Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

It was then that I saw them standing on the pavement across the street, Nirmal Babu holding a cloth bag in one hand, his face thinner than I remembered, his hair higher up his forehead than before. Beside him, a girl who must have been Bakul. She looked like Bakul but for the sari, I had never seen her in a sari — if she had turned a little to the left I would have seen her face. I stared across the rush of traffic and people. I willed her to turn towards me. I had only to cross that wide road crowded with moving cars and stumbling people and I would be next to them, saying, “After all these years!” But how could it be that I had seen them and they had not seen me? They looked away instead, towards the other end of the street. Sometimes they spoke to each other and Nirmal Babu looked at his watch.

I turned to Arif. “You go on to Suleiman Chacha’s, I have to … ” I could still see Nirmal Babu’s tall head bobbing across the street. Just above him hung a sign for Cuticura Vanishing Cream, rusted and askew, the pink-faced model peeling paint. Behind him a line of bookshops, books tumbling out of them onto the pavement. I started to cross the street, pausing in the middle to let a tram pass. It stopped before me like a wall. I cursed it for stopping just there, just then. But it had, for passengers, I thought stupidly. That’s it — Nirmal Babu and Bakul were looking the other way waiting for their tram, and now it had come. I ran as it began to move. From the outside I could make out Nirmal Babu shuffling around in the men’s section, looking for a seat, and Bakul’s face in the women’s section, just a few feet from mine. I opened my mouth to call her, maybe I even did, for it seemed to me that for a moment she peered out, as if looking for someone, but then the tram began to move, she turned away and I fell back.

“A 23!” Arif said, looking at the receding tram. “Why didn’t you call me, it would’ve gone direct to Suleiman Chacha’s … Hey Mukunda, are you listening? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s nothing,” I mumbled. “We’re on the wrong side of the road, couldn’t have reached it in time even if we’d run.” Instinct had made me rush towards them, but that moment outside the tram, seeing them not seeing me, wondering if they wanted not to see me, stirred my old bitterness about the way I had been cast out of their lives.

* * *

Suleiman Khan was Arif’s landlord — Arif was a lodger in his house, and we both called him Suleiman Chacha, deferring to his age. When we reached his house after our day-long stroll, he was reading his newspaper, his parrot nibbling his shoulder. Chacha’s face was hidden behind the Statesman , but I sensed his eyes upon me now and then. When I was about to leave, he spoke. It would be lonely for them without Arif, he said. They had always had a lodger, before Arif there had been others. Would I like to live in Arif’s room?

He was hesitant. The words came stumbling out and stood there between us, growing in the silence. It was almost presumptuous of him. I was perhaps the only boy in the college who visited Arif at home and ate there with him. Visiting was bad enough, but living there! It was unheard of for a Hindu to live in a Muslim’s household, especially in those times, when people could talk of nothing but whether the country would be fenced into Hindu and Muslim pens, India and Pakistan. If it were, which would I choose? I did not feel much of a Hindu, or anything at all in particular, with my origins such a matter of speculation and hearsay. Instead I had the offer of a roof over my head. I must have begun to smile, for I saw Chacha smiling at me, and then at Arif, who slapped my shoulder and said, “It’s not the hostel, Mukunda, you’ll have to civilise yourself!”

Suleiman Chacha had offered me a home when I was about to become homeless. Did he perceive my need because he sensed he too would be homeless soon? Did he know then that by the next year mobs would roam the streets looking for kills, that he would have to come home before dark every day? There must have been some hint of prescience in his spontaneity with me, or else why did he offer his home to me, a near stranger?

I brought my trunk and moved into Arif’s room. They would take no rent and gave me two meals a day. They had no children, they said, and they had a big house. They had never taken rent from Arif either. I was astonished by their generosity and knew that I could never match it.

* * *

Suleiman Chacha was a teacher of history. He had for many years taught at a run-down school in Baghbazar, and although the school had the reputation of being a rowdy one in which the boys seldom came to class, they trooped into Suleiman Chacha’s. Chacha knew not only about the emperors, but also about their concubines, slaves, wives and generals. His classes often went beyond the set forty minutes as he chatted about the households, bazaars, roads, doctors, schools and peasants of times past. Most of the other teachers were only too happy to have a class after Suleiman Chacha’s because they had about twenty minutes less to teach and could blame it on him, although some, jealous of his popularity among the boys, had complained to the headmaster that he did not teach by the syllabus and left students unready for examinations. But the headmaster was perhaps under Suleiman Chacha’s spell as well, and did nothing to rein him in.

On many sultry, dark evenings at his house, as we sat out in the verandah waving mosquitoes away with our handfans, I too listened spellbound to Chacha talking of Jahangir’s library, or of Bahadur Shah’s last melancholic journey to Burma. For Suleiman Chacha the past was always in the present. In this he reminded me of Nirmal Babu, who used to measure time in centuries rather than minutes and seconds. Music reminded Suleiman Chacha of what Tansen sang for Akbar, kababs provoked a story about Lord Clive’s khansama, a painful boil he had on his knee made him chuckle about slanging matches between the vaids and hakims of medieval times. As he spoke, clearing his throat often, I not only saw the past before my eyes, I could even smell and hear it. Yet when I tried to repeat his stories to anyone, they never sounded the same.

In appearance he was not imposing. He was a short man, barely reaching my shoulder. His hair had fallen out early, leaving him with a bald scalp that shone with the perspiration that is Calcutta’s gift to its citizens most of the year. His beard was neat, though sparse, and his bony, longish face was sheltered on either side by overlarge ears whose lobes almost reached his jawline. His only striking feature was his eyes, which were a luminous grey, shadowed by eyebrows that with their very luxuriance compensated for the paucity of hair on his head and chin.

Chachi and he had been married very young, and by the time I came to know them, her habitual manner with him was a kind of exasperation. She berated him, sometimes loudly, sometimes in mutters, for everything: for letting his bathwater go cold on winter mornings; for forgetting to give the milkman her instructions; for filling up the house to such a point with his books; for his visitors coming too early and leaving too late. Chacha listened to her with a twinkle in his eye, and when she paused he said, “Come, Farhana Begum, it has been so long since I had a scolding, have I strayed into the wrong house?”

Their house, though situated in a shop-crowded gulli, was an airy one, with two floors and a small patch of dusty ground that had a mango and a lemon tree. Chacha had inherited it from an uncle who had died childless. The house had little furniture, and it was very clean, but you could see that the coverings were threadbare and the curtains had an infinity of darns that showed against the light when the sun shone through the windows. They could afford just one fan, and it was run only in the afternoons and at night in the large middle room.