Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

I learned the work quickly. There were certain things I enjoyed: seeing a building rise from drawings on a page, finding swift, decisive solutions to problems on building sites, having the labourers look up to me, walking past a building I had put up when lights shone in the windows and curtains rode across them, yellow and red. I found in myself an unexpected capacity for being practical about things, despite my occasional unease. This is why Aangti Babu began to rely on me more and more. I looked on him as a benefactor who was teaching me a trade; he treated me differently from the others. The tea boy now had to bring tea to my table; I no longer sat outside the kitchen on the bench with the peons and Harold and Bhim, waiting my turn. People began to fear and respect my closeness to the boss. After a lifetime of deferring to other people, now there were those who deferred to me. I saw in their faces my old face.

I returned home only for Noorie. On the way back from work, I bought her chillies fresh each day and fed them to her one by one, telling her about what had happened at work that day. “Aangti Babu sent me on a site visit and I found the local goondas had surrounded the building site,” I would say. “Sister-fucker,” Noorie would say, “bastard.” Her claws digging through my kurta to my shoulder had begun to feel familiar and companionable. “I can call in Harold and Bhim, and you know how menacing they can be together, they don’t have to lift a finger to get results,” I’d say, holding a chilli out to her. “What d’you think Suleiman Chacha would say about my work, eh?”

I wondered what he would have made of me now, he who could not get himself a share in his own property. I could have solved that problem for him. And Nirmal Babu? I did not like to think of him — Nirmal Babu, who could not let ruins dissolve without combing them with paintbrush and toothpick. What would Nirmal Babu have made of my trade, when he wanted me to bury myself in books and emerge after twenty years, a scholar with a dusty library and a receding hairline?

“Haraami,” Noorie would screech, breaking into my thoughts and dropping the chilli in her beak. “Gaandu.”

“Not for long, Noorie,” I would say on days that were harder than the others. “I’ll save some money and then I’ll look for a different kind of job. I wasn’t made for this.” She would make quiet clucking sounds, matching my tone, nuzzling my hair with her beak.

Noorie’s swear-words had begun to sound like endearments. In my friendless world, she was all I conversed with, and swearing was to us a kind of communication. Once, on an idle evening, especially amused by her squawked vulgarities, I wondered if Kananbala had died and been reborn as a parrot. Noorie’s wizened face did in some ways resemble the old woman’s. What would Bakul have said to my outlandish notions?

But I could not allow thoughts of Bakul. That was something I never permitted myself. I picked up a chilli and returned to Noorie. It was she, not Bakul, who was my constant companion. It was only to her that I could confide how my success made me afraid that perhaps I was changing into someone my old self would have despised.

* * *

Some time after I had settled in at Aangti Babu’s and was looking after quite a lot of his affairs, Barababu, the head clerk from the old tannery, dropped in at the office to see me. When we had finished sharing our disbelief over the day’s heat, he began to fumble inside his old cloth bag and eventually fished out a white envelope stained ochre at one corner with turmeric.

“Daughter’s wedding, Mukunda, no easy matter. It’ll be a load off my mind when it’s done,” he chuckled as he handed over the invitation. “You will come, won’t you? It’s a village wedding and we are village people, but it would give me great pleasure if you took the trouble.”

I reached their village a day before the wedding. I had only just put down my bags and was asking Barababu how he was when a young girl came in with an elaborately arranged plate of food which she placed on the table before me. Her other hand held a covered bell-metal tumbler of water. I caught only a glimpse of her face, for she had her sari aanchal demurely over her head. She was accompanied by her mother, who said to Barababu in a loud voice, “Your daughter, my goodness what a stubborn child she is! A busy day and yet she cooked all these things! Wouldn’t listen to me when I said, let’s send for some mishti and shingara! No, Ma, she said, Baba’s friend probably always eats shop food, living alone, he must have good home food!”

I sent a polite smile in the direction of the young girl’s sari-covered face. “Come, Malini,” her mother commanded, and turned to leave the room. Obedience itself, the girl followed, but then at the door, seeing her father’s back was turned, she gave me a deliberate, long, almost cheeky stare, her sari falling off her head to her shoulders. If I had not thought it inconceivable, I would have said she stuck her tongue out at me.

The following evening, after the wedding and a big feast, I sat with Barababu and his relatives, sharing their post-wedding euphoria and a hookah that was going around. Barababu said, “Everything in life has an apposite time, my boy, everything has an apposite time. Now you, for you it is time for grihaprastha — do you know?”

“Grihaprastha,” I repeated, drowsy from too much food.

“Yes, grihaprastha. How old are you now? Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-one! That was another life,” I said. “I’m twenty-three, I was born in ’27.”

“Proves what I’m saying,” Barababu said, crowing. “You should become a householder now. It’s time for you to have a wife, children. Are you going to wait till you have dentures?”

“Children,” I said. “I don’t even have a bride in mind. And I don’t have parents to find a bride for me.”

“I admit it will be difficult getting a bride for you — you have a good upbringing, and yet nobody knows your caste,” Barababu said. “But I don’t believe in such things.” He looked around at his somnolent audience. “I say, judge a man by his actions. And by your actions I would say … ” He looked around again. “You are fit to be the husband of my own daughter, yes, my own daughter, though I am a Brahmin as ever a Brahmin lived and breathed.”

* * *

I had never been conscious of needing a wife, yet I had never felt as contented as I did after I married Barababu’s middle daughter, the girl who, when she became my wife, told me she had indeed stuck her tongue out at me that morning in the village. After our son was born, I felt there was nothing left for me to want or need. My wife laughed when I marvelled at his ten tiny toes, his pudding-soft bottom.

“I’ll go back to that rascally astrologer,” I said to her. “‘You’ll have no children,’ he said. I’ll show him my son!”

My wife smiled and said, “Perhaps he is not a child. You worship him like a little god, after all.”

She was right. I was fascinated by my son, by the fact of having a child. We had named him Goutam, after the Buddha I remembered in Songarh’s banyan tree. But I never called him that, using instead a range of sweetly ridiculous endearments. He was a year old now, and for eleven months I had celebrated his birthday every month, just as I remembered Mrs Barnum doing. On the twelfth of every month I made my wife cook payesh and light a ghee-lamp before my son and I brought home something special — fish fry, or cutlets — for our evening meal and a slice of sweet pastry for him. “More celebration is better than less,” I told my wife when she protested at my extravagance. “We’ll spend our entire lives celebrating, the three of us.”

From the floor where I was sitting, I looked up at my wife as she lay on the bed with her face at its edge, her long, untied hair trailing my knee, her rounded face dimpled with laughter. My son lay by me on the cool floor trying to suckle his toe. I twisted a strand of her hair around my forefinger. It was two years since we had been married, two strangers who had only her father in common. She had been brought up in a little village and had not read beyond folktales and children’s stories, while I was now a city man who had over the years read everything in Suleiman Chacha’s collection. In many ways she was still a child, spontaneous, playful, and as eager to please me as it was difficult to please her. Our early days had not been easy: strained silences, sulks, and misunderstandings, followed by long nights of lust-filled apology. Gradually, we had grown accustomed to each other, companions in a lonely big city. There were still many things we could not share with each other, but there were others I knew I could share with nobody else.