Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Bakul sat on the windowsill and stroked the flute, running her fingers over its ridges and holes. She put it to her lips as if to play it.

Then she raised the flute and hit herself with it on her open palm. She looked at her palm, then hit it again. She hit it again and then on and on, as if in a trance, until her palm went red and blistered and her skin split.

“Look, a skeleton!” one of my workmen exclaimed.

However busy I was, and however many buildings I was building, I always supervised each one’s first day of digging. That day I sat on a tin folding chair on the building site, shaded by my usual large, black umbrella by then so worn out that the sun came in through its many minute holes as if through a salt cellar. The week before we had cleared out the last of the debris from the crumbling mansion we had demolished, and work on the foundations of a new building had just begun. I had been arguing with my manager about some detail in his accounts when I heard the workman’s voice: “Look, a skeleton!” After a pause I heard another labourer snort with disappointment, “Hah, just a dog or cat, Nandu, carry on.”

I looked into the tumbled earth and, within a tangle of bleached weed roots, I saw an almost perfectly preserved brownish skeleton of what must have been a dog, with the mouldy remains of a blanket and an aluminium dish from which it must have eaten all its life. I sat on a stone next to the grave filled with disproportionate grief for this dog I had not known, for the family that buried its dish and blanket with it because they could not bear to part the dog from its possessions. I thought without reason of the children that may have pranced around with the dog in that vanished mansion’s garden.

There was a house once whose garden I knew, every last tree, and where the stairs had chipped away and which of the windows would not shut. The ophthalmologist asked me once, “Do foreign bodies ever interfere with your vision? Floating black specks?” And I thought, not bodies, houses, and not foreign, ground into my blood.

“Shall we carry on, Babu?” the labourer had enquired after a bemused pause. The sight of me sitting practically in the dirt next to the dog’s grave had startled him.

I could not imagine shovelling the dog out with its things like the rest of the rubbish we were daily heaping into trucks and sending away.

Eight families now live in slabs, one on top of the other, over those bones and the dish, which I planted deep in the foundations. They know nothing of it, naturally; skeletons have no place in new apartments.

People are afraid of ghosts in old houses. I know it’s the new ones that are haunted, by the crumbling homes they replace. Old houses don’t go away. They lurk crumbling and musty, their cobweb-hung rooms still brooding over the angled corners of shining new kitchens and marbled bathrooms, their gardens and stairwells still somewhere there in the elevator shafts.

Left to myself — despite my profession — I would let old houses remain exactly as my memory told me they always had been. Termites would write their stories across ceilings and walls, their wavering lines mapping out eventual destruction. Once the termites had dissolved the houses, returned them to the earth, a natural cycle would be complete.

I know all about houses and homes, I who never had one.

I am Mukunda. This is my story.

* * *

Other people have fables about their naming. My grandfather called me Nachiketa, they may say, and then my father changed it to Arjun. I have none. Who named me? Why did they give me a Hindu name? I have no answers to these questions. Perhaps Amulya Babu, who I have been told placed me in the orphanage that supplies my earliest memories of the world, gave me this name on an impulse when asked to fill out the official form. Perhaps my mother, whoever she was, had always thought that if she had a boy she would name him Mukunda.

People have stories too about their physical features: well into old age, they debate if they have their father’s nose or mother’s chin. Are they tall because their grandfather was? And will their children inherit their family propensity to insanity or baldness? Of all this, I am free. I admit I spent some years of my childhood scanning strangers around me, wondering if the map of their faces would show me a way to my lost parents. But not for long. Among parent-owning boys, I began to feel a sense of freedom as I grew up: they had a hundred things forbidden them, I had none. I could make myself as I pleased. I was free of caste or religion, that was for the rest of the world to worry about. I felt released from the burden of origins, from the burden of belonging anywhere, to anyone.

* * *

In college, my friend Arif and I did pull-ups from the branch of a mango tree, I to get broad shoulders, Arif to become taller. Arif’s hair had thinned, but he was so muscular he looked menacingly strong, like a short, bald boxer. In truth he was too gentle, sweet-tempered, and squeamish to smash a cockroach with his slippers. We were friends because we were both outsiders: I, provincial, casteless, wealthless; he a Muslim. I was taller than Arif so I liked walking next to him, my thatch of hair combed back in a puff, my new belt with a rearing unicorn buckle gleaming at my waist. I had two loose, white cotton shirts which I wore with the sleeves rolled up, and we would saunter along Chowringhee together, stealing looks at Anglo-Indian girls in skirts, wondering how to begin a conversation. Despite our city-boy airs, we were too shy and nervous to begin speaking and the Roxannes and Lisas slid past, animated, not noticing us. We lit cigarettes, feeling looked at as we exhaled. We tried to appear jaded, but we gaped at Calcutta as if it were a foreign city.

In this way we both reached our eighteenth birthdays, his date and month certain, mine whatever I wanted it to be. It was 1945 and we had both finished our Inter. I had no precise notions about the future, but the world of work and earning my own money began to beckon me like a spell. All my life I had lived on charity. I had not been aware of it my first few years in an orphanage, but the next few, in Nirmal Babu’s family, I had felt it as keenly as a blister that the rough edge of a slipper keeps rubbing. At eighteen I determined that I would never depend on anyone again. I knew that Nirmal Babu wanted me to study further, but I knew equally that I would not. As soon as I got a job, though just a poorly paid clerkship at a tannery, I stopped collecting the interest on Nirmal Babu’s fixed deposit. I wrote Nirmal Babu a brief letter saying I had passed and he did not have to send me extra money any longer. I gave up my room in the college hostel and left no forwarding address.

I cut my ties with Songarh as once it had with me. I was now alone in the world. No solitary pilot in the clouds, no climber on the point of a peak, could have felt my combination of vertigo and euphoria.

* * *

Now that I had finished college, I began to look for lodgings and meals. Get a wife, the boys at the hostel chuckled, a rich one, aren’t you an eligible groom, you casteless bastard. Arif was about to leave Calcutta, having landed a job as an accountant for a rich relative, a textile manufacturer in Lahore. Two days before he was due to leave, we went for a long walk through the streets of Calcutta, heading in a pleasantly aimless fashion towards the house in which he was a lodger. It was a still sort of day, and heavy clouds were beginning to collect. A thread of light streaked through the sky now and then, and the low rumble of distant thunder reached us after a minute’s pause. We had idled in the green of the Maidan, eaten a plate of kababs and rotis on the street in Dharamtolla and then meandered towards College Street. Arif was looking into the window of a bookshop while I stood facing the street, saying to him, “Hurry up, I think it’s going to rain.”