Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

He looked at me as I rose from his feet and said to a man sitting next to him, “This is the boy I told you about.”

I touched that gentleman’s feet as well, my heart racing. Aangti Babu had been telling someone about me!

Aangti Babu said, “So, do you feel like a change? Can you abandon the ledger and come with me to a site tomorrow?”

I looked up from their feet in gratitude and disbelief.

We were to meet the next day at a site in Ballygunj, which was too prosperous an area to be part of my daily life. I went early and waited for Aangti Babu to arrive. A half-demolished old building stood in a large overgrown garden. The labourers had not yet arrived. I could see they had not progressed beyond knocking out the front windows, which made the building look as if its eyes had been gouged out. Through the gaping holes, you could see darkness and corners, dusty red floors. At the back of the building was a shabby outhouse, two rooms at most, with a broken tap next to it, dribbling water.

I walked past the outhouse, thinking myself alone, but I was startled by a man who emerged, shaking. His head shook and his body shook, his hands which held the door shook. He had dirty white hair and yellow eyes. His shoulders sloped into a shabby shirt without buttons. The open neck showed bones beneath wood-coloured flesh covered with grey straggly hair. Behind him, a thin young woman appeared, and tried to make him go back in. She was young, but her face had a tired, youthless look. He would not obey. In a reedy voice, looking all the while at me, he protested, “Leave me alone, I will not go. I will not go.”

I turned away and walked out to the gate, bemused. I forgot him the next instant for Aangti Babu had just appeared, his starched white dhoti and crinkled kurta looking dazzling in the bright, early light. It was already hot. His armpits were circles of translucent cloth. I hurried to him and held an umbrella over his head to shade him from the sun. I was fumbling with nervousness. It was the first time I had been alone with him at a real building site, and Aangti Babu could have a filthy temper. I did not want to put a foot wrong. The overseer had joined us. He was a tall, hawk-faced, monosyllabic man, who did not scurry around Aangti Babu as the rest of us did. He listened to the instructions directed at him without any apparent anxiety that he would forget something.

“Those mango trees must go, we’ll get space for the water reservoir,” Aangti Babu was saying as we reached a grove at the back. “Tell me what we get for the wood, and don’t sell it to the man who takes the windows, he gives a bad price for wood.”

Aangti Babu took rapid strides, assessing the work to be done. “Level that earth,” he said, pointing one way; “pile the bricks there,” he ordered, pointing another. “Stack up the windows, count them first! And what about the stair grills? Have to get a better rate than we did last time. There was a carved banister on the upper staircase, I want that fitted in my house. See to it, will you?” I took note of everything on a scrap of paper, uncertain which of the instructions were for me and which for the overseer.

We rounded the corner and arrived at the outhouse, now with its door shut, the tap outside dribbling as before. “Still here?” Aangti Babu said, sounding tetchy. “See to it, will you?” He wiped the back of his neck with a damp, grimy handkerchief as I struggled to keep the umbrella over his bobbing head. As we were leaving the site, he said his first words to me. “See what we do? Will you be able to?”

The next time I went to the site, the land around the house looked clean and spacious. There was suddenly a lot of light where a dark tree-and grass-filled garden had been. The trees were gone, the outhouse was gone as well. The tap still ran, wetting the earth around it.

* * *

Aangti Babu’s method was to buy old houses, some abandoned in a hurry by those who had gone away because of Partition, some that were owned by too many warring relatives, some occupied by tenants the landlord no longer wanted. As a result he got them cheap. He knew how to get rid of unhappy relatives and lingering tenants. Then, if the neighbourhood was a good one, he might build a mansion and sell it at a profit to a rich man. Sometimes he let it lie fallow for years, saying, “A gold mine, you will see, one day it will be a gold mine.” He would stick his little finger into his ear and with one eye closed prise around until the fingernail emerged with wax rimming the end. As he looked at the wax he would repeat, “You will see, my boy.”

My workplace, in a building in Bowbazar, consisted of two rooms, one occupied by Aangti Babu and the other by everyone else and a tea kettle and stove that hissed all day. Outside was a street market where slimy vegetable peel rotted underfoot and vendors shouted far into the evening. The building was a dilapidated one, and the rooms were small, painted a mauve that had greased into grey, no advertisement for a builder. There was a narrow, dark patch of corridor outside Aangti Babu’s own room. It was here that I now sat proudly at a table, inkpot before me, register and ruler and house plans ranged by my side, a bulb in a cheap saucer-shaped tin lampshade hanging over my head, conferring on me a yellow halo.

Apart from me there was a tea boy, assorted contractors, plumbers, electricians and labourers who passed through, and two men Aangti Babu had on hire who were, I suppose, small-time thugs fallen on hard days. He used them when he had to deal with neighbourhood roughnecks and so on. There was a flabby scowling one called Bhim, who was quick to swear and pick fights, and a cadaverous, tall Anglo-Indian called Harold, with a hollow-cheeked face and an overlarge, pockmarked, boozer’s nose. He had been a rugby player and a boxer, his physique exhaled scrimmages and uppercuts. Temperamentally, though, he was a melancholic who in fallow times recited the Lord’s Prayer and a poem he had learned in school that went, “Look up at the stars, look, look up at the stars …” He would intone this every day as evening fell, and sometimes even when the sky had clouded over and the day had dimmed before time.

I could not imagine what use he was to Aangti Babu until one day a small mouse was caught in the office trap and I saw Harold take it out. He cradled the mouse in his hand and looking at its terrified little face said in a sad, gentle voice, “Wee, sleeket, cowrin’, tim’rous beestie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” As he spoke he squeezed the mouse’s neck, he squeezed it until the mouse’s eyes popped.

I had thought of myself as sentimental: I remember brooding over things for days at certain times of life, even crying in secret, though boys do not. When tenants had to be ejected by stealth or force, when bribes had to be paid, when I looked at the ravaged faces of people watching their homes being demolished, I would tell myself this was the real world, the one all grown men lived in. When Harold and Bhim were deployed, I would look away, escape in my mind to the Buddha’s gnarled face in the tree at Songarh’s ruin, still a refuge though I had shut out everything else related to that town. I knew we were doing nothing illegal; the tenants being ejected had no legal right to the place, the teary-eyed sister who came for one last look at her parental home had not inherited a share. Compassion had no place in the world of finance, Aangti Babu was fond of saying. There had to be someone who lost, or else how would there be anyone who gained? This was how money circulated. If ever I hesitated he would say, “Who has the legal right? All I ask of you is to do what is legally right.” At times I wondered at the bitter, poetic justice of my work: driving people out of their homes when I had once been shunted out myself.