Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

* * *

I did not want to work with Aangti Babu, but I had no choice, for our work had become closely intertwined over the years. He, for his part, did not pass up any opportunity to taunt me. One day, as I left his room, he said, “So the house in Songarh did not, after all, come at a bargain price, did it?” Then he chuckled in that nasal way he had. “When will you put it to use, Mukunda? Are you a businessman? Or Mahatma Gandhi?” His eyes seemed smaller in a face that had become obese and pouchy. The years of betel chewing had stained his teeth and lips beyond redemption. He drew breath with a wheeze these days.

I thought it best not to answer him. The Songarh exchange was some years in the past now, and I had tolerated this jibe many times. Instead, I left him with a short, “I’ll be back next week, have to travel.” I stepped into the reception — Aangti Babu had prospered and made himself a reception area — and started collecting some papers from my former table that occupied one corner of it. The room’s single, brown-upholstered sofa was occupied by a grey-haired woman who sat with her head in her hands. She had not been there when I had gone into Aangti Babu’s room an hour before. She did not look up when I rustled my papers or chatted to the tea boy. When her head jerked downward in a sleepy nod, I realised she had dozed off. Despite being asleep, she kept a vigilant hand on a chipped purple trunk beside her. It was painted with red roses and green leaves, a pattern that I felt I had seen before — but then such things were common enough. I wondered what she was doing there; one hardly ever saw women in Aangti Babu’s office. I stopped whatever noise I was making so that I would not wake her, and left the building.

Minutes after I had stepped out of the door into the elbowing, sweaty rush of the street, I heard someone calling and then a hand clutched my elbow. I turned with a protest ready on my lips to see a thin, elderly man in glasses. His clothes looked worn and the bag on his shoulder was an ordinary cloth jhola. His bald head gleamed with sweat. I thought he was a party worker of some kind, and said, “Dada, I am in a hurry.” I did not want to stand there being told the benefits of being a leftist or a Congressman, not then, though such conversations often amused me.

“Don’t you recognise me, Mukunda?” the man said with a smile.

The puzzle of his face melted into place. He had shaved off his beard and that made him look completely different, but now I knew.

“Suleiman Chacha!”

Even as I said the words, I wanted to turn and run, run as far away as possible from him, and from the little woman in the waiting room with the purple trunk.

“Shall we sit and have some tea somewhere?” Chacha said. “Your Chachi is so tired.”

* * *

We did not want to talk in Aangti Babu’s office, so we picked our way through the squalor of Bowbazar’s street market in search of a suitable place. It was at its busiest: vegetables, fish, flowers, rickety chairs, birds in cages, trinkets and toys, all spilling at our feet, vendors shouting each other hoarse about the perfection of their wares. We kept losing sight of Chachi, then finding her again. I banged their trunk against people’s knees in the crowd and pretended not to hear the curses that followed. Finally we found with relief one of those little restaurants that line the streets all over Calcutta, the ones with wooden benches and greenish glasses with bubbles in them. Three such glasses stood on the greasy table before us, steaming with tea. Chacha and Chachi were eating dhakai parathas, but I felt nauseous looking at food. Did they know what I had done? Did they know I had bartered away the house they trusted me with? That it was being demolished even as we sipped our tea? The thought was insistent, but I could not bring myself to raise the subject.

I barely heard the things Suleiman Chacha said about East Pakistan and how difficult life had been there at first, and how much he had missed Calcutta. “I remembered strange things, bhai,” he was saying. “You know, the ships’ horns at night in the docks, hooting in that spectral way. I had never really noticed them when I lived here and my ears ached for them there. And the school, the children. I had thought I was tired of their stupidity and the bullying of the older boys, but I began to wonder, did Monohar eventually clear his exams? Did Sudip ever learn to spell Nizamuddin? Did Aslam migrate to East Pakistan or did he stay on in Calcutta? And that bookseller I went to on College Street, did he recover from his eczema? Nothing there seemed right, although if you come to think of it, Rajshahi is not that far … it’s home, isn’t it? It may be a hovel, but if it’s your home then you can’t stop longing for it.”

We asked for more tea. I wondered when they would bring the topic up, or should I?

At last he said, “We went to our old house, of course.” And after a bite of paratha he continued, “We went there straight from the station. Your Chachi was all agog, even though I kept warning her nine years had passed and things change.”

Chachi said, “You look a grown man now, I would not have known you in the street.”

I stared at my glass of tea. Chachi reached across the table and touched my cheek saying, “Look at you, so thin, your cheeks have gone in. And your clothes! Aren’t you married? Doesn’t anyone look after you? We wondered sometimes.”

“You never wrote to me,” I said. “Why did you not write?”

Suleiman Chacha smiled in the gentle way I remembered. “Arre bhai, Mukunda,” he said. “You have no idea what was going on. Often your Chachi and I did not know where we were going to sleep that night, or where the next meal would come from. I tried so hard to get a job, but they didn’t want schoolteachers there, especially of history.” He laughed. “I’ve become an assistant in a watch shop. Still working with time, you see, a historian of sorts!” He laughed again.

“What about your family?” I said, trying not to sound as if I resented him for returning, though at the time that was how I felt.

“What could we have expected,” he said in a resigned voice. “Everyone told us to occupy any empty house whose owners had fled. But that didn’t seem right. What if their owners returned, just as we thought we’d come home to Calcutta? We never thought we would stay there for good, so we kept living in rented rooms here and there. The family house turned out to be too crowded to give us space.”

“Family house!” Chachi said with scorn and glared at her tea as she adjusted her sari in the righteous manner women do sometimes. “What family? What house? They looked at us as if we were usurpers … even when we visited.”

Chacha said, “We went looking for our house — and there is just rubble. The space looked so big, I hadn’t thought the old house was so large.” His eyes were too apologetic to meet my own. Although the crime was mine, it was as if he were the criminal and my sins had become his.

Chachi said, “The shopkeepers next door did not know about you, but they told us to contact this Aangti Babu. It’s lucky you happened to come just now, we were about to give up.”

“I waited a long time,” I said. “But my letters got no replies … ”

“We had to move around a lot. I could get only little bits of work at first … ”

“ … then there was a financial crisis,” I said, scrabbling around for something convincing to tell him, “and I had a real problem finding the money for the bills and taxes, and then there was a chance I would lose the house to a landgrabber … ”

“We’ve lost too much to worry about losing a house,” Chacha said. “My brother, uncle and nephew were all killed in the riots, and I found out only a year later. I hunted for them for such a long time there. I heard they had been disembowelled, and then … ”