Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Chachi glowered at him and said, “Why go over all this now?” She was casting furtive looks around her, in case anyone had heard him.

“I didn’t expect the old house to be there, only your Chachi did. She kept saying … ”

“ … All I had thought was that the house would have Mukunda’s children playing about in it.” She threw Chacha an angry glance. “Women my age want to be grandmothers to someone! That’s all I said, nothing about the house. I know these years have been hard for everyone.” She, like him, seemed desperate to make excuses for my wrongdoing.

“ … but never mind, these are futile things,” Chacha said. “It’s been so many years, a lifetime. What could we have expected? You have a life to live, could you have waited forever?”

“What will you do now?” I asked him. “Will you stay on here in Calcutta? I can find you work. You could work with me. If you don’t want to work, it’s all right, I will look after you. I have nobody else, Suleiman Chacha, let me! Come and live with me for a change!”

I was looking at their tired faces with desperate urgency. Nothing else seemed more vital for me now than to look after them. First I would take them to my terrace room and make their beds and cook them hot rice and daal. Then, after they had rested the night, I would look for a house with enough space for the three of us, like before. I would not let Chacha work, I would buy him books and music and watch him live a life of leisure. I would buy Chachi pretty saris and a harmonium. She had always wanted a harmonium. We would live together, as we had before. I would make it up to them.

Chacha looked at me with an amused smile. He stroked his bald head. “I don’t know, Mukunda. I’ve just come, let me see. I have some people to see first, friends we have not met for so many years … Bashir, you remember, who lives in Tollygunj? We have told him we’re coming.”

I looked down, disconsolate.

“Why do you say you have no-one?” Chacha asked with concern. “Have you not married? Don’t you have any children?”

I rubbed my hands over my eyes and lied to them about my wife and my son: I said they were having to live in the village because I had to travel so often and Calcutta’s climate was no good for my son’s skin allergy. Chachi’s eyes scrutinised my face so hard I had to turn away. “Once we are settled here again,” she said, “I’ll make some neem oil to massage the child with. This is no way for a young family to live, separately, and you looking so terrible.”

The waiter in the restaurant began to give us exasperated looks, wiping our table every now and then to make us get up. Chacha sighed and stirred.

“It’s quite late,” he said, looking at Chachi with a raised eyebrow. “We ought to go, I am not sure I will find Bashir’s house easily after so long.”

I picked up the trunk with the roses when they got up to leave. They had a few other bundles that Chachi anxiously counted. She looked up at me and touched me again on the cheek saying, “Don’t blame yourself, what else could you have done? At least you waited all these years. There are those who sold homes while the pillows were still warm from their owners’ heads.”

We walked to their bus stop. The crowds had grown and the evening air was stewy thick and yellow with lamplight. I screwed up my eyes, peering into the distance, and said to Suleiman Chacha, “Let me get you a taxi. Don’t go in a bus.”

“Arre bhai, Mukunda, when have I ever taken a taxi?” Chacha laughed, “I wouldn’t know how to direct one either … can’t find my way about, everything so changed! What number bus should I take? Is it still … ”

I saw their bus lurching over the cobbled tramlines in the distance, behind two others, and said, “It’s coming. It’ll take you straight to Tollygunj.”

Chacha asked, almost shyly, “There was just one thing — I was wondering … about Noorie …?”

Chachi said, “Come on, how long does a parrot live?”

“She was happy,” I said. “She was happy and healthy, but would keep asking for you the way she did when you were here.”

“And then?” Chacha looked at me with trepidation.

I began to confess before he could ask, “Chacha … I am … ”

The traffic signal changed and their bus surged in our direction.

“It’s alright,” he shouted, making his way towards the bus. “She was happy with you! That’s enough.”

“Chacha!” I called out in the confusion, “What’s Bashir’s address? How will I find you? And you haven’t taken mine either!”

He had begun to climb into the bus. Someone was pushing him. He wobbled dangerously, balancing a bundle, and Chachi, frightened, grabbed his arm.

“The address, Chacha! The address!”

Suleiman Chacha pushed his head over the shoulder of another man and tried shouting out the address. The man barked irritably, “Arre Dada, if you want to chat, get off the bus and let me get in!”

I heaved their trunk in after them and lost their faces among the crowd of passengers pushing each other in their search for footholds and handholds inside. The bus began to move forward in a cloud of black fumes. I ran after it. I would climb in, go wherever they were going, I had boarded moving buses all my adult life. The rear doorway of the bus bulged with people. I managed to get a grip on the steel rod by the door and hung from it as my feet searched for a crevice on the footboard to jam in a toe. There were four other men at the door, trying to haul themselves in as well. The bus gathered speed, I felt the smooth rod slipping, I felt my feet meet the road at a run and then stumble to a stop, my arms hanging useless by my sides.

The bright lights darkened with the shadows of people who blundered mothlike against me. I stood still in the middle of the street. They milled around me, crowds of strangers who had friends and family to go home to. Beyond this street were others, and beyond those still others, a spreading web of streets, teeming with strangers, hundreds, thousands, an infinity of strangers in a city where I no longer had a friend, where nobody ever waited for me to come home.

* * *

I walked a long time that evening. I paused at Kalighat Bridge to look at the river below, dark as buffalo skin in the night, the lights it reflected struggling to wink on its scum-slicked surface. It was not water any more, but greasy, stinking, rotting sludge. I did not know why I had walked so far, all the way from Bowbazar to Kalighat. My legs ached. Unexpectedly, I was reminded of the time I flew a kite with my wife in the Maidan. It had been a winter afternoon a few months before our marriage ended. We had had a long quarrel the night before and I woke up determined to make amends. I thought I would take my wife and son out for a day in the Maidan. They never got out. I went and bought a few large kites and all the kite-flying paraphernalia from a shop down the lane. I came home and, affecting enthusiasm, said, “Come on, Sankranti is around the corner! We must fly these kites! Up, up!”

My wife had looked at me bewildered. The quarrel the night before had been only one of many that had crowded the week.

“I’m tired,” she said, “I’ve been on my feet all morning. Besides, when does a woman ever go running out to fly kites?”

“Oh come!” I said. “I’m trying to do something we’ll enjoy. We’ll get out of the house, take a tram.”

We reached the Maidan. There was hardly a breeze. My son pranced about with delight, lisping, clapping with glee, looking at the other kites that dotted the sky, waiting for ours to join them. I told my wife to pick up the kite and set it aloft so that I could pull the string and make it fly. She could not get it right, though it was a simple enough thing to do. She would let it go too low, or too soon, or simply too lackadaisically. She kept adjusting her sari and saying, “Oh Ma! Is this something a woman can manage?” Or she would look around and say, “Everyone is laughing at me. Can you see any other woman here, doing this in public? This is terrible.”