Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

* * *

The man in the next bunk began to let out phlegmy snores. I was far too agitated to sleep. I could think of nothing in particular, yet my head was crowded with so many thoughts that there was no place for them.

Mrs Barnum. I had not thought of her for years. Was she still alive? She had decided to sketch me the minute she saw me. “Sit still,” she had exclaimed, pointing to a big blue-cushioned chair and scrabbling around for her pad and pencil. “What bones! Boy, what is your name?” When she showed me what she had drawn, it was a boy with an angular face, large eyes, dimpled chin and a nose that was a little too long for the face. “That’s not like me at all,” I had thought, though I did not dare to say so. Bakul had begun to laugh when she saw the sketch and said, “Yes, that’s just how he looks. Funnyface!”

Would I see Mrs Barnum too, I wondered. How would it be, even if years and years had passed since she caught me prying in her bedroom? How could I have snooped around as I did then, especially after the way she had educated me with whatever books she had in the house, her encyclopedias, her Women’s Weekly magazines and romances? I remembered the first of her monthly birthdays, spooky affairs to which she summoned spirits and told our futures. She was festive in a full-length lace gown and tiara, darting from place to place, stroking my cheek in passing. She had clapped her hands. “Music!” she had exclaimed. “You children must have gaiety and music!” She had picked up the bell by her side and shaken it until the sound pealed out. After five minutes, we heard the khansama come up the stairs wheezing.

“Yes, Madam?” he said, his obsequiousness ostentatious.

“We must have music, khansama, put on the record, that record!” She settled back into her chair, eyes closed.

The khansama shuffled up to the dusky alcove at the far end of the room, where a brass-horned gramophone stood. There was a record in place already, a black disk we could see from our chairs. He dusted it with a corner of his shirt, wound up the gramophone and put a heavy needle on it as it began to rotate.

We sat rigid in our chairs as sound snaked out from the player. I could recognise none of it as music. It began with a tremendous noise that sounded like a tree falling or a ship crashing into ice. Then it became almost silent. If I didn’t have sharp ears I would have thought the music had ended. But then it became once more loud and menacing, a huge mix of discordant sounds rising and falling. I kept expecting some singing to start, but there was no human voice. I imagined in the music the dramatic, solitary snow peaks Nirmal Babu talked about, gigantic open spaces and tiny rivulets. The music would swell, then melt down and once or twice I half rose from my chair thinking it had ended, but it started again. I looked at Bakul for help. Mrs Barnum’s eyes were closed and a smile touched the edges of her lips. All of a sudden the music dwindled. For a few seconds I thought with relief that it had actually, at last, ended.

This time the silence was broken by the thin sound of a flute. I recognised flutes. In the orphanage we had played them too, and I had a flute of my own that I had bought at a fair. But this one sounded like no other. It was only after I met Suleiman Chacha and whistled him the tune that I came to know what it was — the “Finlandia” by Sibelius, he told me, music from very far away.

Whenever I thought of Bakul later in the Calcutta school dormitory, creaking in my charpoy, swatting mosquitoes, I thought of her with that music, in that house, by the lily pond where I had swum with her, where I had felt her lips crushed against mine, felt her peach-sized breasts through the wet cloth of her thin, summertime frock, her mouth pressed on mine and then away, her hands inside my shirt, and then fumbling in my shorts that seemed to have come alive. In moments of fantasy I used to dream of setting sail with her, charging through black seas and sparkling icebergs to the end of the world. I felt I could almost hear the flute that stilled the icy waves and wondered if Bakul heard it too.

The train to Songarh sped on. I had not thought of my wife or son since leaving home. But this did not occur to me at the time. When the real reason for the journey nibbled at my mind, I pushed it away.

* * *

So much had changed in Songarh in the years I had been away that I could find no familiar landmarks and grew more and more confused on my way from the hotel to Dulganj Road. Everything looked meaner, smaller. I was used to Howrah, which I thought the most enormous, grandest, busiest station possible; Songarh’s two-platform station reminded me of the mofussil towns I visited with Aangti Babu. Finlays had peeling paint, a signboard hanging askew, and stiff, pointy-breasted mannequins. I could see that the small shops that lined the single major road sold cheap, tawdry things. There were some new streets and buildings, however, and I misdirected the tonga many times until we had a quarrel over the fare and it was past five when I finally stood before the door of 3 Dulganj Road. Once my home.

I had fantasised in the train that I would stumble upon her, surprise her alone, but Bakul was not in the garden, nor was she by the well. I walked through the empty garden to the front door. I took a deep breath, ran my fingers through my combed hair, reached out for the familiar brass knocker, then realised it was no longer there. On the wall by the door, I found instead a switch for an electric bell. When I pressed it, somewhere far inside I heard an answering tinkle and the bark of a dog.

My heart had begun to beat uncomfortably. I tried to slow down my breathing, wanting to be calm and coherent. I looked back at the garden to distract myself. A madhabilata was in full flower on one of the walls. It had not been there before — a pink flowering intruder in a garden of whites. The mango trees had grown and small, green fruit were visible even at a distance. The sun was still hot and high in a stark-blue sky.

The door had not opened. Enough time had passed for me to ring the bell again. I pressed the switch harder this time.

As soon as the bell rang, I heard an agitated voice above the frantic barking of the dog; it came from just behind the door.

“Who is it?” It was a young boy’s voice.

I almost replied, “It’s me,” as I had always done years before, but then remembered and said, “I … my name is Mukunda.”

“I can’t open the door. I don’t know who you are.”

“Listen, I have to see … ”

“I told you, I can’t.”

I could feel sweat tickle my scalp and bead my forehead. My fresh blue shirt had started to stick to my back. Annoyance at talking to a door and having the dog bark on at me made me shout:

“Look, whoever you are, I have to see Nirmal Babu and I am not going until I do. Where is he? If you don’t let me in I’ll just climb over the courtyard wall.”

There was a brief lull in the barking. Then the voice, which had a slight tremor, now said, “You can’t scare me. You can’t climb over anything. I won’t open the door. And the dog bites.”

I looked at the door with exasperation — a block of wood I had seen countless times before. I stepped back and looked it up and down, wondering what to do. To the right, by the well, was the outer door that led into the courtyard and to my room. I could see that it had a lock on it. Although I had threatened to scale the courtyard wall and it would have been possible to do so, I felt foolish thinking about it. I returned to the door and shouted, “Are you still there?”

No answer.

“I just want to see Nirmal Babu,” I said, “I am … an old friend of his. Tell him it is Mukunda. Or tell Bakul it is Mukunda.”