Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

I waited. After a moment the voice, sounding less belligerent, said, “You’ll have to wait outside, I can’t open the door. They’ll be back soon.”

I walked back into the garden. I plucked a leaf in passing and began to tear it into tiny, mango-smelling shreds. I wandered towards the well and stood leaning over its wall, which seemed much lower than I remembered. The white jasmine next to it was still there, still scattering the water with its flowers. I could discern the dark reflection of my head in the distant circle of light that was the base of the well. I dropped in a stone. The splash sounded far away, the circle of light wavered and broke and then stilled itself again. All the water I had drawn here! All the buckets I had filled!

I began to walk around the garden, bored by my thoughts, tired of waiting. I did not know much about plants and trees, but could see that it was now a beautiful garden, filled with the old fruit trees I recognised, fragrant bushes and creepers and many new saplings tied with stakes. Despite the greenery and the well, there was a not a drop of water to be had and the heat had parched my throat until I could think of nothing else, not even the boy’s odd behaviour. Finally I sat down in the old garden swing-chair, too downcast and tired to care about my clothes crumpling into a sweaty mess. I closed my eyes and began to rock.

* * *

I must have dozed off. They were standing over me looking down, frowning and curious. Like the bears finding Goldilocks, Bakul said later. It was almost dusk. Their bodies were silhouetted against the soft light. I blinked away my sleep and tried to stand up. The swing jolted forward hitting my legs and I fell back into it.

Bakul giggled, then covered her mouth with her palm. I managed to heave myself out of the swing.

“Have you been waiting long?” Nirmal Babu said. “I am not sure we have met.” He sounded wary.

“Oh, Baba,” Bakul squealed. “Can’t you see? It’s Mukunda!”

I was not surprised that she recognised me. I had expected no different. I would have known her too, anywhere. Her face had changed, but only a little: her cheeks curved now where they had been thin and flat, and her hair reached her waist. It was tied back but around her face it scorned the hairpins and oil, or whatever it was she had used to neaten it; strands that had broken free curled at her neck and forehead. Her eyes were the same odd colour, only her gaze was different, amused and enquiring where it had been watchful and sullen before. In the light of dusk her sari, the yellow of mustard flowers, glowed against her ill-fitting white blouse which drooped on one side to reveal a thin gold chain. The sari fell away in curves I should have expected, but still I was astonished.

I looked away.

“Is it really you, Mukunda?” Nirmal Babu enquired. He adjusted his glasses — I had never seen him wearing glasses before — to look at me closer.

“Of course!” he said. “I thought you looked familiar. How stupid of me. How could I … What a shame, the boy made you wait outside. But he was not to know.”

* * *

I climbed the stairs, sliding my hands on the banister as I used to when I lived in that house, running up and down many times every day, on errands repeated again and again. I could almost hear Manjula and Meera calling, “Mukunda! Where is that boy! Hiding again!”

The corridor at the head of the stairs looked the same, but the plaster on the ceiling had begun to flake. My professional self noted its sandy gaps, the exposed bricks, the patches of mould near the bathrooms, the rusted iron beams that held up the roof, the walls that needed painting, the cloudy glass panes that had cracked in places. The almost derelict interior was at odds with the garden, in which every plant and tree seemed cared for.

Nirmal Babu and I sat at the table, a smaller one than there used to be near those windows. A grizzled brown and black pi dog sat at his feet, painstakingly cleaning her paws with her tongue, and then rubbing her eyes with her paws. Next she scratched her ears and furiously nibbled the base of her tail. Then, placing her head between her front paws, she shut her eyes and heaved a loud sigh. Nirmal Babu smiled down at her and said, “You remember Meera, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“She used to feed stray dogs at the old fort. After she left I began to feed them and I brought one of the puppies home — and here she is — twelve years old now.”

“Exactly as many years as Meera Didi and I have been away,” I said, not meaning to sound reproachful. “How is Meera Didi?” I asked him, to break the awkwardness between us. “Do you have any news?”

“Oh yes,” he said, looking uncertain. “I … see her now and then, she teaches art at a school in Darjeeling — there are beautiful walks up the hills there — you know how she liked walking — and she paints and sketches. In fact … ” He got up and walked to a corner and took down a framed landscape showing cottages and trees tumbling headlong into a valley. “This is one of hers.”

I held it and admired it. The feeling of verticality it induced, the sense of energy in the trees and hills did make it an unusual picture. Nirmal Babu took it back and returned it to its place on the wall after a smiling look at it. “Yes,” he said, “the walk down that slope is very steep, you need a stick and sturdy shoes. But it has beautiful orchids and ferns and unusual rhododendron.” Then he remembered me and said, “She asks about you, she was always fond of you.”

Was there any truth, after all, in the gossip we used to hear that last year in Songarh? Another silence began to twang the air between us.

Nirmal Babu looked towards the stairs, saying, “What is Bakul doing … cooking up a feast for you?”

I pictured Bakul in the kitchen telling the servant to make tea, trying to find things to serve me. She had never been one for cooking anything. Eventually, though, she came up the stairs, followed by a boy of about twelve who carried a tray with food, water and tea. He wore shorts that flapped below his knee, and a grey kurta drooped at his shoulders. His ears looked like handles to hold his head by. His hair, cut very close to his scalp, emphasised his outsize ears. He gave me a sidelong look, then put the tray down on the table. It was the same brass tray and I could have sworn that the china was the same I had washed sometimes.

“This is Ajay,” Bakul said. “You must forgive him for not letting you in, but we tell him to keep the doors locked. Baba and I rarely go out together, but when we do … ”

“Really, it was nothing,” I said.

Holding his cup of hot tea and lighting a cigarette seemed to settle Nirmal Babu’s diffidence and he said, “What a pleasure it is to see you, Mukunda, really. I wondered all these years if you had finished college, would I ever see you again. Tell me, what do you do? Have you married? Do you have children?”

He listened patiently to my answers and when I said things that I thought were funny, mainly about my child, he smiled, but he did not laugh his rich, strange-sounding laugh that always ended in a smoker’s cough. He looked changed. Those glasses had altered his face. Grey hair, not unexpectedly, though if I think about it now, he could only have been about fifty then. It was more than age. His face had darkened and his eyes were circled with shadows. He looked like a man who did not sleep very much, or well. He was fidgety in a way I did not remember from before. He had grown thinner, which made him stoop.

I felt remorseful. Why had I cut myself off from him? Why had I not come to visit? Why was it he I had blamed all those years for the way Manjula used to serve me smaller portions than everyone else, her spoon a safe five inches away from my untouchable plate? For the way Kamal made me run errands; for the rat-infested quarters I slept in; for the far end of the table reserved for me? What had I felt so embittered about? And why had he become the core of my simmering bitterness? Now, face to face, I felt nothing of the old anger — or perhaps I was looking at him with the triumphant magnanimity of the strong for the weak.