Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

The kite would not fly. It would stay aloft a few seconds then begin its precipitous dip which brought it crashing down. Perhaps I too had lost the knack, but I got more and more frustrated and scolded my wife each time she made a mistake. My son lost interest and sat on the grass, picking at it and amusing himself. After many attempts, during which she managed to tangle up a kite in her sari and tear a gash in it, I lost my temper and shouted, “You’re useless. Have you never done anything apart from housework in your life? There are women who climb trees and swim!”

I was struck with remorse as soon as the words had left my mouth and abandoned the kite string to go to her. She collapsed on the grass and began to cry. “I’m tired,” she whimpered. “I’ve been working all day, my legs ache, I can’t run any more, I’m tired.”

* * *

I stayed up late that night, tidying in a frenzy. My cupboard had not been cleaned for years. I made a big bundle of old clothes so torn and filthy that I could not imagine a beggar accepting them. I threw in the few saris my wife had left behind. I paused some moments over my son’s clothes from when he was newborn. He would be nearly six now, and I had not set eyes on him since he was three. But then I stuffed those into the bundle as well. The kitchen shelves were stacked with dusty, mouldy containers of greyed spices, damp papads stuck to each other, and unidentifiable powdery things in paper packets crawling with weevils. I threw them all out. Cockroaches skittered out from their long-undisturbed hideouts. I stacked all the utensils neatly in a corner and stood gazing at them for a while. There was the brass kashi my wife and I had bought together at a mela. The grinding stone I had had carved with a smiling fish especially for her. I put aside the silver jhinuk I had bought just after my son’s birth to feed him milk with. We had hardly ever used it; he had gone straight from breast to glass.

I went to the other room and pulled all the books from the shelves onto the floor and began to sort them. Most of them were Suleiman Chacha’s. He had read bits out to me from many of them, and all were annotated in his fine handwriting. Letters fell from a couple, a dried-up leaf from another. Stuck between books on the shelves were statements of accounts to Aangti Babu, across one of which I had scrawled: “Must tell him, we can get the old man out of the Dharmatolla house for less. Also, cheque for Sushanta may bounce.” In one of the books I had written in English, “Dear Suleiman Chacha, with best wishes for your birthday, many happy returns, Mukunda.”

Amongst the books, in a brown envelope, was my Intermediate exam certificate. And a letter from Nirmal Babu, his last before I cut off contact with him.

My dear Mukunda,

I am so very pleased to hear you have passed your exams. When I told Bakul about it she laughed, and wouldn’t believe me until I showed her your letter. What are your plans now? I hope you will carry on and do a B.A. and then study further. Education is really the best thing life can offer. Now look, I am lecturing you, but forgive me, I’m an old man. I’ve known you since you were a child. You were a bright-eyed, clever boy and now you’re turning out to be an intelligent, well-read man. It makes me stupidly emotional to see you’ve reached this milestone in your life. I wish we could have celebrated it together, but I hardly travel now. Perhaps you will come to Songarh one day to see us all, and then we will talk of old times. Meanwhile, when you know where you are going to stay, send me your address so that I can visit you if I ever I come to Calcutta.

My love and blessings,

Nirmal Babu

P.S. I am enclosing a little cheque, please use it to buy yourself something nice as a present. Why do you ask me to stop sending you money now and then? I do it out of affection.

I do not know when I finally slept that night, sprawled amidst the debris. My head ached, my eyes hurt, I wanted never to wake up again. But the cawing of the crows broke into my sleep as usual. I opened my eyes a crack and then sat up straight, wide awake.

I would give up my line of work. It was not too late, I could not have rotted all the way through, there was still time. I was not yet thirty. I would learn to make my living some other way, think of something else, even if it meant a few hard years. That very day I would go to Aangti Babu’s to settle accounts and then call it quits. I would stop myself turning into him.

* * *

When I woke up the next morning and opened the door to the milkman, he was holding out a letter along with the milk. “It must have come yesterday, Babu,” he said. “It was lying on your doorstep.”

After the milkman left, I slit open the stiff, large envelope addressed to me in Nirmal Babu’s hand. A night after I had re-read his old letter. We had not written to each other since he had sent Bakul’s wedding card and changed my life forever. I wondered what new bombshell was enclosed in this envelope.

What first slid out of it was a photograph showing a large house, almost a mansion, that seemed to have a spacious verandah in its centre and rooms on both sides. The sides were framed by palm trees. Tall pillars of the kind that had been fashionable once upon a time towered right up to the first floor, reminding me of buildings like the town hall in Calcutta. Above was a folly of a roof. In the foreground was water: at the pillars, waves and eddies.

It was, I realised with a jolt, the house Aangti Babu and I had visited some six years earlier, the house by the river which he had tried to buy with fake papers. The house in … Manoharpur, that was it: I could visualise the name, black on yellow on that long-ago railway platform. It was the only time I had seen Aangti Babu lose money and face.

“The enclosed photograph is of Bakul’s mother’s old home, which is by a river,” Nirmal Babu’s letter said after a few lines of pleasantries. “The river changed its course over decades and finally flooded it in the year of Bakul’s birth. My father-in-law tried many things to stop the disaster from happening, but to no avail. I read a lot on rivers at that time, and one writer who said: ‘In a deltaic country, floods are inevitable; they are Nature’s method of creating new land and it is useless to thwart her in her workings … the solution lies in removing all obstacles that militate against this result.’ This was absolutely true of the house in Manoharpur.

“You may know some of this already: Bakul was born a month before time and nobody could reach the house with medical help because the house and the surrounding area were inundated. As a result, Bakul’s mother died giving birth. After Shanti died, her father (my father-in-law) became a little eccentric; he insisted on staying in the house even though, each monsoon, the ground floor flooded and for several years he was marooned inside for weeks at a stretch. I am told people arrived by boat with food for him and he threw down baskets for them on ropes, but he wouldn’t leave. People have strange obsessions that nobody else can understand. They seem irrational, but to themselves these people make complete sense.”

It was a long letter. I turned to the third page. It was as if he had embarked on an autobiography. He seemed to have been in need of someone to talk to who was familiar with his terrain, and I felt he was addressing me as he might a son. After my excoriating self-hatred the night before, the letter seemed a healing ointment that had come by post. It connected me, however tenuously, with a world in which a part of me existed, still untouched by later changes.

“A few years ago,” the letter went on, “the government decided to construct an embankment further up the river. This was eventually completed, and all of a sudden, after the havoc of all these years, the river is tamed. Some other area must be inundated because of the embankment, but for the moment the house is safely out of the water and has been for a year or two now. (The garden would be a good place to find fossils.)