Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Oh, a long long way off,” Mukunda said. “I don’t know the date.”

“I know,” Bakul said. “We get a calendar of events right at the start of the year. It’s from May the tenth. Right up to the end of June!”

Nirmal got up and went to a calendar on his wall. He put a big red circle around 12 May and smiled at the two of them. They looked at him with questions in their eyes.

“How would you both like to go to Calcutta? And then to Manoharpur? We’ll have a first-class compartment all to ourselves, with four bunks, with a bathroom and a mirror. We’ll go to the zoo and the Indian Museum. We’ll ride a tram and clop on horses in the Maidan, what do you think? We’ll visit Bakul’s grandfather and take a boat down the river at Manoharpur.”

* * *

That night, Mukunda lay awake in his tiny room out in the courtyard. Mosquitoes sang around his ears in their high-pitched whine. He swatted them against his skin almost without noticing. He heard in his mind the train’s far-off whistle, urgent, destined for more important places than anywhere he had ever gone. The sound had been a refrain in his orphanage, which was not far from the railway line. All day they could hear trains going up and down. They would rise to the sound of the Sealdah Goods and stumble out, chewing on neem twigs to clean their teeth. At midday it was the Danapur Down, and if that train was late, lunch was late. At night, tossing and turning, fists clamping down hungry, hollow stomachs, they would listen to the sound of the train whose name they did not know; it went so late at night, it could have been a spectre in their dreams, and so they called it Bhoot Rail, imagining it transported ghosts across the country.

It was he, Mukunda, who had hatched the plan to run away on a train. He had convinced three older boys they could do it: he knew he could not do it alone. He and the others — Birsa, Subhas, and Michael — stole out of the orphanage one mid-morning and raced down the path behind their building. A small distance away was the jungle that separated them from the railway track. They were not allowed there, but today they ran, tearing through scrub and grass, butterflies rising ahead of them like petals, insects buzzing angrily. Ran through patches of damp, stabs of nettle, dense shade broken by pools of brilliant sunlight, thrust out at clumps of bright flowers as they passed, tugging them off and waving them as they sprinted, shouting and laughing. At last they reached the edge of the forest and saw a narrow road across which the railway track went. It was quiet but for the alarmed chatter of a family of monkeys and their own hoarse breathing. Even as they wondered if the train would come, they heard the tracks hum and sing, heard the far-off agitation of its whistle. Before they knew it, it was upon them, a blur of chugging metal and smoke, and they were jumping up and down, waving frantically at the train to stop, slow down, so they could get on, make their plan work, run away, reach another city. But at the windows of the train people were leading their separate train-lives, peeling a banana, looking out unseeing, or reading as they tunnelled through towns and waving boys, hardly aware how they had been waited for, watched with yearning; indifferent people close enough for the four boys to see but evanescent, vanishing with each clack of wheel and belch of black soot. A child in the last coach waved back at the boys, and after that there was emptiness where the train had been, and the quiet, filled once more with the chatter of monkeys.

Mukunda remembered the caning they got when they returned, and the ache in his stomach from hunger. The warden had made them stand in the corner and watch the others eat: they were to get no food that day or the next. That would teach them.

A journey on a train! Mukunda had known that day that he would travel, go far away, very far.

* * *

Despite the lateness of the hour, Bakul was announcing to Kananbala, “Do you know, we’re going to see my mother’s house, on a train!”

“A train, eh? You little tadpole, who’ll take you on a train? Don’t you know nobody leaves this house? Look at me .”

“Oh, you’re just jealous! You don’t know what a train is! Just because you’ve never even left this house!”

“A train! I went on a train, I went on many trains, but that was long ago.”

* * *

In another room, Manjula was saying to Kamal, “When did we last have a holiday? I tell you! What a rotten day it was when my father decided to marry me into this family, so far from any city, any excitement. Why don’t we ever go anywhere?”

“Why, we went to Varanasi just three years ago. Have you forgotten already? And that trip to Puri and Dakhshineshwar? Who took you on that?”

“Those trips were all to pray for offspring, they weren’t holidays, just days of fasts and mantras. And the prayers didn’t work. Nothing’s worked in my life!”

“Stop grumbling,” Kamal said. “Stop sounding as if I’m responsible for everything.”

“Who is, if you aren’t?”

* * *

In her bed next to Bakul, Meera lay restless in the driftland between sleep and waking. She and Nirmal were together in a tonga, returning from town. Her head bobbed near the collar of his crumpled blue shirt, his eyes laughed down at her and she could see the shadow of stubble growing away from his chin, darkening the lines of laughter that went down his cheeks. Like all tongas, this one was cramped and their hips and shoulders jolted together with each rut in the road. The horse panted on the uphill stretches. There was no sound but the hunh hunh of the horse’s breath. Overhead, the fleshy ears of semul swayed bloodshot against the blue, breezy, springtime sky.

She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, now properly awake. It had been about twenty days. She had finished three drawings of the ruin. They were becoming more useful, more accurate. Every afternoon she left the house furtively after lunch and went to the ruin. Manjula had grown accustomed over the years to her ill-timed, eccentric walks and asked no more questions. The children were either at school or playing. This time had always been her time alone.

But now, Meera knew, at some point every afternoon, the time was no longer entirely hers. She no longer sat contented with her dogs. She waited. Nirmal would appear sooner or later. He would look at her drawings and comment on them and tell her which part of the ruin to draw next, which detail to emphasise. He would sit back, light a cigarette, and tell her about his work that day, about his travels years earlier. He would ask her about the life she had left behind, a life so long ago now it seemed to be someone else’s.

Meera knew that their conversations would lead nowhere — they could lead nowhere, and if anywhere only to disappointment. But for the brief time they sat there among the ruins, with the dog and its tubby puppies gambolling around them, she did not want to look into the future. It was enough to be happy in the present, to inhale the smell of his smoke, the smoky smell of him.

* * *

The trip Nirmal had planned was still far off, but Bakul had a calendar in one corner of the tuition room on which she had ringed a date two sheets below. She had begun to cross out the large printed numbers on the sheets on top, one by one, every day. At mealtimes she talked about the food they would carry on the train, and at other times she informed Mukunda of the delights of Manoharpur and Calcutta. That she had only a dim, imagined notion of both did not cramp her style.

At Mrs Barnum’s, on the mantelpiece over the fireplace, stood the globe made of glass. Mrs Barnum never let them touch it, but today, when Bakul begged, “I must see where Manoharpur is, please Mrs Barnum, let me look at the globe,” Mrs Barnum smiled, her thin face creasing.