Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

I knew she was crying inaudibly into her pillow at the thought of leaving our tree-fringed home, but I had begun to believe my story. Often, I told myself, events showed you the way. I had always been insecure about the house, living in it and not really owning it. Why should my life — and now my family’s life — be spent in a house on loan? Now my dilemma was morally urgent too: how could I stand by as Nirmal Babu, who had brought me up, was made homeless?

* * *

I went to work the next day with some trepidation, wondering if Aangti Babu would agree to my plan. All morning I got up from my chair each time I heard someone enter the two-room office, but he did not come in until the afternoon. I waited by the door. He gave me an unsmiling grunt of recognition when he arrived and said, “Into my room. In five minutes.”

He did not ask me to sit down this time. He busied himself extracting a paan from his box and then stuffing it into his already reddened mouth. Then, his mouth filled with betel juice, he waved me to the chair and mumbled sounds I interpreted as, “Sit down, tell me the news, are they out of the house?” Harold, Bhim & Co. were not back from Songarh, so he could not know of my perfidy yet.

I told him what in essence I had been inspired by in the train: I wanted an exchange. He could have my Calcutta house, far more valuable than an old house in a small town, if he gave me the one in Songarh. On condition that nobody knew of the exchange. It was to seem just a simple sale. And he would give me money to make up the difference in value between the two houses, so that I would have the capital to start my own business. I spoke too fast, somewhat breathless, but what I said was lucid and my tongue did not get tangled up as my thoughts made their way into words.

Aangti Babu had been wiping his bald, sweaty head with his usual grimy handkerchief. He had been offhand rather than attentive when I began to speak.

But soon enough he was looking at me, a slow, cunning smile curling a side of his mouth. He gestured at me to stop, picked up his stained brass spitoon shaped like the face of a woman with her mouth open, aimed a stream of red spittle into it, then wiped his mouth. I looked away, queasy despite being accustomed to his habits. Two thin lines of red betel juice were now engraved into the wrinkles near his mouth. He scratched the back of his neck and then examined his nails as he spoke.

“So,” he said, measuring out each word, “do I understand you right?” And he repeated precisely what I had said to him.

I wanted him to agree to my proposition, of course. But as his protégé I had thought, or perhaps just hoped against my better judgment, that he would have my welfare at heart. Even as I put my idea to him that day, I had expected him to dissuade me, to say, “Mukunda, don’t be a fool. It’s a stupid deal and I’m warning you off it because I have your interests at heart. If it were anyone else I’d have held my tongue and let him diddle himself.”

But he agreed without hesitation and said, trying hard not to look crafty, “That’s intelligent, Mukunda, very clever. You’ll be getting a huge property, with lots of unbuilt land, and it’ll appreciate enormously. And I’ve been thinking for a while that the time’s really ripe for you to start off on your own. I’ve taught you all I can, you know. You’ll go far, Mukunda, mark my words! As for this small old house in a Calcutta bylane that you’re offering me, well, it is all so uncertain, no real papers, no deeds. Should I risk it? But perhaps I must, to help you on your way, the extra money will let you set up your own business, as you say.”

The alacrity with which he agreed made me feel relieved as well as disgusted. Suleiman Chacha’s house was in a prime location in Calcutta and he knew it. Possession was ownership as well as nine-tenths of the law, one of the tenets of his trade which he had instilled in me. And after six years, even if an absentee Muslim’s heirs turned up, what chance would they have against Aangti Babu and his thugs? He would have the house sold and the money pocketed in two months flat. In exchange for this virtual certainty in his favour, from Aangti Babu’s point of view I was taking on the opposite: risking possession of a disputed house in a provincial town that might never fulfil its grandiose prophecies. Aangti Babu did not want to know the reasons for my lunacy. He may have been curious, he may well have had his surmises. But he wanted the sale and exchange done before I saw the light and changed my mind. He was the embodiment of diplomacy, behaving as if I had just proposed a life-changing deal for myself. I had, but not in the way he thought.

Despite his haste, however, he managed to make me lower the amount I wanted for the Calcutta house, so that I was left with less than I had expected.

Any innocent belief of mine in his wanting to act out of some fatherly or mentoring impulse towards me was dispelled, but as I walked out of his room, what dominated my feelings was immense relief: Nirmal Babu and Bakul’s future was in my hands. The ownership papers of 3 Dulganj Road would soon be mine. My childhood home was safe; it would not go to strangers to be broken down and built upon.

A few days later, when it had all been formalised, I sat down at the table I had along the corridor at Aangti Babu’s office and began to compose a letter. “Dear Nirmal Babu,” I wrote, “It is difficult to explain all this, but by chance I discovered I know the property dealer who bought your house from Kamal Babu and I have been able to persuade him … ”

I redrafted the letter seven times. It was ready to be posted only at the end of the day. My letter made it clear that Nirmal Babu need not think about looking for other living arrangements for at least as long as I had a say in the matter, and that I expected this state of affairs to obtain indefinitely. He would be able to live on at Dulganj Road without worry. By return of post there was a letter from him, alternately bewildered, grateful, curious, and apologetic, struggling to retain his dignity. He seemed to have believed and accepted what I had said in my letter to him. His reply confirmed the house was no longer besieged and expressed great gratitude to me, mixed with perplexity, that the days of harassment were over for Bakul and him. I felt sorry for him, and I put his letter aside without sending a reply.

* * *

Our move from Suleiman Chacha’s house was not without trauma, even for me. My wife and I fought bitterly over what to take with us. I did not want to part with Suleiman Chacha’s books, which had become old friends; my wife was determined to sell them to a secondhand dealer. Noorie had never endeared herself to my wife, who was not amused at being called names and sometimes pecked. But I shouted down her pleas to give the bird away or set it free. My wife wanted to take some heavy bits of furniture with us that she had been given as dowry, but I knew our new home would be too small for four-poster beds and enormous carved cupboards. All evening battle raged. If I gave in and said yes to a cupboard, I blackmailed her about Chacha’s desk. We went to sleep silent and fuming and woke up sullen with stored-up rage.

Despite it all, I was intoxicated at being Bakul’s saviour, knowing she was safe in her own home because of me, that even if absent I was looking after her. Those few hours with her in Songarh had changed me irrevocably and I knew I could not live the rest of my life as I had been living it the past few years. I felt something fundamental in my personality shifting and reshaping itself. I was now consoled by the thought that human beings were made to love many people. I did not try to explain it to anyone; I clutched at it almost as a kind of epiphany, some divine illumination that had chosen to shine on me alone. After all, did we not love our parents, our siblings, our friends, our spouses, and our children simultaneously and in different ways? If at that moment my wife had announced that she loved another man as well, in addition to me, I was sure I would have been happy for it, because I was certain that I could — I would — love both my wife and Bakul in different ways. I saw it as my destiny. This was fortification against the guilt and sorrow that attacked me when I saw the pain I was causing my wife and the pain my son was too little to know I was causing him. I was never going to abandon my wife and child, of this I was sure. The thought of my world without Bakul may have become inconceivable, but equally the thought of life without my baby boy was a sterile vastness I could not bear to contemplate.