Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

I did not want to buy a new house straightaway. Whatever money I had, I wanted to put it into a construction business, and because most of my money was locked up in the Songarh house, there wasn’t much to spend. I was worried about how much money would be available to me once I started work on my own. All I could think about was economising, so I wanted to rent something small in an area we could afford. In the end I rented two rooms in a house in Shyambazaar. There wasn’t space enough to swing a cat in there. It was a slummy area. Open drains, shared bathrooms which were dirty. We had to stand in a queue for the lavatory each morning. Then the men and children bathed at a tap in the courtyard while the women waited their turn for the solitary bathroom. There were about eleven tenant families. Street shops surrounded us. Right outside our bedroom a stall sold pakoras all evening, and the oil fumes smoked up our room if we opened our single window. By night there were crowds of drunken men milling about near the stall. Every day, from the chicken and mutton cutlet shop next door, we heard the terrified squawks of birds being slaughtered, followed by the smell of frying meat.

Then one morning my wife went into the lavatory and found that the child who had been before her had left a pile of mustard-coloured turds on the floor. My wife had squelched them.

“On the floor,” she screamed. “What kind of children do people bring up that leave shit on the floor!”

“Ooooh,” the mother of the child called out in a high voice, “my, my, aren’t we lucky to have Queen Victoria herself staying with us! Used to a mansion, isn’t she?”

“You watch what you say, Nakuler Ma,” my wife yelled in a bellowing, heavy voice that I could hear from the first floor and did not recognise.

“And what will you do? Throw us out? Husband’s a big landlord, isn’t he? Runs a big business. Very high and mighty, aren’t we now?”

Another woman joined the fray and said to my wife, “Come on, a child’s leavings aren’t impure. Haven’t you heard? A baby’s pee is pure Gangajal. You’re a mother yourself, why should you mind?”

We moved house two weeks later, as soon as I had found another place, this time around Kidderpore. It was on a busy street slashed in different directions by tramlines. All evening and all day we could hear the clanging of trambells and the honks of buses below. Far into the night, when it was still and dark and even the trams had stopped, we would lie awake listening to the forlorn cries of a boy calling out for his drunk father. “Baba, Baba? Where are you?” he would call in a high voice that came from different directions as he walked the streets looking for his father. Then, long minutes later, he would stop shouting; perhaps he had found his father lying in a stupor somewhere and dragged him home. We would fall into tired sleep at last and wake to the sound of crows cawing and the trams clanging up and down once more.

It was one room, and a makeshift kitchen, but it was away from everyone else and there was a bathroom of sorts across the roof. I hung Noorie’s cage on the roof, by the window. She seemed to screech less than she had in the poky Shyambazaar rooms. My boy could be put out on the roof on a blanket with his toys when there was shade. He gurgled with delight again. After what seemed a lifetime of never hearing the end of it, I found the new quarters had calmed my wife down a little, perhaps only because of the constant exhaustion to which our new life had subjected us, and I began to look for work.

* * *

The reprieve was brief. My wife had from the start been sceptical about the real reason for the sale of the house; now my father-in-law began to appear on our doorstep every few days to poke and pry and reinforce her qualms. The early happiness in my marriage began to dribble through my fingers as inevitably as water in a cupped palm.

Barababu had married his daughter to me because of my prospects. Despite my parentless background, despite there being no information about my caste, my father-in-law had liked — or accurately calculated — my property and prospects enough to hand her over. He did not like the change in our circumstances any more than his daughter did. “We may not be well off,” he said to me more than once, “but we kept our daughter like a maharani. She’s not used to all this hardship you’re putting her through. And why?” It was latent hostility that I sensed in him more than puzzlement. I had long suspected I had been attractive to him as a prospective son-in-law more because of Suleiman Chacha’s house than for any qualities in me.

“It’s only temporary, while I set up the business,” I said.

“But why should there be this problem with money? That’s what I don’t understand,” he badgered me. “You’ve sold a big house in such a good locality, you should be rich! Instead you’re stingy about food and I don’t see you landing any contracts. Malini says you don’t even buy fish every day any more!”

“I have the money from the sale tied up in certain investments,” I said tight-lipped, turning away to put an end to the conversation. I began to find the very sight of my father-in-law, making his way up the stairs to our terrace room, wheezing and groaning, insupportable. Everything about him began to irk me: his overlarge nose with its hairy nostrils, his receding chin, his long-lobed ears over which he looped his dirty sacred thread when he washed his hands at the tap, and most of all the way his daughter and he spoke in whispers, darting looks in my direction. After he left and my wife repeated his questions to me as if they were her own, I said, “You don’t understand about business, keep out of it and let me do what I think is right!”

“You’re always shouting at me.”

“I’m not shouting. And I’m trying to tell you something simple. Let me do my work. Don’t interfere, don’t bother me. Do I try to tell you how to cook or bring up Goutam?”

“It’s not just this time,” she continued as if she had not heard me. “I only have to speak for you to snap my head off. If I ask you to come and eat, you start shouting ‘Can’t you see I’m working, can’t a man work in peace.’” She stormed out of the room muttering, “Since my speaking about anything annoys you, I won’t speak, you wait and see.”

Long silences would descend over the house, dense, tense hours broken only by the thin wail of the baby. I would leave in a huff and go and sit by the river on the Strand and watch the boats go past, emaciated boatmen pushing poles into the water to manoeuvre their old boats. Even they were happier, I thought. They knew what their work was, they earned their food and drink. Perhaps they were lucky and had no wives. At times I was racked by self-loathing at my duplicity, at the way I was making my family suffer, but I felt — I knew — that the course of action I had taken was the only possible one. Sitting by the river one day, watching the trams go past on one side and the boats on the other, I yearned with such intensity for the time I was unencumbered and light-hearted, walking the Maidan with Arif, talking of books and girls, that I almost walked into the river in despair. Arif’s Lahore was in a different country now, as was Suleiman Chacha’s Rajshahi. They were in the past — all my friends were. I was utterly alone. How had contentment deserted me? Why was I so overcome with dissatisfaction? Was it worth anything, this changed world in which I had lost a wife and gained only a longing for something so remote, so far in my distant past?

* * *

Six months passed without much change. My wife and I spoke, but we rarely talked. Her once-smiling face had assumed a rigid sternness. She lost her temper often. My child had become cranky. He had a long attack of some skin allergy that could not be diagnosed and I found it difficult to scrape together the money for his doctors and medicines. All night he kept waking up, wailing and sobbing and scratching patches on his body and scalp that went an angry red. To see him suffering tore my heart in two. The room on the roof was a heated box in summer and to sleep on the terrace was to have a symphony of mosquitoes around us. My father-in-law had been right; we could not afford to eat the things we had been used to.