Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“Anyway, that’s none of our business. The older one had power of attorney over the younger because … oh, I forget the details. The older one has sold it using the power of attorney. So legally we are absolutely alright.”

“Then … ” I said in a murmur.

“The younger brother is refusing to move out. Oh, it’s fine, we’ve dealt with this kind of situation before. I got a better price from the older brother because there is this problem. And this one is easy … the younger brother, I mean. He’s not a tenant. He’s signed his rights away. All you need to do is to tell him to go, remove himself, leave the house … persuade him.”

“Persuade?” I said, nonplussed. “Hasn’t the older brother tried to do that already?”

Aangti Babu opened his eyes in sudden fury. I saw the bags under them were grey and red blood vessels snaked their way through the whites.

“If I were your age, I’d jump at this and not ask stupid questions,” he snarled. “It’s just that I am too busy to go and attend to this business. Do you understand?”

“No, no, I mean, yes, of course,” I stammered.

“ Persuade him to leave. Understand? I’ve got Bhim and Harold there doing the normal things: banging on doors at night, ringing their bell and vanishing, breaking a window or two. It hasn’t worked. I want you to go there. I want an empty house. If you have to cut his water and electricity … if you need to frighten him … But no police. Don’t get into trouble with the police. Just get him out.”

Aangti Babu found a notepad and wrote a few lines on it. He wrote laboriously, hissing under his breath the words he was inscribing. I heard what he was writing before I saw it. When he was done, my hand, which did not seem to belong to me any longer, reached for the slip of paper. Aangti Babu’s handwriting was neat and rounded, like a child’s. The note confirmed what I had heard, but still the stubborn recesses of my brain refused to let in the information staring at me.

* * *

I walked out of Aangti Babu’s room feeling unconnected with my limbs. I was in the office, yet not in it at all. My ears had begun to whistle as if I were all at once weak with fatigue. When the tea boy clattered a cup on my table and said, “What, have you gone deaf? Here’s your tea,” I looked at it for long minutes, as if I did not know what a cup with hot brown liquid meant. Throughout the day I did the things I had to, but almost without knowing what I was doing.

At home, my wife startled me when she touched me on the elbow as I stood in the jasmine-scented darkness of the verandah, my mind racing ahead of my body. At dinner, seeing my untouched food, she exclaimed, “If this is what landing some responsibility does to you, just stay an assistant all your life, that would be better for all of us.”

At last the day of my departure arrived. I did not know what I had packed or how I got there, but some time in the afternoon, long before the train time, I found myself in the milling chaos of Howrah Bridge, staring at the barges that creaked along the flat, muddy river. People collided into me and cursed as they passed, ant-like beneath the towering metal arcs of the bridge. Trams clanged by, reduced by the crowd and the bridge to mechanical toys. I walked along looking at the river and one barge that had an orange and green tattered flag fluttering from its prow. Beside me the superstitious were bowing and whispering prayers to the Ganga.

I felt speechless and prayerless, my mind in turmoil.

Twelve years after Nirmal Babu had sent me away from Songarh to Calcutta, I was going back to Songarh. Aangti Babu had bought my old home from Kamal. I was to evict Nirmal Babu from the house I had grown up in.

And Bakul. I was to evict Bakul.

I sat by the window, my hair tossing in the wind. Outside, shadows rushed backward into the moon-pearled night. The breeze that came through the open window was warm, but still it dissipated the stuffiness of the overheated, third-class, metal compartment. Beside me, on the next bunk, a hunched form lay asleep, snoring in a rumble, then exhaling with a whistle. From above, the arm of another man drooped down almost into my nose. The train seemed to be chugging along with my thoughts. “Bakul, Bakul,” each turn of its wheels said as it rushed over the plains of Bengal towards the hilly plateau of Songarh.

For all these years I had not allowed myself to think of her because it would open gates to misery that I knew I didn’t have the power to shut. I never let my mind draw her picture: her turned-up nose, her always-wild hair, the down on her thin cheeks, and her eyes, like pools of river water, which stared rather than looked. From the time I was six and she about four, we had been together. On cold winter mornings we would watch our breath mist and mingle, in the heat of summer afternoons we would throw buckets of chilled well-water at each other and squeal with delight. When Bakul first menstruated, it was to me she came running, alarmed, excited, voluble — I was sickened and horrified at the blood stains, thinking she had somehow hurt herself. We were each other’s secret-sharers, we were two orphans who had found refuge.

We had no sense of our lack of other friends. Perhaps it was unnatural. A boy and a girl, so intimate, not even related. It must have bothered people, although we were joyously oblivious of their concerns.

That is why I was sent away of course — I understood that now, as a father myself. But at that time, when Nirmal Babu told me he was putting me in a school in Calcutta and that I would have to leave Songarh, my mind had no room for reasons. Poets talk metaphorically about broken hearts, but I know that mine was broken then. I felt it cracking, a physical pain, a knife in my ribs, when Nirmal Babu told me I was to leave and repeated it when I did not believe him. When I asked why, on the way to the station — just once, I never asked again — he smiled in a way I knew to be false and said it was for a better education and to take me away from being ordered around by others in the house. That night when I was thirteen, and the world was ending as the train bumped and jogged me away from Bakul and Songarh, I had to bite the blanket so that Nirmal Babu would not hear me cry. I made up my mind: I would never go back to Songarh, never speak to him again for tossing me around from orphanage to Songarh to Calcutta — a game of badminton and I the shuttlecock.

Once he had put me in the school, Nirmal Babu paid the fees on time, wrote me letters a few times a year and twice came to see me. I especially remember the first of those visits, seeing him in the corridor, Motilal the peon saying to Nirmal Babu, here is your boy, and I looking but not looking at his shapeless bush shirt, his big toe poking out from a clumsy sandal, his loose trousers, his gaunt face oddly eager to please. We walked out across the heat-deadened playing field and through the school gates in an awkward silence punctuated only by polite questions from him. He realised, as I did, that plucked out of Songarh’s spaces for casual companionship, where there was no need for conversation, we were both at a loss. We tramped through the Indian Museum and walked past the Geological Survey, heat curling out of cement footpaths, driving ticklish trickles of sweat down our backs, Nirmal Babu asking if I’d like ice cream between holding forth on the Gandhara and Kushana periods as I trailed a few feet behind, keeping back the question I wanted to hurl at him: “Why did you give me a home and then throw me out of it?”

I lay back on my hard wooden bunk now, staring into the darkness. I was being sent back again to Songarh, a lifetime after being sent away. Except that I was a shuttlecock no more, rather an arrow tearing through the night to do harm.