Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

For behind Bakul there was someone else.

A man. A young man. A man with a lazy, elegant slouch and a mop of hair over his high forehead. He held the curtain aside for Bakul’s tray, his height reducing hers to a child’s, and came into the room as if it belonged to him. He was in a dark suit and blue-grey tie loosened as if he could no longer stand to be constrained. A French beard, combed and waxed, stuck out at a strange right angle, making his otherwise handsome face look faintly comical. Touching Mrs Barnum on the shoulder as he passed her, he flopped into an armchair and said, “What a day! I need all the sandwiches I can get! And some swawbewwies and cweam wouldn’t be too bad either.” He spoke English like an Englishman, but with a lisp.

“There are no strawberries in Songarh,” Bakul said.

“There are, if you have the imagination,” Mrs Barnum said swiftly. “That’s the trouble, nobody has imagination!” Then she said, “Mukunda, this is my nephew Tommy. Tommy, do you know, Mukunda was Bakul’s childhood playmate. We had such a grand time those days, the three of us.”

“Thwee, Aunty, were you the third? You’ve always been such a baby. Did you play house-house? Or was it hide and seek?”

Tommy spoke to Mrs Barnum with an indulgent smile as though she were a child he needed to pamper. He reached out and picked up a sandwich, raising an eyebrow at me. “Do have some, old fellow,” he said.

I spoke English, but when I was confronted with anyone fluent in that language my mouth filled with wool and I could hardly get a word out straight. I began to chew a sandwich to avoid speaking.

“And are you Bakul’s welative?” Tommy enquired. He looked at Bakul with a smile. “She doesn’t say much, never told me she had long-lost bwothers.”

“Oh, no, darling,” Mrs Barnum exclaimed, “Mukunda was an orphan boy they took in. And then he went to Calcutta to study. Now you must be a big man, aren’t you, Mukunda?”

Bakul held the tray towards me and spoke so that only I could hear. “Won’t you have your lemon sherbet? It’s getting warm.”

Tommy raised an eyebrow. Then, as if he had lost all interest in me, he turned to a pile of magazines on a corner table. Settling his long frame into his armchair and putting his feet up on the chair facing it, he said, “Don’t let me keep you from chatting. It’ll be nice to hear all your stowies.” He began flipping through the pages of the magazine.

“Oh, but you should hear the stories Tommy has to tell,” Mrs Barnum said. “Such tall tales about the clubs in Bombay and the races and dances. I don’t believe a word of it, Tommy, I tell you I don’t!”

“You just need imagination, Aunty,” Tommy smiled playfully at her again, and reached out for her wrinkled hand, “That’s what you said, didn’t you? Can’t you imagine yourself dancing at the Yacht Club? I’m shwo you’d be the toast of the town even now.”

“Oh yes,” Bakul said enthusiastically, “Mrs Barnum can still foxtrot — she taught me.”

“We must have a dance then, Bakul,” Tommy said in a teasing tone. “Now, this minute!”

I felt the conversation twisting and eddying around me, the characters and incidents in it unknown to me. I laughed when they laughed, but I could not understand their jokes. When one of them, usually the nephew, stopped and said with ostentatious politeness, “No, we’re weally talking too much. Mukunda Babu hasn’t had a chance to tell us anything about himself,” I could not fill the minute’s pause that followed. The sandwiches tasted nothing like they used to when the khansama made them. The bread was dry and there was so little butter the two slices separated and curled at the edges. I was no longer hungry, but I ate one nevertheless. It was worrying me in an obscure way that Mrs Barnum rang her bell for a servant who did not exist. I did not want to look at Bakul smiling at Tommy, laughing at his jokes, glancing at me as if to say, “Isn’t he wonderful?” Our recently excavated closeness was buried, it appeared, for good.

Then Tommy got up and played a few notes on the piano, still standing, his tall, lean frame like a question mark over the black- and bone-coloured stripes of the instrument. He sighed, looking theatrically around the room, “Stwauss! Ah, how I miss swirling awound the woom to a waltz! Can you play, Mukunda Babu, or would you like to dance? I’m happy to pwovide the music!”

I got up from my chair. “I was never a dancer, and I really must be going.”

Tommy whinnied and said, “Oh, Mukunda Babu, I didn’t mean to scare you away. Do please sit down.”

“I have to go,” I said, and turned to Mrs Barnum to say goodbye.

Tommy perched on the stool and began to play, eyes closed as if there was nothing in the room but his music. Mrs Barnum sat before him, her face lit by the evening light that shone in from the single window in the room, her expression rapt — as if she were looking upon divinity.

It was the three of them now.

* * *

Dinner was over. Nirmal Babu had refused to let me return to the hotel to eat. The power had gone off so we were sitting in the garden to get away from the stuffy heat of the house. It was very still outside but for the passing breath of air that ruffled the creepers, releasing the scent of white flowers gleaming in the dark. I am sure I had never noticed the fragrance twelve years earlier, but now it was a key that unlocked all my memories. And if that were not enough, there was Bakul next to me, perfuming the night herself with a heady mix of soap, talcum powder, and something else I could not identify.

All around us loomed the black shadows of watching trees. The only point of light was Nirmal Babu’s cigarette and, further away, a dim yellow flickering from Mrs Barnum’s upstairs window. The houses down the road, new and old, were bulky shadows. A chair had been brought out for Nirmal Babu, while Bakul and I occupied the stair before the front door. Bakul swivelled a semi-circular palm handfan, wiping her sweat with her sari when it trickled down her neck. Because she wanted to fan both of us with single strokes, she had settled down close enough for me to feel her brush against me. In the shadows I could not tell what Nirmal Babu made of Bakul sitting there next to me. He said nothing.

I wondered if Bakul’s closeness was indeed necessitated by the fan. All through dinner I had felt her brushing against me, by accident I had supposed, as she leaned across to serve me. Her arm would stretch out right near my ear, touching it, or her hip would nudge me as she turned with the ladle towards her father.

Now in the darkness, as she fanned us both, each individual particle of my body seemed separately alive. I was conscious of every tiny move she made, every accidental touch of her shoulder or wrist or hip. My mind seemed to have emptied itself of all normal thought, making room only for the sensation of her touching me. I listened to Nirmal Babu’s voice talking about the part of a stupa they had found near the Songarh ruin, about the crowds that now went to see it and scratched their names into the ancient stone, he almost regretted ever having unsettled it, he said; he talked about attempts to climb Everest, about his own old travels. His dog began whimpering a little in her sleep and he caressed her ears and then began again to discourse about fossils recently found in the Himalaya.

All the while my body waited for a touch from Bakul. My knees trembled with the effort of not edging closer to hers.

And then a stone shot through the darkness and fell at a little distance from us. The dog leapt up barking while Bakul sighed and said, “Time to go in!”

Another larger stone fell, this time in a clump of bushes by the gate. After a moment’s pause, there was a strange crying sound, like a baby’s or a cat’s.