Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

The hotel had begun to seem sinister and I left it as soon as I could. I had no appetite for hot, ghee-soaked rotis or the copious amounts of potato curry they were ladling out in the noisy dining room. Despite the waiter’s anxious queries I left after a couple of mouthfuls and walked rapidly to the neighbourhood of my old school. There it stood, the same shed surrounded by scrub and straggly bushes, with the same group of hapless boys under the same banyan tree. I looked around for the master who caned us every day. I would have been glad to see him — anyone familiar at all, even the fishmonger or the samosa seller calling out, “Hey, Mukunda, is that you?!” I went up to a tonga standing by the tea stall — the same tea stall, but larger, and with different people — and asked to be taken to Dulganj Road.

We clopped off. The taste of the summer air on my tongue was warm and familiar, its dust and sun and lantana, its dry touch so different from the sweaty air of Calcutta. It seemed my duty to look around my old haunts, yet I felt no inclination to do so. I did not want to see the new houses that had come up in the fields we used to play in. I did not want to see my old abandoned fort with a ticket counter at its door and VIJAY LOVES SUNITA scratched into its walls.

I paid the tongawallah and went into Mrs Barnum’s garden through an opening in the wall at the back. The trees around the lily pond had grown in height and now formed a canopy hiding most of the sky from view. The edge of the day’s heat was blunted here by the cool darkness of the foliage. Large, purple water lilies floated in the leafy, scummy water of the pond.

Had we ever been little enough to swim in it? I lay on my stomach in the grass next to the pond, cradling my chin. In my mind I was in the water, among the weeds, Bakul was swimming by me, in and out of the murk. I was losing sight of her, trying to call out to her, the water muffling all sound. She swam up towards me again and I could see her clothes floating away from her, then clinging to her, only this time she didn’t have peach breasts but grown ones. I thought I should not look, and then she swam up and through the water kissed me on the lips.

“Are you asleep? Mukunda?”

I opened my bleary eyes, shading them against the light. Then I realised the light had dwindled, and sat up with a start.

“How did you know I was here? This is like yesterday all over again!”

“I thought you would be, somehow. All day I thought you’d come, then you didn’t, so I came here to look for you.”

She sat down on the grass beside me in a sari the colour of a monsoon cloud and a sea-green blouse. It made her strange-coloured eyes look stranger still. She smiled, and I saw that crooked tooth. She was hiding something in her sari, bursting with suppressed excitement as she used to, even as a girl. Bakul could never keep a secret from me for long.

“Well, what are you hiding?” I asked her, lying back in the grass. She felt so familiar I could have said anything to her, and yet I felt immensely shy, all at the same time.

“Nothing,” she said. Then, as if she could hide it no longer, she brought it out with a flourish and said, “Remember this?”

“The flute? My flute?”

“Your flute. The one you bought when we went to the mela, remember?”

I reached for it, felt its smooth polished surface, ran my fingers over the bits of string I had twisted around the ends to protect it. My flute from twelve years ago, a flute I had forgotten about. She had kept it all these years. I felt something inside me flip upside down. I held it out to her. I could not tell if she noticed the slight tremble in my hands.

“Don’t you want it?”

I lay on my stomach again and dipped a hand into the water, running my fingers through it, feeling it resist.

“It’s yours now,” I said. “I’m sure I don’t even know how to play it any more.”

“Do you know,” she said, “I learned how to play it. I don’t just produce those … ”

“Fart sounds?”

She burst out laughing, then put the flute to her lips and pursed them, but she began to laugh again. Exasperated, she exclaimed, “Now look what you’ve done, I can’t play if I go on like this.”

I said, “Let’s think of something sad.” I held my breath, bit my cheek and looked straight at her. I was thinking of her lips touching my flute where my lips had touched it once. A sentimental, stupid thought, but it pleased me nevertheless.

“You look as if … ” she giggled again and I chuckled too.

“Now what is it? Can’t you try to be serious, Bakul, for a minute? It’s not as if we’re ten years old and can’t do without fits of giggles.”

She put the flute aside and said, “I can’t imagine laughing like that any more, can you? It seems so long ago. Can you imagine us being little enough to swim in this pond? Do you remember?” She waited for me to say something.

I lay back on my arms looking up at sky through the leaves, softer coloured now in the late afternoon. Birds had begun calling again, as if revived by the prospect of a cool evening. What did she remember? What did she want me to remember? Or had she forgotten everything and was just making conversation? Had anyone touched her after me, made her forget?

When she thought the time for an answer from me had passed, she lifted the flute to her lips and what I now knew to be Sibelius’ flute melody floated out, limpid and heart-wrenching. Her notes trembled a little as if she was nervous, and one or two went wrong, but she began again each time. She had shut her eyes. Her lips were pursed, and her cheeks hollow beneath her sloping cheekbones. I could see a small brown spot on her left cheek. In the evening breeze, her hair began to fly against her cheek. She shook her head to get rid of the hair. I did not want her to stop playing. I reached out and brushed it away, hoping I could do it without her noticing.

It was merely an excuse to touch her of course, and she stopped.

I had touched her though, and now I could not stop. I stroked her cheek. I traced the line of her jaw. I felt the shape of her eyebrow with my fingertip and the fragility of her closed eyelid as if I were a blind man memorising it for later. I twisted the gold stud piercing her earlobe and felt the petal-soft skin behind it.

I do not remember why the flute did not break between us, or when she put it aside, or how her sari fell away.

I remember how her lips felt, her tongue, her breath smell like fresh-cut grass, and the way, despite my mouth on hers, she managed to keep saying, “Why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you come back? I waited.”

When we laid beside each other on the grass it was dark, and through the circle of leaves above us, we could see the stars starting to poke out one by one from behind the purple sky. From some distance, a rich old voice sang out the opening notes of a song that was popular then, “Babul Mora,” the voice went, “Naihara … ”

“Heard music is sweet, but music overheard even sweeter,” I murmured, smiling into Bakul’s hair.

“Terrible,” she murmured back. “Is this what Calcutta has done to you?”

“Afsal Mian, isn’t it?” I whispered. “He still sings.”

She shifted so that her chin rested in the hollow of my neck and I did not need her to tell me she was thinking about that night we had run back from the old ruin together and then kissed each other in an empty dark meadow, stunned by starlight and the shooting star streaking through the black sky.

* * *

When we reached the house, Nirmal Babu was sitting at the far end of the garden in the darkness. The red point of his cigarette drew us to him.

“I have to go,” I said to his starlit face as he patted a place on the swing next to him.