Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

The next morning when I uncovered Noorie’s cage, she was speaking. Something — it would be too pat to say it was some change in me — but something had provoked her to speech again, and she was repeating the imprecations I had hurled at her all those weeks. “Bastard,” she was squawking. ‘Sister-fucker, bastard, sister-fucker.” Spoken in that nasal, unmodulated parrot voice the words sounded grotesque, even though they were part of my normal, daily conversation. In a distant corner of my mind, it rang bells I did not want to hear. I remembered an old, half-mad woman in a tiny room in Songarh, Kananbala, whose swear words I used to parrot for fun. I did not want to be reminded of that world.

I took care when speaking to Noorie after this, but she had already mastered my obscenities, and to my discomfort, uttered them almost to the exclusion of anything else.

When I think of the man I worked for next it is his hands that I visualise first of all. They were pale and long-fingered, with a slight tremor. Each finger had at least one ring on it, and each ring had a different, potent stone — I could identify a topaz, a cat’s eye, a ruby, even a diamond. In all he wore twelve. A year into my employment, when I was able to enter his room without prior permission, I found him at his polished desk, twisting one of the rings round and round. He looked up as I came in and said, “Do you know what these rings are? They are my destiny.” He fisted his hand and held it to his chest. “With these rings I keep my destiny imprisoned in my own hands.”

I had got this job only because of Barababu, after long months of searching when the city had seemed filled with Inter pass boys like myself, all unemployed. I had been tempted then, by the seduction of ease, of living a landlord’s life off Suleiman Chacha’s house. Aangti Babu’s job had come just in time to stop my zamindari fantasies. I was afraid now and said, eager to please, “The rings are your destiny, and you are ours, Sir.”

In private we called him Aangti Babu and joked that ten fingers were too few for him. The word always went around the little office very quickly when Aangti Babu left for a mysterious errand in the afternoon. Nobody suspected a woman, save possibly a woman astrologer. He never let on which astrologer he had just discovered, but we found out all the same. There was a man in Bhowanipore, not far from where I lived, and I went to him as well after I discovered he was Aangti Babu’s latest find. I had never believed in future-telling, I was simply curious about Aangti Babu’s passion.

The astrologer sat at a bare desk in a small room. He was an old man in thick glasses which shone. I could not see his eyes behind the lenses. The glasses covered most of his small, pouchy face. He did not smile a welcome. He hardly even looked up as he said, “Birth chart?”

I was uncomfortable, for the curtained-off door behind him was open and I felt sure someone was eavesdropping. Despite my scepticism, I began to feel the astrologer knew everything about me and it was important that nobody else find out.

“I have no birth chart,” I mumbled.

He reached into a drawer with a sigh and took out pen and paper.

“Time of birth?” he asked me, like a government clerk.

I told him I did not know.

“Date of birth?” he continued in tones laden with the same weariness.

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure.” The man let out a high, startling sigh that ended in a laugh, and picked up a glass of water from the windowsill near him. “Moshai, I am an astrologer, not a magician. I need some details.” He sipped his water as if he was already done with me. I half expected him to look over my shoulder and say, “Next!” although there was nobody else waiting to see him.

“I thought you could read my palm,” I said, now not wanting to leave without some knowledge. “Or maybe my face.” I said. “There are those who read faces.” What had I come for? I was no longer sure. I had forgotten my curiosity about Aangti Babu by then. Perhaps, like others who go to such people, all I wanted was attention. I felt disappointed, as if I had been denied a gift.

The shining lenses turned upward towards me. He regarded me for a second without comment. I looked away from his unspoken ridicule.

He held out his hand. I put mine forward, saying, “I don’t know if it should be the right one or the left … ”

He scrutinised my palm for long minutes, and I looked with him, as if I had never seen it before. It was creased, untidy, crowded with crosses and wild strokes slashing it in two. I have seen palms that have scarcely any lines. Mine was not one of them, far from it. I waited as if for a verdict.

“A veritable atlas,” he said, his fingers tracing the longer lines on my palm. “What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition!”

“I wanted to … I mean I was hoping … ”

“Want, want, hope, hope,” the astrologer parroted, “this is what your palm says too, moshai, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings.” He poked my lifeline and said, “Nothing but longing.”

For a while after that he said nothing. My arm was cramped from holding it over the desk. The ornate wooden clock on the wall counted out the hour. My hard chair had no armrest. His bent head, his opaque glasses, gave nothing away. I began to wonder if he was asleep. Or dead. I coughed as if I needed water and moved my chair to make a scraping sound. The astrologer jumped up and exclaimed, “Tuesday’s train! Tuesday’s train!” Then he shook himself a little, and as if he was continuing a conversation, he said, “Life is made of brick and stone, brick by brick.”

“I am a builder’s assistant,” I informed him. “I have been working there for almost a year. Now my boss has started sending me to negotiate with people.” I was proud of this. Just a few days before, Aangti Babu had sent me to talk to some prospective buyers.

“Hm.” He mumbled something and then said, “Have you come to talk about yourself or to listen?”

I shut up, ashamed.

“What d’you want to know, eh?” he said. “Let me tell you. Your past is cloudy, but your future clear. Your past shows homelessness, your future shows homes, this is most visible. Yes, you will be married. Yes, you will do very well in your job. You will have money. You will go far beyond your beginnings. You will not have a child. No, you will not travel very much. Anything else?”

I felt a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. But suppressing my impulse to be rude I asked him in a humble tone, “Anything else you could tell me about how my life will be … ”

“No more. But wait.” He squinted at my palm again and bringing out a magnifying glass, examined one part of it. The top of his head was near my nose. Strands of copper-grey hair poked upward out of his balding scalp like new saplings in a brown flowerbed.

“I see you standing on some steps, there is water before you, but will you step into it and swim? Or will you keep standing on the bank?”

He dismissed my palm and pushing his chair back he said, “It’s late, that’s all.”

Before I could ask him what he meant, he had disappeared behind the faded curtains that hung limp at the inner door. The newspaper on the desk came suddenly loose in the air from the fan and scattered all over the room as I rushed about trying to gather it in my arms.

* * *

Aangti Babu was indeed noticing me more. For the first year or so in the office I had been hardly more than a tea boy who recorded Letters Received and Letters Sent, Affidavits and Powers of Attorney Drawn Up in a large red ledger. I would watch Aangti Babu enter the office self-absorbed, apparently unaware of the flurry of sycophantic gestures made for his benefit by the head clerk, the supervisor, visiting contractors. Sometimes, I later noticed, he would deliberately drop something at his feet so that whoever was near him had to bend to pick it up. So great was our desire to oblige him that we would all dive together, knocking each other about in the attempt to reach the elusive pen or paper clip. I observed during one of these dives that although his hands were white and long-nailed, the little finger’s nail even painted red, his soles were cracked and dirty. Even so, that Durga puja, I went to his house to touch his feet and get his blessings.