Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“A spaceship?”

“Space. Ship. That is it. Something strange flying in the sky. At that time we didn’t know what it was. We wondered: was it a shooting star? Was it a problem of vision? But no, it was circular, it was glowing, and it was floating above our camp, coming down towards the earth.”

He paused and chewed on his supari for a while.

“My labourers are praying and shouting. They will suck out our souls, these are people from heaven they say. I too, I am scared, the ship is now very low, and we can see it is neat and oval and it is not a star or anything like that. But I have to be the leader, say Calm down, men, calm down! All around us the forest has gone quiet. But everything is lit bright in white light from the spaceship. There is a low humming sound in our ears, like a vibration. At that time I knew no more about spaceships than my men, I thought it was a chariot from heaven that had come to take us.” The man paused and, with glugging sounds, drank water from a bottle he held about four inches above his open mouth.

“Then?” I said, impatient to know.

“Then? Nothing. It floated near us for some time and then it rose and went away. I met many people later and asked them, Did any of you see this thing that we saw that night? Nobody, nobody saw a thing. People started to think of me as a little, you know … ” He tapped the side of his head with a forefinger. “If my labour had not been with me and seen it too, I would also think I am … ” and he tapped his forehead again.

When I woke up in the morning, the train had already been standing at Songarh station for a while. The fat man and his rabbit were gone. If not for the lingering odour of mango pickled in mustard oil, I would have doubted both his existence and that of the spaceship. Had Bakul and I seen what the man had seen that time, long years ago in the starry field? Was it as many as fourteen years ago? In my mind the image of that evening — the light in the sky, Bakul’s proximity and our shared terror — was so vivid it seemed as yesterday.

* * *

Outside the station was the familiar rank of tongas, their horses and their drivers hooded with shawls. Although it was already hot and uncomfortable in Calcutta, here on Songarh’s high plateau surrounded by forest it was only the end of a chilly spring, and I shivered when my tonga gathered speed and air on the slope down to Dulganj Road. I had decided I would not waste time going to a hotel first. What if I narrowly missed her?

The tonga turned the corner into Dulganj Road. It was empty in the half-light, with the sky still struggling between night and day at the western edge while the east was bloodshot. I was reminded of standing out on the terrace on a Saraswati puja dawn one cold January many years ago, waiting for Bakul and her relatives, not allowed to enter the puja room during the prayers. I paid off the tongawallah some distance from the house and heard it clopping away. I was alone on the road, but for two labourers huddled near a tea shop in mud-coloured shawls. I could almost hear the dew dripping from the leaves and grass in the profound peace of the dawn. Somewhere a tentative brainfever bird was trying out its voice, unused since winter. I noticed that the roadsides were piled at intervals with shining slabs of mica. Until my companion’s discourse of the night before, I had hardly noticed it. I picked up a tiny sliver of mica and put it into my pocket as a charm.

I walked in the direction of the house. My feet dragged. I was not able to think any more of what I would say to Bakul when — if — I saw her. The man in the train kept winking and grinning at me, tapping his forehead. I reached the gate and looked in. There were no obvious signs of a recent wedding — no tent up in the garden, no piles of folding chairs, no rubbish from the feast. Perhaps the ceremony and the dinner had taken place elsewhere, not at the house.

I put my hand on the latch, and at the same moment a window opened on the first floor of the house, first one shutter and then the other. I could see a flash of orange as Bakul leaned out to open the second shutter. I thought I caught a glimpse of loose hair and a corner of her face. Something flashed in the first rays of sunlight that must have been gold.

Before she could see me, I wheeled around and hid next to the wall, my heart thudding against my chest hard enough to stop my breath. When I was sure she was gone from the window, I walked away, then half ran from Dulganj Road, past Mrs Barnum’s house, past the new houses, past the tea shop with the peasants — now four of them, not two — past the corner where Nirmal Babu’s office used to be. I could not think rationally about leaving without seeing her, speaking to her, when I had come so far. I had come to see her, but to encounter her as someone else’s wife? I could not bring the journey to its logical conclusion.

* * *

There was nothing for me in Songarh, but I could not bear to go back to Calcutta. I stayed on in the cheap room I had booked myself into for the next couple of days, lying in bed, alternating between a dead, stunned doze full of troubled dreams and long wakefulness. I did not want to eat or get up. I felt as if I would not be able to move my body from the bed even if I tried, as though it had a separate, stone-like weight I would not be able to heave out. I did not want to bathe or brush my teeth. I did not care that, with barely any savings, I could scarcely afford to pay for a hotel. I was cold in Songarh without winter clothing, so I lay shivering under a threadbare quilt all day, refusing to open the window to let in the sun.

I felt as if, having been loved, I had now been cast into the dustbin of the unloved; out of the cool shade into the putrefying sun, out from shelter into the wilderness. I knew well enough even in that darkness and confusion that Bakul was blameless, yet I felt as if she had abandoned me.

* * *

I am not sure how long I stayed at the hotel. It felt an eternity of misery. Eventually I dragged myself home, too tired and disoriented to make up excuses to trot out to my wife.

When I opened the staircase door and reached our terrace, the first thing I noticed was that Noorie’s cage was open and she was not in it. The terrace stretched out barren and empty in the sun without her.

The next thing I saw was that our door had its big brass lock on it. When I went down the stairs to the neighbour with whom we usually left the key, she gave me a strange look and handed it over with a note. She shut the door on me without a word, which was unusual. My wife and I always made fun of her garrulity.

“I am going home,” the note said. No more. She had not bothered to seal the folded square of paper within an envelope to keep our neighbours from gossiping.

My wife could not have taken Noorie to the village with her. She must have thought that leaving the cage door open would allow the bird to fend for herself. But how could that tame parrot have found food? She must have stayed in the cage, cowering in a corner as she used to after Suleiman Chacha left, not daring to fly out, waiting for me to arrive with green chillies and fresh water.

I fiddled with the cage and looked around for Noorie, making the chucking sounds she responded to. I squatted in a corner of the terrace, feeling the baking midday sun burn the soles of my feet. I knew it was futile. There would be no familiar flash of green. No claws would dig into my shoulder, no beak would nibble my ear and search through my hair, consoling me with squawked obscenities.

Above me, in the dirty, grey-blue Calcutta sky, rapacious kites wheeled around and cawing crows hopped along the parapet mocking each other.

* * *

I let myself into our room at last, wondering what had made my wife go away like this. She was used to my travels, and certainly to trips as long as this one. Why should she have thought this time any different?