Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Eventually, the cart was empty and the workmen turned away. Perched on bits of half-built house they lit their beedies with sighs of exhaustion. Amulya paid the malingerers no attention for a change, fascinated by Barnum’s portly efforts to heave himself into the three-sided cart through the rear. He had to sit on the dusty floor where the bricks had been, his back to the driver, trousered legs and shiny shoes dangling from the cart, facing Amulya and the labourers but managing not to meet anyone’s eye. The cart returned slowly townward.

A few days later, as Amulya watched a well being dug into what would be his garden, a servant from Barnum’s house came to him and shouted above the thud of the heavy hammer and the loud, chorused chant with which the labourers timed their digging, “Sahib has forbidden this!”

“What?” Amulya said, trying to hear above the din. He shouted to the labourers, “Wait. Stop!”

“Sahib says no noisy work in the afternoon. He comes home for his sleep and lunch. No work from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.”

Strutting with borrowed British authority, the servant gave Amulya a conclusive look and was gone before he could react. Amulya seethed at the servant’s departing back, filled with impotent rage, knowing that he would have to obey.

When finally they occupied their new house and Kananbala wondered aloud one day if it was rude not to call on the neighbours at least once, Amulya snapped, “No need. What an idea! Have you forgotten they’re British? To them we’re no more than uncouth junglees.”

Amulya was the only Indian to have built his home in that area, in the wilderness near the miners’ dwellings and fox lairs, far away from the bustle of the main market, from the drums of Ram Navami, the speeches and tom-toms of patriots, the nasal calls of the maulvi, the discordant bursts of trumpet music at wedding processions, the sparklers and explosions of Diwali. He heard these noises all day at the factory. As his daily tonga clattered him towards his home each evening, he waited for that miraculous moment when the shouting town would slide behind, replaced by dark trees and an echoing stillness broken only by calls from the forest and birdsong at dusk.

Except now, these past few months, scars had appeared on the smooth surface of his contentment. He had begun to recognise that he was considered an outsider in his very own Dulganj Road, and he knew that while his yearning for isolation was cause enough for him to want to remain an outsider, for his wife it was a different story.

* * *

The silence that to Amulya meant repletion locked Kananbala within a bell jar she felt she could not prise open for air. She had disliked it from the start: the large house with echoing, empty rooms, the wild, enormous garden where leaves rustled and unfamiliar berries plopped onto the grass. The want of visitors, the absence of theatre shows and festivity. Instead, cow-bells tinkling, the occasional clopping of a horse’s hooves, the ghostly throb of tribal drums far away. The croaking of a hundred frogs after rain, the inscrutable sounds from the forest at night. In Calcutta, in her rambling family home crowded with siblings and aunts and uncles, there was always the possibility of a chat, the comforting sounds of nearby laughter, gossip, clanging utensils, squabbling sisters-in-law, the tong-tong of rickshaw bells, the further-away din of the bazaar, the cries of vendors, the afternoon murmurs of a decrepit goldsmith who visited them with boxes of new trinkets and a tiny silver balance to weigh them on.

The first few months after coming to Songarh, the silence of the place — silence in which she could hear herself inhale, in which she could hear sweat trickling down her face, in which she could hear leaves fall and flowers open — the resonant quiet had startled her into an unexpected garrulity.

She had no-one to talk to, however. There were hardly any neighbours who were not British, and had there been, Kananbala, who spoke only Bengali, would not have had a language to talk to them in. There were three Bengali servants who had come with them from Calcutta, one of them a maid who massaged Kananbala’s head every drowsy afternoon. Kananbala babbled without end to the maid, stopping only when one day she overheard the maid and the gardener sniggering about something she had said. After this she began to wait for Amulya to return home from work, and the instant she heard the gate unlatch she ran down the stairs to ask the servants to put on his tea, then rushed to the gate to start chattering: “What happened today? Did I get any letters from home? What do you think we are having for dinner? Do you know what Gouranga said to Anubha today when she was washing the clothes?”

And so on, until one day Amulya, exasperated, snapped at her, “Leave me alone, can’t you leave me alone for a little while? Just a little while!”

He seemed that very night to have forgotten what he had said to her as he caressed her hair and drew her to himself. But she had not. She turned her face away slightly so that he could not kiss her on the lips. She had felt something twisting, writhing and changing inside her with his “Leave me alone!” She was withdrawn the next day, not herself, thinking too hard to be able to put any of her thoughts into words. Then, in the quiet afternoon, she dug out the old keys she kept still, out of both hope and attachment, the keys to her unused Calcutta rooms, and, clutching them tight, she walked to the well, paused, drew a deep breath, and threw them into the deep, black water.

* * *

The years passed more quickly after that act. Their elder son Kamal had been married off, the younger one, Nirmal, had crossed the awkward threshold that stood between boy and man, and her own small frame had acquired the uneasy bulges of late middle age. She should have been as close to contentment as was possible. But now, a long twenty years after their migration to Songarh, the garrulity had begun its siege on her afresh, threatening to break down the barricades she had erected against it.

Amulya was at the factory longer and longer. These days, he left early in the morning and did not return until after dark. He grumbled that there was too much competition now from imitators. The smallest gap in supplying the shops, and someone else would occupy it.

“Even so,” she asked him as they lay in bed one night, “couldn’t you come home a little earlier in the evenings?”

“Don’t be silly, Kanan,” Amulya said, “I don’t enjoy lingering, there’s work to be done. When you need to send your family their twenty-five saris next puja, where will the money come from?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Kananbala faltered, “I was just remembering when we first came here, how you used to come home and we’d sit by the window every evening with our tea.”

“It’s been about twenty years since that tea,” Amulya replied as he turned on his side. “The factory was smaller then, there was less to be done.”

“It feels so empty, Nirmal at college, Kamal at work with you all day: not that sons are company for mothers.” She sighed, “How I wish I had a daughter.”

Muffled by his pillow Amulya said, “If you had a daughter she’d be with her husband, not holding your hand. Why don’t you talk to your daughter-in-law? Manjula has plenty to say.”

“It’s not the same.”

She waited for a reply, then mustered up all the decisiveness she was capable of. “It was better living in Calcutta,” she said. “My family all around, the house so lively all the time.” Then she stopped, feeling the old uncertainties return with the sound of her own voice.

Amulya smiled. “If you were in charge,” he said, “There’d be no America, and no Australia. No-one would take ships and boats to distant places, they would just sit cuddled up in their mothers’ laps all their lives. Wait and see, in a few years there’ll be people from your Calcutta crowding this place.”