Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

There were reasons for their ascetic existence. Chacha’s pay was meagre — when were schoolteachers ever rich? — but also, if ever there was spare money, he could not resist spending it on books and music. Each time he came home with a new or secondhand book or record, he would creep upstairs trying to hide it in his clothes, while Chachi, detecting it by his demeanour, would cry out, “Again! You’ve done it again! Wasn’t this the month for a new kurta? Do you know that the children make fun of you at school for your clothes?”

“Aha, Farhana Bibi, but I had been looking for this book for months, and just as I was about to board the bus, I saw it on the stack and then bargained … I had money left and bought some nice bangles for you, but in all this, do you know I missed my bus and … ”

“Don’t tell me all this rubbish, I don’t want to know!”

He would turn to me for support, “This is a brilliant book, bhai, read it and tell me, tell your Chachi … ” He would hand me the book to look at, then snatch it back in a few seconds to open it and smell the pages. If it had a beautiful engraving on the title page he would show it to me. He would remove the dust jacket and finger the gilt embossing on the spine, and by then, having forgotten all about Chachi’s scolding, would go to her saying, “See, Farhana, see what beautiful lettering there is!”

Chachi would leave the room, but we could hear her muttering in the kitchen and each time she passed us. By dinner time, though, I would find the hot roti going first to Chacha, and at night there was peace as he read his new book and she darned clothes, humming old tunes under her breath, and I paced up and down wondering what to do until Chacha looked up with a frown and said, “Can’t you sit still? Read that book I gave you last week.”

* * *

I was nineteen and had lived at Suleiman Chacha’s for a year, though I cannot remember the month or day or season, only irrelevant details about that day. For example, I recall I had eaten bread with tea that evening. I rarely had bread to eat as it was more expensive than rotis, but that day I happened to walk past my old school, the one Nirmal Babu had put me in after Songarh. The bakery next to the school was still there, and the smell of fresh baking which had tormented me through my school years still filled the lane. I could not stop myself; I spent all the change in my pocket on a cylindrical loaf of fresh bread. When I returned home with the bread in my hand, Suleiman Chacha said, “Now we have a rich lodger! Time we took some rent.”

Chachi said, “If you wanted bread so much, why didn’t you say so? I thought you liked my rotis.”

I took out the yellow Polson’s butter I had bought as well — even more flamboyant an expense — and toasted the bread on their electric ring. To this day the smell of fresh toasting bread makes me feel faintly nauseous. I handed them the thick, crisp, brown-edged slices soaking in salty yellow butter. Chacha dipped his into hot tea.

Chacha’s feet were in soft old chappals indented with toe circles. His kurta-pyjama was worn out, with several stitches loose. We were sitting as usual in the wide verandah in the last of the daylight. There was some noise from far away, a few explosions of firecrackers, and Chacha said, “Someone celebrating something.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled with a sigh. I could smell the smoke, pleasantly pungent. Despite the noise, a quiet contentment spread over the verandah, as if we were nestling in a translucent globe that fended off the world. The cups, the saucers, the faded purple flowers on them, the faint aroma of tea, even the chips in the old gilt edging on the saucers, all seemed to have a perfection that made me unwilling to touch anything and mar it. In the west, the last fragments of orange in the sky deepened to a luminous pink.

After we had finished the loaf and drunk all our tea, Chachi wrapped the remains of the butter in its paper while I went up to the roof to smoke.

My match remained unlit. In the distance, ringing the horizon, was an incandescent necklace of terrifying beauty: the city had been set on fire. Orange flames leapt, subsided, started somewhere new. The sky had turned an eerie red. I could hear a distant, monotonous roar broken by the odd high-pitched scream. Another of those explosions and I realised they were not firecrackers at all, they were probably bombs. An oily pall of smoke hung over the sky, smelling of hair and flesh and burning rubber. Although I knew I was too far away to be in danger, I felt a fog of fear rising within me and obliterating everything else. I knew something larger than I could comprehend was pacing out there in the darknesses between the firelight, something my instinct told me would change things forever.

I was too riveted by the flames and cries of people to notice that Suleiman Chacha had joined me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of translucent cigarette papers. I jumped at the sound of foil. He began the fussy business of layering his paper with tobacco. He did not look up at the flames until his own roll of tobacco was glowing in the darkness.

“I think we’ll have to go away for a while,” he said, as if discussing a summer holiday.

“Go away? What do you mean? Where to?”

“My relatives in Rajshahi,” he replied. “They have been asking me to visit for years anyway. This is a good time.”

“There’s no need for you to go anywhere,” I exclaimed. “None of this will affect you. It’s the slums they’re burning.”

“Oh come, nothing to do with anything burning, I just think your Chachi needs a change. She’s getting a bit depressed.”

“If she needs a change, go to Darjeeling. Why don’t you?”

“Those relatives need visiting,” Suleiman Chacha said, half laughing. “What if they forget us? And you do know I have a room or two in an ancestral house there. Shouldn’t I lay claim?”

I knew as well as he did that he could not discuss the real reason for going away. I had sensed from the time I began living with Chacha that the political upheavals and violence all around, the news of rioting in Punjab and in the Muslim pockets of the north worried him deeply, as they did everyone else. We used to discuss it now and then, but as troubles that simmered at a distance from us, that might scorch us at the edges but not burn; we had never thought the flames would come close enough to threaten us.

Now they had.

When I walked into a room where Chacha was sitting with his friends, or even just with Chachi, there was an instant lull in the conversation and then they would begin to talk of something innocuous. And where Chacha had earlier routinely gone out and met his Hindu friends, now he seemed to meet only his Muslim friends, and at home. When they did not think I was in the vicinity they argued with each other about leaving the country. One afternoon I left the house when I heard quiet sounds of sobbing at the doorway as I was about to enter. More and more, I had begun to feel like an outsider in the place that had become my home.

“You don’t need to leave,” I repeated, but I was drained of conviction. These days people I had thought of as ordinary and levelheaded talked of storing bottles of acid as weapons. If the mob came for Suleiman Chacha and Chachi, where would I hide them? How would I save them?

Suleiman Chacha took another deep drag, but his cigarette, as these rolled ones do, had gone out. He fumbled in his pocket for matches and lit the damp-looking blackened roll again.

“You can carry on living in the house,” he said again. “In fact it would be a good thing not to put a lock on it — who knows what may happen. Look after it until we are back.”

“How long will you go for?” I asked.