Anuradha Roy: An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Amulya settled deeper into his blanket, breathing in the cold air of the night and uncurling his warmed-up toes.

“Why didn’t you ever ask me before we moved to this town?” Kananbala continued, almost in a whisper. “Why didn’t you ever ask me about building this house? I’d have liked being closer to my relatives. Did you never think of that?”

Kananbala had said this many times before, and she wanted to stop, but she could not.

“Are you asleep?” she whispered into the night towards Amulya, “Did you hear that owl?”

She heard a gentle snore and then a whistling sigh.

The night creaked and rustled. The cold air carried to her the urgent whine of a fox. Answering foxes echoed its call and their barks multiplied across the forests and fields, drawing circles of sound around the house. The foxes were the companions of her long, wideawake nights now. She recalled how, when Amulya had declared his intention to live in Songarh, everyone had stared at him in disbelief and Kananbala’s father had laughed: “Arre, all you will hear there are foxes, Amulya.” Not just foxes, she had wanted to tell her father later. In her lonely, wakeful hours she had stared out of the window as the roar of what she thought was a lion reverberated in the forest.

The lion’s roar was a secret she could not share with anybody else. The others slept on, oblivious to the throbbing wakefulness of the jungle. Sometimes she felt she was looking at the house from the outside, with the impersonal, measuring gaze of a jackal, or closer, at the windows, swooping owl-like through the night, finding her husband sprawled on the bed in their room, Kamal and his wife Manjula entwined in each other’s arms in a corner of their double bed, and Nirmal, open-mouthed in sleep in his rooftop room, his cigarettes hidden at the back of a drawer where he thought nobody knew. It was only at Nirmal’s window that she lingered briefly but then flew away, shaking off the house with every slicing motion of her wings.

One day she would disappear into the trees, she really would, never to be found again.

“I feel alone here,” Kananbala whispered into the darkness and then, embarrassed by the sound of her voice, turned to stare out of the long window by the bed, which framed a moonlit neem tree hazy through the mesh of the mosquito net.

* * *

The year was 1927, an early summer day. As usual Amulya had woken at four-thirty and left for a walk in the half-light, almost before anyone else was awake. It was how he had always been in Songarh — though he recalled wanting never to lift head from pillow in Calcutta. This was a time when the forest, the cool air, the purple sky, all of it was his alone. He watched the low ridge in the distance beyond the ruins, a shadowy hump at first, begin to reveal the dark points of trees across its spine as the sky paled behind it, preparing for the sun. Some days the ridge looked not like a ridge but like the remains of some prehistoric animal which only he could see. As the sky paled further, he turned back for his cup of steaming, straw-coloured tea and two buttered toasts. By eight-thirty he had left home in a horse-drawn tonga. He would be at work an hour before anyone else, look over the accounts, inspect his factory in solitude.

That morning, however, he had barely stepped off the tonga when a man sprang from nowhere and flung himself headlong into the dust, clutching one of Amulya’s ankles as if it were the edge of a precipice. Trying to drag his foot away, feeling one black sock lose its grip around his calf, Amulya looked down at the back of the man’s head. Until the man raised himself from Amulya’s polished, black-leather pumps there was no way of telling who it was.

“Let go, arre baba, kindly let go,” Amulya snapped, “What’s the matter? Can’t you get up from there!”

“You’re my father and my mother, Sa’ab, you are everything I have in this world! I have nobody else!”

Amulya thought he recognised the man at last from his voice, although it was tear-cracked and distraught: just a few days before, as he had entered the bottling room in the factory he had heard the same voice say, laughing, “The old bastard hasn’t come poking his nose here today. Think he’s dead?”

The man who had spoken was scratching himself under his dhoti.

“These shrivelled-up, thin ones go on for ever,” his companion had said.

“Then we’ll live a hundred years, won’t we?” the first man had chuckled.

He had stopped as Amulya entered. Amulya had not smiled. He found it difficult to attain any kind of easy familiarity with his workers. Impossible to say, “Arre Ramcharan, and how is your son? Is your wife still away in her village? Sure you’re not chasing any pretty girls now her back’s turned?”

Amulya tugged his foot out of Ramcharan’s grasp. “What is the matter, Ramcharan?” he said, his voice curt. “Stop all this weeping and wailing.” He fitted his brass keys one by one into the three Aligarh padlocks on the factory door, entered, hung his umbrella on its customary hook, and then, turning towards Ramcharan, noticed for the first time that they were not alone.

There was a woman standing a little away from the door, her dark skin set off by the grubby yellow of her old sari, her sun-paled hair straggling out of its bun. She was slender and young, little more than a teenager, with a smile that seemed to lose its way when Amulya looked in her direction. He recognised her. He could never have forgotten the face of the girl who, at that harvest dance in her village two years before, had given him the purple passion flower from her hair. But where was the vivaciousness he remembered, the glow of her dimpled face, the teasing laughter? This woman had a famished look, the kind stray, starving bitches feeding pups often had. She held a small bundle in her arms, so languidly Amulya thought it might fall any minute. When it moved he realised it was a baby.

“My son got her pregnant, Sa’ab, she says, and she arrived this morning with the baby … it can’t be true … my son is married, he’s a good boy, he has children of his own, but the coward wouldn’t even come out of our house to throw her out … what am I to do, Sa’ab? If I return her to the forest those jungle people will slaughter us for this with their sickles … they’ll excommunicate her for going with an outsider … she says we must take care of the baby … but what are we to do, Sa’ab, we are poor people, we already have eight mouths to feed and one salary, and what will our relatives say!”

Ramcharan’s voice rose and rose until Amulya said, “Quiet! Be quiet!”

Ramcharan sat on his haunches in a corner of the room and, burying his face in his knees, began to moan, “They’ll kill us … they’ll kill us all if we send the baby back.”

Amulya flipped through the order book and his diary. Decided there was no help for it, he would have to write off the day. He scribbled instructions for his accountant and then, with the woman and Ramcharan squeezed alongside the tongawallah in the front, he sat at the back watching the road give way to fields and then scrubland as they clattered to the Christian orphanage mission beyond the edge of Songarh.

That evening he returned home well after dusk and washed off his day-long deposit of sweat, pouring mug after mug over his thin, nutcoloured body, sighing with relief. He walked out of the bathroom in a soft, unstarched dhoti and kurta, feeling something within him unfurl at last. He knew his daughter-in-law would have left him a large cup of tea and some food. Amulya ate alone, gazing down the room that ended in a full-length, stained-glass window in the east, a window he had positioned thus; he sat at a round table with brass lion paws at the ends of its legs, a table he had bought at an auction. As he chewed, the knot inside him seemed to loosen, and the anxiety of the day’s events began to recede.