Anuradha Roy - An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Soon after, a thunderous knocking made Nirmal throw Shanti’s arm away and run to the door. Shanti sat up, surreptitiously wiping eyes sticky with sleep. When Nirmal opened the door, his mother rushed in.

“Come on, it’s late,” she exclaimed, “Can’t you see the sun high up in the sky? Your father will be back from his walk soon.”

“Ma, it is only … “ Nirmal peered at the clock on the wall, “ … five-thirty!”

“Don’t argue,” Kananbala snapped. “The house is full of relatives. They will all be up soon and do you want to be caught still snoring? There is so much to be done!”

Nirmal looked in amazement at his mother, who had now begun bustling about the room, tidying up. He saw his mother picking up and beginning to fold the sari Shanti had let fall on a chair the night before. Next to it on the floor were the clothes he had worn, his silk kurta and dhoti twisted up and thrown in a corner as if he had been in a tearing hurry. His embarrassed gaze went to the bed with its crumpled sheets, the two pillows on it bunched close together, still indented where their heads had been and, all over the room, the squashed flowers that had begun to smell of rot. He could not look at Shanti who, he saw from the corner of his eye, was making futile attempts to mimic her mother-in-law’s efforts to clean up.

Before he could stop himself, he said, “There’s no need to do all this, Ma, you never clean my room, so just let it be! I’ll do it later.” He wanted to bundle his mother out and slam the door on her. He wished he lived on an island far away from his family, his parents, his cousins’ sly glances waiting downstairs.

“My grown-up son, already telling me what to do, a day after his wedding!” Kananbala said with a mocking smile. She swung around to Shanti, who had now begun to smooth out the bedsheet and brush off the flowers. “Shanti Bouma, go, have your bath, the water is hot. The servant can’t heat it again and again.”

She turned to Nirmal. “You too, have your bath, go to the downstairs bathroom. And send Manjula up. Manjula will show you where everything is, Shanti. She will bring you downstairs for breakfast when you’ve finished.”

Kananbala stood by the door sentinel-like, watching as Shanti rummaged for the keys to her new cupboard. Then, in a confused moment when she felt she was regaining consciousness, or emerging out of deep water for a lungful of air, she saw Shanti’s growing desperation: at her new home, at the new people around her, the new man who was her husband, at her distance from her father and from everything she had known, at her failure to find the right key. In Shanti she glimpsed herself at sixteen, the morning she had woken up with Amulya next to her, bony, unknown, overnight her husband, a man she had only glimpsed through her veil the evening before at her wedding. Tenderness surged through her, transforming her scowling face. She went across to Shanti and took the keys, picking out the one that was needed. In the gentle voice she kept for children, she said, “You’ll soon know your way about, and then things won’t seem so strange any longer.”

Shanti had been stoical throughout, even at the leave-taking from her father, her room overlooking her river. But at Kananbala’s unforeseen sympathy she felt her lips tremble, and before she could stop herself she had buried her face in her sleep-crushed sari and burst into tears.

* * *

Two weeks later Kananbala sat waiting as usual for Nirmal with his evening tea. The house was empty of wedding guests save for one lingering relative. Things were beginning to return to normal, but not quite, Kananbala knew. Nirmal had begun to return home earlier, even though his job was a new one; what must his students think, Kananbala wondered, seeing Nirmal slip out of college half an hour or even an hour earlier some days? Surely the boys he taught, clever fellows only a little younger than him, were making fun of their teacher who was in a hurry to be home with his new bride?

As every evening, Nirmal came to his mother’s room first and sat chatting with her. But she could see his heart was not in the tales he was telling her about his day. He was sitting on the edge of the chair, as if settling into it would commit him to more time. He stole glances at the clock on the wall in the corner and then, half rising, said, “I’m tired, I need a bath,” before he fled to his room. From the evenings that had gone before, Kananbala could predict he would not be seen again until dinner time.

The terrace was a darker, emptier stretch that night. Kananbala walked to its end and stood at the low parapet. From here, she could almost look into the Barnum house, where lights blazed from every window and the lawn filled and emptied and filled again with people holding glasses. Beyond the house, in the memory of the day’s light, the ruins of the fort were still discernible to those who knew it was there. She walked back across the terrace to the room which Nirmal and Shanti occupied. It had long French windows, four of them, giving onto the terrace. The venetian blinds were as tightly shut as sleeping eyes.

Kananbala pushed open the door. Nobody in the house knocked; besides, it was only seven-thirty, no time for locked doors.

Nirmal was on the bed, his head half in Shanti’s lap. She was singing something, her fingers in Nirmal’s hair, her face close to his. Her sari had slipped off her shoulder.

They looked up as Kananbala entered and, startled, moved quickly away from each other as if to say that they had not been touching at all. Shanti stopped singing mid-syllable. Wide-eyed, she sprang off the bed and then turned away flustered, busying herself with something near the dressing table.

“Ma,” Nirmal said after pause, “we were about to come down.”

“No need for you to come,” Kananbala replied. “But Shanti, it is time you started helping us with dinner.”

Kananbala woke the next morning, heavy-limbed, yet hollowed out by the dark space within her. She could scarcely lever herself from her bed, exhausted by her night-time battles. The ceiling had pressed upon her, iron rafters and all, and then the serpentine posts of the bed, fleshy and pliable, had tried to choke her. She had been jolted awake, gasping for breath, her heart pounding. Looking across the bed she realised it was not the depth of night, for Amulya’s space was empty: he had left for his walk and so it must be dawn.

She thought of the relative who had stayed on after the wedding, a cousin they called Chotu-da. They were finding it difficult to get rid of him, although he was a doctor and everyone expected him to be a busy man. He was rotund and garrulous, waiting for mealtimes and sleeping in between. Kananbala decided to put aside her distaste for him and tell him some of her symptoms.

Chotu-da pressed a stethoscope to her chest, admiring afresh the soft, enveloping bulk of her bosom.

“Only palpitations, normal at your age,” he pronounced, at the end of what Kananbala thought was an unusually long examination of her lungs and heart, “And maybe a touch of gas. Tell Amulya to get you fruit salts. Or maybe something from his famous factory — he has a cure for everything, doesn’t he?” Chotu-da laughed. His round, jocund face gleamed with sweat, his eyes bulged behind thick glasses. He wondered why he was hungry so soon after breakfast.

“Perhaps,” he enquired in a careless tone, “Manjula could make me some sherbet, and … such fresh air, in these parts. One never feels this way in Calcutta.”

“Even the rice tastes better, doesn’t it, Chotu-da? One just can’t help oneself!” said Kananbala in a flash of her old impertinent self, the one she thought had dried up for good.

The doctor gave her a wary glance, but then thought he had heard wrong: the woman was looking as harmlessly preoccupied as she always did. He rose to go. He thought he would wait in the verandah for the sherbet, hoping it would come with a little something.