Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

* * *

We walked in silence for a while in the grounds surrounding the house. The earth had a curious, bleached, aged look from having been so long underwater. There was all kinds of rubbish — bits of wood, dead fish, a dented enamel bowl — strewn around the grounds, as if thrown up by the tide.

Bakul sat down on the back verandah’s worn steps, now exposed to air and light after years of drowning. The cloud-curdled sky was grey and white above us, making the light as soft as the evening’s although it was still only afternoon. A short distance across a stretch of hard, dry clay that must have been the submerged garden, I could see water.

“My father’s always done this to me,” she was saying. “Don’t you remember how he promised he’d bring us both here for a holiday, and then out of the blue sent you off to Calcutta instead? For years he never let me meet my grandfather, and then he brought me here just twice, once about two years after you left — that’s when my grandfather hid the deed with me — and the next time when he was almost too old to know who I was. When we were here, Baba was so unfriendly, and both times we left within two nights after coming all that way.”

I tried to pay attention to what she was saying about Nirmal Babu, but could think of nothing but this: she was not married, there was no husband. Bakul had no husband. She had never had a husband. After years of jealousy I had nobody to be jealous of. If she still wanted me (and how could she not?) then we could … but what if she did not want me any more? She seemed to have everything on her mind but us.

“This terrible Rathin Mullick was right,” Bakul was saying, meanwhile. “I don’t know this house except from stories and pictures. When my grandfather was ill, I didn’t get to know about it. When he died, we didn’t know until ten days later! And now at last I’m here at the house, and there are strangers tramping all over it, measuring it up, assessing it, deal-making. I had wondered on the way here what I would do when I came. I was thinking perhaps I’d sell it. That’s the most practical thing. What am I to do with this ramshackle old mansion far away from anywhere? But … ” she laughed, “I must have something of my grandfather in me. I couldn’t have sold it, I think, even if it was still flooded and as hollow as a coconut shell with termites. Oh, of course I showed it to Harold and all that — I couldn’t very well not when I had agreed to meet him, but the thought of him — or anyone remotely like him — taking it over! Makes my flesh crawl.”

When she spoke again after a pause, her eyes flashed. “Every room in this house makes me think of my mother. This is all I have of her. My father can’t make me sell it, he can’t!”

“Nirmal Babu … you know how he is, lost in his fossils and potsherds and stupas,” I said. “He probably hasn’t even realised you’re attached to this house. He’s just trying, for once, to be practical. He wanted you to have money to survive.” I laughed in an effort to lighten the atmosphere, “And look how he blundered.”

“You can laugh,” she said, hardly able to keep the tremor out of her voice. “He’s adorable, isn’t he, so absentminded, so lost in his world of continents and kings. But he never had much space in his mind for me. He’s always been concerned, but did he ever consider how I would feel if … ” She stopped speaking for a while, then took a deep breath and said, “I’m just going on and on. Tell me about yourself. How is your son? Why have you given up your job?”

“What did you do with the house deed?” I asked her. “Have you got it safe?”

“I posted it, Mukunda, that’s what I did the moment I knew I wouldn’t sell the house. Just trusted the Indian Post and Telegraph with my life’s wealth and posted it off to Baba! Three nights ago. I went straight to the place where the deed was hidden, found it, packed it securely and sent it as a registered letter to Songarh. You don’t have to worry about saving me from your Aangti Babu. This house is mine now.”

* * *

The relief of it made me garrulous. I sat on those steps and told Bakul about my wife and son, how I had not seen them after that brief glimpse when I went to my wife’s village some months after she had left. I told her how I longed to see my son, still dreamed about him as I had seen him last, as a toddler, but my father-in-law was implacable and my wife never replied to my letters, and my son would not know me until it was too late.

I told her about the trips I had made to my wife’s village over the years, hoping each time to be let into the house, and each time being turned away from their door. I had a child and yet I didn’t have a child. How right that senile old astrologer had been!

I told her about Suleiman Chacha and Chachi coming back from East Pakistan. About the man in the train who had seen a spaceship.

In the end my throat felt dry. After years of living so much alone, I felt as if my voice was ringing in my ears. I stopped.

* * *

We walked across the clay to the placid water. It was no longer the wide river I had seen when I had come to Manoharpur with Aangti Babu. This was a flat, tranquil stream. How could it have flooded the house, caused Bakul’s mother to die? It barely even disturbed the silt that disappeared into it, a smooth, silky, greyish black.

Bakul took off her slippers and walked into the wet mud. I followed, the cool mud oozing between my toes. She sat on her haunches by the stream, the edges of her sari growing damp.

It was quiet but for the call of a distant, monotonous bird. Bakul’s chin rested on her knee, her hair shielding her face. She seemed sunk in thought. A long-legged insect made of straight lines trembled on the surface of the water. I touched it with my fingertip and it sprang away. I wondered what Bakul was thinking. Were we too late? Had her feelings changed? Had I said too much about my wife and child? Why did she seem so far away, trailing an idle hand in the water and looking out to the other bank as if she had forgotten I was there?

When at length a red flower came floating down the water towards me, I guided it to Bakul, hoping she would notice. She stopped hiding behind her hair and turned, and for the first time that afternoon she smiled at me in the old way. Her hand reached out for mine and our fingers found each other’s beneath the water and intertwined.

The flower, the ruined house behind us, the two wispy-haired children staring at us from a mud-flat across the river, everything receded. I could see and hear nothing with her hand in mine. I caressed each of her fingers until they slipped out of my grasp one by one. I heard the sound of water as she used her freed hand to push it back and forth. Far in the distance, a flat, dark country boat punted into view.

At last Bakul said, “Mukunda?”

I did not answer.

“How was I to know what to do? You were still married,” she said, pulling at my arm. “What did you expect: that I’d write to you and say, Leave your wife, leave your child — come and live with me now, I can’t go on this way, everything seems wrong, each day of my life seems only half lived without you … Is that what I was supposed to tell you?”

Somewhere far away a steamer hooted. Perhaps the real, wide river met the sea somewhere out of sight, but within our hearing.

I thought I had replied when all I was doing was staring at her and repeating her words in my head.

I felt as if everything had gone very still. The rushes had stopped nodding, the breeze had stopped blowing through our hair, the stream had stopped flowing, the curdled clouds had stopped drifting overhead, that bird had stopped its call, the two children on the opposite bank had frozen in mid-gesture.