Fifteen? When had he started it? That oak he had sat under when walking through the western Himalaya. That maple, the rhododendrons, all of different colours. Most of them were leaves from high altitudes, times when he had left his digs on getaways to walk through the hills, even if the hills were a train- and bus- and then cart-ride away.