Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“It’s so broken down already there’s nothing left to break,” he shouted. “Can you believe it, not even the dome has fallen in. No damage seems to have been done at all.”

He reached her and said, out of breath, “Magnificent, don’t you think it was magnificent? The plates of the earth shifting, continents changing shape, mountain ranges rising, oceans migrating. Amazing it’s all hot liquid deep inside! Fire below the oceans.”

Meera looked at Nirmal and wondered if the quake had perhaps dislodged some bit of his brain.

“Millions of years, it’s taken millions of years for these continents to separate from each other, drift away,” Nirmal was saying. “Then anchor themselves in the places where we find them now. Us humans? Even the ancients I study? We’re as new as the butterfly, born today, gone tomorrow.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Meera said. “Do you really think it’s safe now?”

“What if it weren’t?” Nirmal said, his eyes sparkling. “What if it all began again and we were all to die? What would you like to do before you die?” He laughed at her bewildered face and said, “Come now, tell me.”

“Onion, garlic, fish,” Meera said, surprised by the words that came out of her mouth, the clarity of her enunciation. “I’d like to eat everything I’m forbidden. I’d like to eat everything once before I die.”

* * *

Mukunda sat on the floor in Mrs Barnum’s bedroom. He had rushed in when the earthquake began, thinking he would find her and take her away from the moving floor and shaking walls. The room smelled of whisky. An opened bottle had tumbled and darkened the carpet. All around him were things that had fallen out of shelves and off walls and tables: a broken picture, a cracked vase, books. Surrounded by the debris, Mukunda was reading. In his hand was a sheet of thin, translucent onion-skin paper which began, “My darling, it truly seems the Antipodes without you. I’m surrounded by strange people, my body is here and my mind with you always, beneath our banyan tree. I’m working my hands raw, will make enough one day to get you away and we’ll be together again.”

Mukunda’s heart thudded louder than it had when the earth had begun to shake. He could see a long white feather and two more letters inside the box, but the handwriting was hurried, and even though he did not pause over words like Antipodes which he could not understand, it took him too long to read the long, looped scrawl. He knew everything would end if he were caught. He thought he heard someone, pushed the box aside and ran out, the letter ringing in his ears.

“My darling, it truly seems the Antipodes … ” A letter to Mrs Barnum, he thought, it could only have been from her lover. It must be true then that the two of them had murdered Mr Barnum and planned to run away together.

It could not be true — she was too kind to kill anyone.

What was he to do? Where was Bakul?

Beyond the Songarh ruin, thickets of acacia and ber stretched to the hilltop on which a small, white temple shone in the afternoon sun. The temple was not old, but it had acquired a reputation for benign power.

Meera looked around, noticed bees skimming the air over mauve wildflowers that grew close to the ground, thought of Nirmal’s extraordinary question after the earthquake the day before and her own ridiculous answer. What must he think? He had not questioned her further, merely looked at her as if for the first time. But she felt a spasm of shame whenever she recalled her gluttonous words.

The afternoon sun was too hot for comfort. Overhead, the sky stretched empty and high, no hint of clouds. Summer had come upon them as suddenly as it did each year, the heat an oppressive presence to get used to all over again. She stumbled over stones and clods of earth up the path to the hill, wiping her perspiring face with a corner of her sari. Her usual path, but why did it feel harder today? Under the trees, where patches of green shade alternated with bright bursts of sun, it was a little cooler and she paused. She could see empty bottles and matchboxes thrown aside here and there, two crumpled cigarette packets, not Nirmal’s brand. She knew this was a favoured place for trysts and shook her head. She was not here for a tryst, there was no reason to feel guilty. She had come to draw the fort.

She reached the edge of the ruins and paused. Nirmal was already there. The dog sat beside him and the puppies tumbled over each other and around him as if they were old friends.

Nirmal tried not to stare at Meera, at the perspiration on her upper lip, her blouse translucent on her back with sweat, at the bits of hair that stuck to her cheek, the sari with which she was wiping her face.

“It’s become hot, hasn’t it?” she said, self-conscious all of a sudden. She looked the other way, spotted a steel tiffin-carrier beside Nirmal, and recognised it as the one she had packed for him that morning. She gave him a puzzled look. He held it out to her and she took it. She opened its clasp and saw in the top container two pieces of fried fish, and below it rice. In the third bowl she knew there was a vegetable: she did not need to look further.

She looked up at him, filled afresh with disgust at the greed that had made her say what she had to him the day before.

“Go on,” Nirmal said, “nobody’s looking.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s very good fish,” Nirmal said gently. “Wonderfully cooked. A good way to break a long and pointless fast.” He looked away from her and began to play with the puppies while she stared at the container of fish in her hand, wondering if she felt like eating any after so many years of abstinence. What was it like, the texture of it, the smell of it, the feel of those tiny, translucent, thorn-like bones in the mouth?

She broke off a fragment with her fingers. She turned her head away from Nirmal, almost afraid that he should see her in the act. Though he seemed absorbed in the puppies, she knew he was looking at her out of a corner of his eye. In her confusion she swallowed the fragment whole, without tasting it.

She gave a nervous giggle and said, “There! I’ve done it! Tasted the forbidden fruit!”

A light breeze was collecting dry leaves. Parakeets chattered overhead as Nirmal looked at Meera and smiled in congratulation.

* * *

Ever since the earthquake, when he had found the letter to Mrs Barnum, she had been transformed in Mukunda’s eyes. Her silences began to seem sinister. Her gin and cigarettes seemed to mark her out as a fallen woman, as in the thrillers Mukunda had read. He would find himself looking at her long fingernails and wondering if she had had to wash blood out of them. Could she have killed a man? Or helped someone kill? He felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle when she came and stood behind him, caressing his shoulders as he read. He thought of her plunging a knife in through skin and bone and heart. But then, when she sat by him and explained passages from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare , he did not know what to think. He would have to read the other two letters, he thought, to find out the truth. Maybe they were not letters to her — after all, she was not named in the one he had read.

Ten days after the earthquake, Mukunda got his chance. He did not know how much time he had. He had been trying to read the difficult beginning of Lord Jim at Mrs Barnum’s dining table when she said, “Carry on, I’m going to Finlays, back soon,” and was driven off by the khansama. His hands began to tremble, his knees shook, but as soon as he saw the car departing round the corner he ran to her room.

What a lot of things Mrs Barnum had in her bedroom, he saw in panic. He had not noticed them during the earthquake. He tried to guess where the box had dropped from. In the corner he could see the vase that had fallen that day. A picture on the wall of a green-faced, drunken-looking woman, cracked right across. Two carved, teak almirahs at the far wall, both locked, so that ruled them out. The bed was a large one, with a dark-purple, velvety cover smoothed over it. The foot of the bed was draped with a tiger skin, its glassy-eyed, open-mouthed, spear-toothed head snarling straight at the pillow. On the wall beside the bed there was a high shelf piled with oddments.