Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

“You don’t understand … ” I began.

“Enough!” he thundered. “I understand everything! You locked up all your money in this house; you did not sell it, who knows why? Everyone says it is because you want to support this other family. And meanwhile, what about my daughter? She has to move from her own house, sell half the things we gave her for her wedding, and live in discomfort in rented rooms. What more do I need to understand?”

“Can I speak to her?” I said, my voice as loud as his by this time.

“Do you think she wants to speak to you?”

“Let her decide that.”

“Come back once you sell that house,” he said in clipped tones. “That is the only thing she asks. Meanwhile, there is no need to speak to her.”

“My son,” I said. “Where is my son?”

“Come back for him when you’re fit to be a father,” he said, and took up his newspaper as if I were no longer in the room.

I got up angrily from my chair and went to the door. As I bent down to put on my shoes I saw my wife standing at the side door of the room. She had been listening to our conversation. I started towards her, but she drew back, almost as if she were frightened. She opened her mouth to say something, but then a shadowy form passed the opened door beyond her and she seemed to jump. Quickly, she turned away, retreating into the other room.

I retraced my steps to the front courtyard. This time it was not empty. My son was playing on the verandah. With him was another little boy. They were about the same age, almost three. My son had a pebble in his little fist. He carefully laid it down and then got up and walked to the edge of the verandah, picked up another pebble from a pile and laid it next to the first.

I stared, mesmerised by the intricacies of the game which occupied him. I forgot the existence of the other boy and the servant woman who was sitting by them. My son looked up at me once and then went back to his game. I couldn’t tell if he was sulking or did not recognise me. When one of his pebbles rolled off the side of the verandah, I stooped and picked it up. He laid out his tiny palm, pink and creased, the palm I had loved to hold to my nose, blow on, tickle.

“Golu,” I said, wheedling, “Goutam, look who’s here! Your Baba!” I smiled, holding out my arms.

“His name is Akshay,” the servant woman smiled. “Call him Akshay and he’ll come.”

I placed the pebble in his palm and closed his fist. He looked at his fist with a frown and tottered back to his game.

I strode out of the courtyard, feeling loops and loops of barbed wire tightening around my heart.

I sat for a long time that day by the side of the town’s pond, staring at the date palm and banana trees that shadowed the water at its edges, the steps which disappeared into the water, the two shiny brown boys who were splashing in and out at the other end. When it was time for the evening train, I got up, shook out my clothes, and walked away.

In the early days of my marriage, I found the idea of separation and solitude frightening. There was one particularly bitter quarrel my wife and I had — I forget the cause — and in the end I had stormed out of the house saying, “I’m not coming back”. When I did, hours later, she was not at home, although it was late in the evening. I remember how a quiet pit of fear had opened inside me as I thought, This time she really has gone back to her parents.

Now that our separation was real, curiously I felt no fear, and after those first bad months I even began to feel a guilty contentment. I came back after work to the empty room on the roof. I cooked some daal and rice, and having eaten it, sat alone on the terrace feeling the city throb below me while I looked up at the stars from my little oasis, drinking rum, feeling the familiar languor spread by degrees to my fingertips. If I went to the parapet of the terrace I could see the trams moving like lit caterpillars, pinging the wires above, and the squares of yellow lamplight in the houses around me. Three floors down was the road, where I could see the busy shadows of anonymous pigmy people on errands I did not need to know about.

My solitude was absolute. I spoke to labourers and contractors and building owners during the day, but apart from professional talk I had no dealings with anyone at all. My neighbours side-stepped me, thinking me an evil man who had not only driven his wife away, but who also drank. This did not bother me. On the rare days I was overwhelmed by my solitude, I went to a crowded Muslim restaurant in Dharmatolla and ate rezala and roti, soaking in the clamour along with the grease.

Everything seemed to have become much simpler. I had the space to think or to daydream. I bought books again, after years, and began to read. On impulse, when I was walking past a market one day and saw some music shops, I went in and bought a bamboo flute with a rich, resonant timbre. I managed, after several attempts, to play the Sibelius melody on it. My terrace was immediately transformed into Mrs Barnum’s garden and I felt as if Bakul were listening to me from some dark corner.

When winter came and the mosquitoes disappeared in the cold, I put my cot out on the terrace and lay there as I drank, looking up at the black, sooty, half-lit dome of the sky. One such night I saw a shooting star and returned in my mind to the flaming trail of light Bakul and I had seen in the sky years ago. What if it had been a spaceship? What if its space people had touched her and me with their magic that evening, with their rays or vibrations? Changing us forever?

Perhaps I should go and surprise Bakul in her marital home in Bombay. But what would I say to her face to face? What if she looked cold and distant, as she sometimes did, and asked why I had come?

If she did, I would make an excuse, say work had brought me to Bombay.

She would make polite conversation and might even give me tea. We would talk about Bombay, the potato prices, her husband’s job, then say goodbye. Her baby (she must have had one) would begin to wail. She would say she had work to do. Her husband would appear and ask her who I was.

I would go to Bombay on the train the next week. I would make an excuse, say work had brought me there, and Bakul, eyes dancing, would say, Lies! You came to see me! Admit it! I would pull her to me and it would feel as if there had been no years and no other people in between.

I would go to Bombay, and as I stood somewhere on the street trying to puzzle out where her house was, Bakul would tap me on the shoulder. I would start to say I’ve come to work and she would interrupt, I knew you’d come looking for me one day.

I smiled to myself in the dark and took out the sliver of mica that stayed with me in my wallet these days as a Songarh keepsake. I lit a match and watched the mica flicker in its flame, then lit my cigarette with it.

Downstairs, the forlorn son of the drunken man called out “Baba? Baba! Where are you?” as on every other night. His voice faded and then returned, faded and then returned again. And then stopped.

* * *

Two years passed this way. I was beginning to find more and more independent work. Aangti Babu, all said and done, had taught me the trade, and now I was a tough businessman. I could intimidate people into abandoning their houses. I could bribe government officials with ease. I could bully labourers into carrying more headloads than contracted. I could hold back payment from shrivelled-up, starving workmen if they missed a day. I developed a nose for buying and selling property and an ear for gossip about old mansions that had begun falling apart. I was making more money than I knew what to do with. I sent a generous monthly amount to my wife. Each month, along with the money, I wrote a brief letter: what work I was doing, the weather. For some time I had thought our separation would be temporary, and she would return, forgetting our last bad year. I had never intended driving her away, never imagined I would lose my son, and that she would be embittered enough to change his name. My letters were never answered. She had always been a diffident and reluctant writer, her alphabet round, childish, pressed hard into the paper. The thought also crossed my mind that perhaps my father-in-law, seeing I had ignored his ultimatum, was withholding both letters and money from my wife and she knew nothing of them. If that were so, my betrayal must to her have seemed too terrible for forgiveness.