Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

It was not as though I had not been trying. I got little bits of work as an overseer as I waited for business opportunities that never came. Often, Aangti Babu handed me these odd jobs with a sarcastic, smug air. But now that I was in theory an independent contractor, I was without his monthly salary, and uncertainty clouded our days. In the weeks when I had nothing lined up, I would say I was going to work and leave the house to walk around the city, sleeping on the benches in the Maidan, eating jhaal muri and not much else. Around me, tall chestnut horses munched the soft, green grass and boys in whites ran about with ball and bat shouting to each other in breaking voices. I would feel myself uncurl a little, borrow some of the pleasure the horses took in their grass, the boys in their game. In the cool dark beneath a tree I would lie cradling my head in the crook of my elbow, looking at the world from beneath and wondering if it had a place for me.

Things had to improve, I told myself. Everyone said businesses took a long time to start up. I would soon save enough to make the kind of investments that would take me to where Aangti Babu was. At times I found myself fantasising about building a little house for Nirmal Babu and Bakul in their garden, and selling off the rest of the property. Surely they would understand my necessity. At other times, on the more miserable days, I would decide to sell the Songarh property back to Aangti Babu as anonymously as I had bought it. If he still wanted it. But then if I got a few months of work overseeing somewhere, I discarded that thought. Sometimes I got work as a subcontractor outside Calcutta, in smaller towns, and being away from home gave me some relief.

Every hour of every day through all those days, I thought of Bakul, the yearning yielding to calmer thoughts sometimes, at other times causing a frenzy made unbearable because it could not be spoken. I knew I had lost a wife, but I knew too that she was at home with my child and that all these contrary things together were now inescapably my life. It was the futility of it, I think, that prevented me even trying to write to Nirmal Babu or Bakul. The knowledge that they were safe because they were in my house sustained me through it all, but if I wrote to them, what could I possibly say?

* * *

When we had a little extra money some weeks later from these subcontracts, we took Goutam to a specialist for his skin allergy. My wife was more sullen than usual. We waited without speaking for the doctor to call us, knowing we would quarrel if we spoke. He was the kind of doctor who has magazines in his waiting room, and I picked one up. It had a picture of a beautiful woman on the cover. I turned the pages, not reading, not looking with any attention at the fantasy life its pages revealed. Then I stopped on one page at a small advertisement for cold cream. I looked at it closer, with disbelief. The face with the perfect pink complexion looked very like Bakul’s.

Those days I often caught myself looking with hope and expectation at a particular back or shoulder on roads, buses, trams, when from a distance it seemed to belong to Bakul. When the woman turned and I saw the face of a stranger instead, my disappointment was disproportionate. This picture came closer than any of the others I had mistaken for her. It was not Bakul in every respect. The hair was too tidy. The skin was too pink, and she never smiled like that. I could not see her crooked tooth either, or perhaps it was on the other side of her face.

“What is that you are looking at with such attention?” my wife said in derisory tones. “Pretty woman, isn’t she?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, turning the pages, feigning indifference. I had not realised my wife had been studying my face.

“Every woman is pretty when she doesn’t have to sweep and swab and fill water all day. Then men think of them as apsaras.”

“Come along,” I said, impatient. “Can’t a man even look through a magazine without criticism? Do you know how you sound?”

I had just returned from a fortnight-long, hot, wearying trip sorting out problems at a site for a government school, where I had stood for days on end in the blinding sun. I had come to the doctor’s almost straight from the station. I felt unprepared for squabbles with my wife. But she was full of suppressed rage, having had to cope with our ill, cranky baby all that time alone. She would not stop.

“Hmph. Men turn strange at your age. I know that. Binu’s mother was telling me she found bad pictures on her brother-in-law’s shelf, under his clothes. And imagine, he is a forty-year-old father of two. Hari, Hari,” my wife exclaimed. Then she shifted in her seat, moving the sweaty baby to her other shoulder. “I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for this doctor. And what’s the use? None of them have been any good.”

“He’s the best skin specialist in Calcutta,” I said. “Where else can we go?”

In the flutter that occurred when the doctor popped his face out of his room and told us to enter, I managed to tear out the page from the magazine and put it in my pocket. Even if it was not Bakul, it felt as if I had her closer to me with that picture in my pocket. I could look at it at leisure.

After we returned home and put the exhausted baby to bed, I slid the picture into my cupboard beneath papers and bills where my wife would never notice it. I washed myself at the tap on the terrace and then, bare-bodied and refreshed, went to find something to wear. The cold mugfuls of water that I had poured over my body and head had made me regain my temper. “Is the food done?” I called out to my wife as I crossed the hot terrace on tiptoe, “I’m hungry, haven’t eaten home food for a whole fortnight!” My few clothes, now looking quite worn, were in a washed pile at the foot of the bed. I tossed them aside one by one, looking for a kurta thin enough for the still, sweaty day.

My wife called out from the kitchen, “Are you there? The rice is done, come and eat.” She was repentant after her earlier tirade, and solicitous.

But now I could hardly breathe, let alone reply. My hands trembled. I sat on the bed to calm myself, not noticing the pile of clothes beneath me.

I heard her say, “Just like you to take your time after forcing me to hurry the food, and now I am waiting with the hot rice, and me up since dawn and unslept half the night with this squalling child … ”

Buried underneath the pile of clothes I had found a letter, put there by my wife while I was away. It was no more than a hurried scribble in Nirmal Babu’s hand which said, “I’m sorry, this is sudden, but I hope you and your family can come. It won’t be complete without you. There are still two weeks. We will talk when you are here, and I will tell you all the details.”

The letter was folded around a stiff card printed in the obligatory red with the usual stain of auspicious turmeric on one corner.

It invited me to Bakul’s wedding.

The wedding had taken place the day before, when I was on the train back to Calcutta.

I stared at the card longer than I knew, and though my vision had clouded over, what the card said was clear as daylight. Bakul now was a married woman.

* * *

A white heap of rice steamed before me, one side of it cascading with yellow daal, the other side still pristine. A bowl with one small piece of fish in a red turmeric gravy, a green chilli topping it, stood by my plate. My wife sat beside me, her fingers deep in her heap of rice, which was already half gone.

“What is it?” Her voice startled me out of my thoughts. “Home food not to your taste after all? I even managed to get fish.” She looked hurt more than annoyed, and this shook me out of the stupor induced by the wedding card. I broke open my rice pile and began to mix a part of it with daal. In honour of my return, there was a vegetable as well. We never had all this at a single meal these days; she must have saved her household money over the period I was away.