Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

After he had drained his cup, he wandered into the garden. Now, where there had been weeds and bathua, there grew a soft carpet of doob grass. The kitchen garden was dark with the enormous, olive-coloured warts of jackfruit clinging to the sides of the tall trees. Green coconut clustered far above and sometimes the afternoon quiet exploded with the noise of their falling. The saplings had seemed tiny when they were planted, impossible to imagine those twigs with four or five leaves storing the power to soar thirty feet. Their branches now jostled for space, and the sky was barely visible through the canopy the leaves had created high above.

In the shadow of these trees was a low swing-seat, and it was here that Amulya came that evening, as on all others, after he had walked all around his garden. Usually he inspected each tree in turn, noting every new bud, every yellowing sapling that had given up the attempt, every cutting that had begun to hold up its head. He would look at them tenderly, wanting to stroke and pat them as if they were pet animals. He had created a garden where there had been wilderness. He had cleared weeds, planted fruit trees, flowering shrubs, and creepers. He had not been indiscriminate, however. He had disdained the flamboyance of pink kachnar, the rich orange of tecoma. Instead, he had planted his garden with flowers that would gleam white in the darkness and scent the night-time air. His only concession to colour was low bushes of the yesterday-today-tomorrow, the Franciscea hopeana he had found with great difficulty, which turned from purple to almost white over three days, perfuming the air around it. The rest of the garden had pure whites: a spreading Magnolia grandiflora , its petals creamy against shining green leaves, the snowy blooms of Jasminum pubescens tumbling over the well area, and a Jasminum sambac to provide scent and flowers for Kananbala’s gods. A few gardenias. Two shefalikas, which he thought of as Nyctanthes arbortristis , that let fall showers of their small, scented flowers — orange-stemmed, but that brief appearance of colour beneath white petals was pardonable as a kind of poetry. Against the wall he had put Cestrum nocturnum , said to harbour snakes, but Amulya was willing to risk poisoning for the fragrance of its white sprays of flowers.

That evening, though, he failed to notice that the buds on the gandharaj were beginning to open and that the mango would very soon burst into flower. He could think of nothing but that tiny bastard baby swaddled in a torn, brownish sari, and of its mother, who had stopped it crying by wrapping her sari around it and putting its mouth to her breast with an ease that seemed born of weeks rather than days of practice. She had been apathetic, almost sleepy, until the time came to part with it. And then she had begun a series of gasping, high-pitched sobs that had lasted throughout the tonga ride back from the far-off orphanage into town. Now, hours later, it was still her sobs he heard, not the birdcalls of dusk. He had gazed stoically at the road as Ramcharan hissed, “Shut your weeping, you stupid woman!” while the tongawallah had spoken throughout the ride only to his horse as if oblivious, or disapproving, of his passengers and their unholy errand.

I’ll have to look after that baby, Amulya said to himself, settling into the garden bench, taking out his pipe and hunting in his pocket for matches. There’s no other way. The fees … better remember to tell the office to pay the orphanage on time. Then he wondered if he needed to add the business of the fees to his will, stipulating that it should be paid for as long as required. He made a mental note that it had best be done. No need to tell anyone at home about the child though, not even Kamal. No need to expose them to something so unsavoury.

From the upstairs verandah Kananbala could see the white of his cotton kurta, smudged in the fading colours of the evening. She never broke into his evening solitude in the garden, but that day, powered by some urge she could not have identified, she went towards him, barefoot on the grass. He did not see her come, and when she was before him, asking, “What are you thinking?” he looked up as if bewildered by her presence. It took him a moment to focus on her face, his eyes at first as startled as if he were looking at a stranger. Then he replied, “Oh, it’s you. What is it?” And then, as she said nothing, he returned to mapping out the financial arrangements for the orphan, sucking on his pipe as he visualised the columns of his bank book.

Kananbala stood there a minute or two, and then turned to walk back to the house, wanting Amulya to call out to her, half expecting him to. But he did not. She looked back once at his still, angular frame, a shadow on the garden bench, lost to her. He might as well have been one of his trees, she thought, walking away. The few hundred feet separating the upstairs verandah from the garden bench became a vastness impossible to cross.

* * *

In October that year, they had their first house guests after a seven-year interval. Relatives were visiting from Calcutta for the puja holidays: there was Amulya’s cousin, his wife, and three children. Kananbala, unused to visitors, had spent all of September planning for their arrival. She was more anxious than eager, she discovered, but could not admit it to anyone. Amulya would have said, “You’re always complaining. You say you’re lonely, then when visitors come, you say you don’t want them.”

So Kananbala complained to herself. More and more, she found solace in talking to herself. She found she could effortlessly become two people and have conversations that sometimes went on a whole afternoon.

There was an additional worry. The relatives had come with a marriage proposal. Nirmal was twenty-four now, and he had just got himself a job in the district college teaching history. It did not pay very much, but it was a government college, and besides, he was the son of a reasonably wealthy man, which made him an eligible groom.

“Why put off something that needs doing? He’s old enough. What’re you waiting for? I tell you, Amulya, gentle, shy, good girls are as hard to find as …” — Amulya’s cousin was picking at the fish on his plate — “as good, fresh river fish in Songarh!” He laughed at his little joke, then, noticing no answering smile, explained in a conciliatory tone, “Boudi’s cooking is wonderful, but what can you do about the fish you get here? It just is not the same as … ”

“Yes, not the same as fish from the Ganga,” Amulya said, trying not to sound testy. The visit was nearing its end and he had heard the fish commented upon several times.

“Nihar’s niece — you remember Nihar, don’t you?”

“I remember.”

“Well, Nihar’s niece — is her name Shanti or Malati? — Shanti, yes, Shanti — she’s sixteen, and from what I hear, a pleasant, home-loving girl. I met her a few years ago, pretty girl. And what a house her father has, on a riverbank. Beautiful! It’s a well-to-do, good family, same caste as us, naturally. Nirmal could not pick better … this tomato chutney, it’s good, but I think there’s nothing like chutney … ”

“Made from Calcutta’s green mangoes? Yes, I agree,” Amulya said.

The cousin looked a little unsettled, but only for a minute. “If you like,” he continued, “I’ll go back to Calcutta and make some cautious enquiries. What do you say? I’ll write to you as soon as I find out what they think. Then Nirmal can go off and see the girl. I can go with him, it is Nirmal’s wedding after all!” The cousin drank a glass of water with noisy satisfaction and rose.

“But this place you live in,” Kananbala’s visiting sister-in-law said later that evening, picking up a shingara and biting into the warm crust, “I don’t know, but I couldn’t live here — in Songarh, I mean. Yes, I know, it’s clean and empty and Calcutta is dirty and crowded and noisy. But the crowds and noise keep me alive! It’s so soundless here, I thought for a moment I’d gone deaf!” Kananbala’s sister-in-law looked in her direction and said, “And I don’t think it’s doing you much good either.”