Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

I let go of her hair and stroked her cheek. She held my finger in her hand and put it in her mouth, caressing it with her tongue.

Sitting on the door, Noorie clucked down at us like a wise, worried old hermit. The only scar on our smooth existence was my wife’s dislike of Noorie and her fear that the bird would peck the baby. But I was sure this would change.

My childish fantasies of adventure and romance were now so absurd I never recalled them at all. This room, with my wife, my baby, and my bird, seemed everything I could have wanted. I looked around then and thought that if I could catch life and imprison a little bit of it to have again and again, this was the bit I would trap in a glass jar, to shake like those foreign cottages with falling snow, and to enter at will.

* * *

By this time, Aangti Babu had begun to look for opportunities further afield. He talked of towns near Calcutta that were changing: some were becoming district headquarters; some, it was rumoured, would become capitals as newly independent India was organised into different states. Aangti Babu seemed to be collecting information on a variety of such places.

One afternoon, he summoned me to his room.

“Bring your things tomorrow, we will travel out from the office. One night, maybe two.”

I had gone on trips with him before, but this is the one I recall most clearly. We took a train on a metre-gauge line, I in the third-class compartment with Aangti Babu’s luggage, and he in the first. I did not resent this. I enjoyed the solitude of the third-class crowds where village women sat on the floor, baskets of produce by their sides, full or empty depending on the time of day, their windswept faces watching the speed-blurred world outside with an exhausted, absent look. I liked the sense of having nothing to do but watch the green, pond-filled, banana-leafed countryside pass by, sipping tea scented with the damp earth of its terracotta cup.

I was soothed and refreshed by the time we got off the train at a kutcha platform made of beaten earth and shielded from the world outside by one metal railing on which hung a sign with the name of the station in Bengali and English: MANOHARPUR. I rolled the name round on my tongue, sure I had tasted it before. Manoharpur. Had Suleiman Chacha mentioned it? Or maybe … had I heard of it from someone in college? I only knew that I knew the name.

We were not able to get a tonga or a rickshaw; there seemed to be none at the station. We began to walk, Aangti Babu cursing the lack of transport while I mouthed Manoharpur, Manoharpur with every step I took, trying to remember. We had to walk through the small town, through its little bazaar, out into the countryside, down a beaten-earth road past mud huts and rice fields with white egrets meditating among the rushes, before we reached a grand iron gate that was out of place in its surroundings. We walked up a long drive shaded with trees of jackfruit, coconut, bael, and mango. The boxes and bedrolls that I was carrying had grown so heavy by this time that my shoulders were on fire. Once we reached the deep verandah that fronted the house, I set down our luggage with a sigh and wiped my sweat-streaming face.

Aangti Babu sat in one of the cane chairs and said, “Go, see to things, call someone.”

I walked around the garden to the back of the house and, without warning, came upon a river. It went right past the house, a wide, pale-brown expanse. I walked down to the riverbank, astonished by the nearness of it. The edge of the bank was only a few feet away from the steps that led up to the back verandah, which was deeper and grander than the one in front. It was empty — no chairs, no tray of tea left over from the morning. You would have expected such a verandah to be the chosen spot, whether for conversation or solitude, but it appeared to be abandoned. On the opposite bank I could see the tops of small huts and the occasional brick building. But they were far away. I forgot my errand as a low flat boat passed me, pushed along with a pole that the boatman flourished with ease. A breeze came up from the river, cooling my heat-flushed face. For some reason the whole scene made me feel inexpressibly sad and filled me with a sense of having been there before, in a past life, a feeling so powerful that I felt almost afraid of its force. Had I been a river frog or mouse in that house in my last birth? Why had Aangti Babu come here, I wondered in a sudden surge of sick panic. Was he planning to take it over and knock it down as well?

Before I could earn Aangti Babu’s ire for my absentminded — and, I must remark, uncharacteristic — delay, someone came up to me and said, “Aah, the people from Calcutta?”

I thought we would walk in through the house to the front where Aangti Babu waited, but the man led me out the same way I had come. So, I thought, the house is not yet empty. I studied the back of the man I was following. His grey-white hair was cut in a circle as if the barber had set a bowl on his head and then wielded his scissors. Beneath the circle of hair was bristly scalp where shaved hair was rapidly growing back. He was not tall — the top of his head was well below my shoulders — but he had that self-important, bustling air with which many short people try to make up for their stature. He looked back every so often to see if, like an errant puppy, I had strayed somewhere. At these times I took the opportunity to study his face, which was pockmarked and dull, with one eye oozing a purulent infection. I decided I would not look at him any more, for fear of catching his disease.

Aangti Babu said to him, “Well, will you not invite us in after this long journey?”

“I would, I would,” said the self-important man, turning obsequious now. “But it is such a ruin inside, I am ashamed! Ashamed, huzoor!”

“Nonsense,” Aangti Babu said, heaving his portly body out of the cane chair. “I insist.”

“Please, huzoor, it is more private to talk here!”

“The old man is in the bedroom, isn’t he? He is sick, isn’t he? I insist! I must see!”

Where Aangti Babu insisted, few could resist. I knew this from experience, and had already begun to move towards the closed main door.

The room inside was truly in ruinous shape. I had seen many old, ill-maintained houses by then, but this one was the worst. Its curtains had rotted and smelled of mould; its floor had worn away in patches to reveal the brick beneath; the furniture, like fallen soldiers, was maimed, some missing legs, some arms, some thrown aside as if just so much wood. An enormous framed mirror hung askew, so dusty that it was impossible for us even to discern a shadow of our faces in it. Moth-eaten blankets covered some of the furniture. Portraits, I supposed of family elders, hung in ornate frames. Both frames and portraits were grey with fungus. Even the staircase that went up one side of the room, a sweeping arc of a staircase, looked as if the step of a mouse would cause it to sigh and collapse in a heap of dust. The only thing that was relatively intact was hanging from the ceiling: a chandelier of enormous size, festooned with gigantic cobwebs.

Aangti Babu sneezed and growled, “This is the house you want me to buy?”

“Ssh, speak softly, huzoor.” The man showing us around looked over his shoulder towards a half-open door, and begged, “As I said, it is dusty here, we will be more comfortable outside … ”

It turned out that the house belonged to a very old gentleman, apparently heirless, and now very ill. We were speaking to a local man who had made himself indispensable to the ailing owner as a kind of nurse and manager rolled into one during the past year or so. Now that the old man was so unwell, his nurse wanted to sell the house before some inconvenient heir appeared. It was rumoured there was a possible candidate.