Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

It was this shelf Mukunda decided to search. He stood on a chair, pushing aside dusty old ornaments, books, a box — but this wasn’t the one. He tried to be careful about replacing things in the same order. He remembered the box with the letters was greenish and made of wood. Finally, in the far corner, he saw the box he wanted. He pulled it towards himself and opened it. There was the white feather.

But the letters? There was nothing else in the box. He shook it in disbelief.

“Satisfied, Mukunda?”

Mukunda froze on the chair, feeling as if his knees had turned to water. The box fell from his hands with a thud. The feather lay half out of it. Slowly, he turned around.

Mrs Barnum looked taller than him, even though he was standing on a chair. He wanted to get down, but couldn’t. He wanted to say something, but his tongue felt like paper.

She sat down on the bed and began to stroke the head of the tiger. She wore a silk dress the tawny colour of the tiger’s skin.

“Is this what you give me for my trust?” she said, her voice hoarser than usual.

I wanted to prove you’re innocent, Mukunda wished he could say. I only wanted to prove everyone is wrong. I wanted to know the truth. He felt he would start to cry if he opened his mouth.

“Come down from that chair,” she ordered.

He climbed down, legs shaking. He could not take his eyes away from the hand stroking the tiger. It had a large, green-stoned ring on one long-nailed finger.

She got up and lit a cigarette. She inhaled and coughed. Maybe it was not so bad after all. She could not be furious if she was smoking, she always said it relaxed her. He opened his mouth to explain and took a deep breath of the smoke around him.

She whirled back towards him. “Don’t say a thing,” she hissed. “Don’t try. Go away, leave. Never come back. Get out of here, get out !”

Her voice rose as she spoke. She coughed violently and wiped her eyes. Mukunda edged away, out of the room. As he left he heard her yell into the passage.

“And as you leave, look up ‘betrayal’ in the dictionary, will you? Look up ‘treacherous’, look up ‘cheat’!”

* * *

Nirmal was announcing over tea that at last everything was in place — the officers, the theodolites and cameras, the labourers, the tents, the permissions and paperwork — and in two days they would begin to set up the dig at the ruin.

“What will happen now?” Manjula said. “Maybe a castle will be found under the ruin! I don’t mind if this old ruin is destroyed if a grand stupa is found. Something will happen at last in this boring old town, and people will come to see it.”

“Nothing will be destroyed, even if anything is found,” Nirmal repeated. He felt too elated by the thought of the work ahead to let anything else occupy his mind. “We’ll start with the mounds at the back. It’s delicate work, it’ll take months maybe. We’ll put up some tents there. The labour especially cannot keep coming and going all that distance.”

He looked sidelong at Meera for a response, but she seemed distracted by thoughts of her own. Since the afternoon she had eaten the fish he had brought, Nirmal noticed that she seemed to be going through the polite motions of conversation and interest, but was far-eyed. She had stopped coming to the fort, or to the roof to dry clothes in the morning. He never found her alone to ask for an explanation. Not that she owes me one, he thought, but even so — there are drawings she needs to finish.

“That’s the end of the romantic couples, isn’t it?” Kamal chortled. “The pigeons weren’t the only things billing and cooing there.”

“The ruins will be crowded for a while, yes,” Nirmal said, filling an awkward pause. “No room for the ghosts of kings and queens either.”

“Especially canoodling kings and queens,” Kamal said, looking at a brown spot on the scratched wooden surface of the table.

“Quiet,” Manjula said. “Can’t you see there’s a child here?”

Bakul, who had been reading a book in the slanting early evening light by the window, all of a sudden pushed it aside and sprang up. “Mukunda? Mukunda!” she called, leaving the room.

Meera got up and began to clear away the cups and teapots, clattering them onto a brass tray.

Kamal said, “Ah, what’s the hurry? I still want another, can’t I have a cup? Please make me one.”

Meera stopped. She found an unused cup on the table, began to pour tea into it, spilling a puddle on the saucer. She added a quick dash of milk.

“Oho,” Kamal said sadly. “All these years, and you can’t remember I don’t like milk in my tea.”

“I’ll get a fresh cup.” Meera turned on her heel and left the room.

“Why are you being difficult?” Manjula said. “Just drink it.”

Nirmal got up to follow Meera into the kitchen, somehow he’d get a minute with her alone. But Kamal said, “Oh Nirmal, don’t go away while I’m having my tea, tell me about the excavation, what happens next exactly?”

* * *

Mukunda was running from Mrs Barnum’s bedroom, down the stairs, into the garden, not noticing the dark, jackfruit part of it that they avoided in the evenings, not noticing the vivid orange of the large setting sun cut up by branches of trees. The khansama was in the garden, shooing his hens into their coop. “Hutt, hutt, hutt,” the khansama called out. “Hey Mukunda,” he said. “Help me with the hens!”

Mukunda wiped his tear-blocked nose and eyes and tried to say something, then ran towards the gate.

“Come tonight, I’m slaughtering a chicken.” The khansama chuckled. “When its head is chopped off and it rushes about dripping blood, that’s really funny, you’ll like it.”

Mukunda ran through the gate that hung loose on its hinges. One of its wooden panels had rotted away, the other was nailed on somehow, and a piece fell down with an exhausted clunk as he banged the gate behind him. He ran down the road in the twilight, faster and faster, panting, seeming directionless and desperate. His breath came in sobs. He left the main road and ran down a dirt path that went through fields mellow in the setting sun. The last birds quarrelled and chattered over their choice of evening perches as he jumped over ditches, his flapping slippers leaving a cloud of dust over his hair and face.

At last he could see the ruins and the ridge behind it. He went into the inner courtyard with its large pool of red stone, dim arabesques still struggling out of the dusty earth around it. The banyan tree nearby was beginning to grow larger with deep evening shadows.

He flung himself down at the base of the banyan tree.

Bakul was already sitting there. She said: “You heard too? From tomorrow they’re digging up the ruin. We won’t have a ruin to come to any more.” She looked around at the mosses and ferns creeping out of the walls, the broken walls they had clambered over so many times, imagining rooms where now there were none.

Mukunda looked at her uncomprehendingly. He had not noticed she was there at all.

“My father had to do it,” Bakul said. “He had to come back and spoil everything.”

Mukunda wished he could put his head between his knees and cry. He wished he could explain things to Mrs Barnum, or at least to Bakul. But he could never speak about what he had done, not to anyone. He knew he would never forgive himself for losing Mrs Barnum’s trust, never stop feeling the sense of shame that made him want to be sick. He sank his head into his knees and felt the salt of tears in his mouth.

“No room for the ghosts of kings and queens any more,” Bakul mimicked. “He thinks that’s so funny.”

A swoop of green parakeets above made them look up. In the early evening sky there was one bright star. The banyan tree to which the birds were heading was now a shadow.