An Atlas of Impossible Longing (10 page)

“I think three or four days.”

“Carry on.”

“There were some tribals waiting at his gate. The guard was not there. It was already quite late, and the road was dark. They surrounded him and they were arguing and fighting. One of them was very tall, with long hair, very dark.”

“Did you hear what they said, Mataji?” the policeman asked. “Did anyone have a knife? Could you see their faces? Would you recognise them?”

Kananbala seemed to flail under the flurry of questions, making a few incoherent noises in response. Amulya, alarmed, half rose to take her away. The policeman gestured him down and returned to her.

“Did you see any weapon?”

“The tall man had something at his waist. But I can't say. It was dark, I could not see so clearly. My eyesight … the doctor has said I need new glasses, but for that my eyes need to be tested and … And they were fighting: something about the mine in the forest, and money. They are poor people after all and they have homes in the forest … ”

“What happened then, Mataji?” The policeman tried patiently. Old ladies had to be handled with care.

“Then there was a scuffle, some confusion, what happened inside the crowd I couldn't see. But the group left quickly, ran away. And the man was on the ground.”

“Where was Mrs Barnum? The guard says she had gone out and given him the evening off as she always did when her husband was away.” He turned to Amulya and said, “Strange thing to do, isn't it? You would think she needed the guard with her husband away.”

“Oh, she was at home all night after she came back. I saw her coming back. It must have been quite early still – I had not yet had dinner. Then she was upstairs,” Kananbala said, pausing as if trying to remember. “I can see her quite clearly from my bedroom window when her light is on. She often forgets to draw her curtain. She was sitting at her window and yes, of course! For a little while she played her piano. Didn't you hear it?” Kananbala asked Amulya.

Amulya looked at her and said, “Piano?” He wanted to tell her not to talk so much. Could it be long before one of her vulgarities slipped out? What if she called the policeman a cuckolded jackass as she had the gardener just before he left?

“Well, she plays something every night and Nirmal told me it's a piano. What do I know of such things?”

“Did you see Mrs Barnum come down?”

“She didn't know he was back, I think. Poor girl! Maybe she never heard the car with her piano playing!” Kananbala said, “To think she stayed up all night in her room not knowing her husband was bleeding to death downstairs. She might have been able to save him. How she must torment herself with the thought.” Kananbala sighed.

The policeman scribbled in his notebook and then turned to Amulya: “She will have to be a witness.”

“Out of the question,” Amulya said.

A
month passed, and half of another. The Barnum murder began to fade from memory. In the absence of reliable witnesses, the investigation lost its top priority status and files went from desk to desk, losing a page here, getting dog-eared and tea-ringed there. It was a messy affair into which the mining company did not press for much poking about. Digby Barnum's short temper and foul mouth had not earned him many friends at his workplace, and besides, other cans of worms lay buried that might inadvertently be unearthed. The man reputed to be Mrs Barnum's lover left town. The police lost his trail in Calcutta – from where he had fled to Sydney, people said. The house opposite
3
Dulganj Road seemed to have stepped away from the town. There were no parties, and Mrs Barnum hardly ever left the house. People stopped talking about the killing.

Life resumed. Amulya signed a lucrative deal with a leading Lucknow shop. Nirmal went to Manoharpur and left Shanti with her father for the birth of their child. The first child would be born, as tradition demanded, in her childhood home, even though Nirmal disapproved of the tradition, saying Manoharpur was no place to have a baby; it didn't have a hospital nearer than the next town, which was far away.

Kananbala, oblivious of the coming baby, wondered if Mrs Barnum knew what she had told the police. Perhaps she had got her into trouble. Maybe their versions did not match. For a while Kananbala's curses dried up with anxiety. When Amulya walked her in the evenings, he found her distracted and inattentive. If he stopped speaking and merely smoked his pipe, she did not seem to notice.

* * *

That year, the monsoon was tardy coming to Songarh and the heat incandescent. Yet, though the afternoon light was still blinding, the evenings, with a whiff of a breeze that seemed to come from somewhere else, brought hope of rain and yearnings for impossible things.

At
3
Dulganj Road the air seemed especially charged as the house waited for its first baby – ever. Manjula had never conceived. After three years of being married, she had come to regard her childlessness as evidence that she had, unknown to herself, displeased God. She had sought to make amends. She had made Kamal take her across the country, tying strings around trees in Sufi shrines and brass bells in devi temples in the hills; she had fasted and prayed, and collected blessings from all kinds of godmen. But nothing had worked.

Now that there would be a baby, something made Manjula sigh and take longer over things; something, she found, made her absentminded, made her stop on the terrace between chores and gaze up for longer than she knew at clouds inching into the sky. And then she would tell herself, old cloth will be needed to cut up into small sheets. A pillow would have to be made, filled with black mustard seeds to mould the baby's soft skull into a perfect shape. She would retire for her afternoon snooze exhausted, thinking she must hunt out old saris to stitch into kanthas. Can one woman manage a household this size? she would mumble. A fine grandmother my ma-in-law will make, lifting not a little finger for the baby.

* * *

Nirmal squinted at the mirror as he shaved, wondering if he looked different, more fatherly. Perhaps it would seem real once he saw the child. Would it be a boy? It wouldn't matter, boy or girl. But if it was a boy! He would take him travelling, they would climb mountains together, rummage in ruins. Nirmal began to feel a tiny pulse of excitement somewhere inside him at the thought. He combed his hair back from the high forehead he had got from his father and went to the terrace
for his second cigarette of the morning. Peering into the horizon, he noticed there were grey clouds over the ruins and the ridge, and the rest of the sky, though blue, seemed to have darkened a little with clouds scattered about it, curdled milk clouds. The light was more mellow and the early morning breeze seemed to have a feathery touch.

Nirmal sighed with pleasure and sat down on the parapet, lighting his cigarette. Shanti was not there to screw up her nose and say, “What a horrible smell, how can you smoke that?” She had tried it once herself, and then again, and to her surprise quite liked it. Nirmal had been both shocked and entertained by her attempt to smoke. He had chuckled once he had got over his horror. “I'll take a photograph,” he had said, teasing, “and show it to Baba. He'll send you off to Star Theatre to be an actress.”

“Well, your mother already calls me a whore … ” Shanti had shot back.

“You know she has no idea what she's saying.”

“It's not pleasant to be called such things anyway,” Shanti had said. “Never heard such words all my years in Manoharpur.”

“We can't always get what we want,” Nirmal had said, looking away annoyed. “It's also painful for
me
to see my mother not in control of herself.”

“She never calls
you
any names.”

It had become a quarrel. They had never quarrelled except as a joke, and it had taken them both by surprise. Now, smoking on the terrace, Nirmal found himself longing violently for Shanti, even to quarrel with. He was to go to Manoharpur in three weeks, when the baby was to be born. He wondered how to keep himself occupied until then. Perhaps he would go earlier. Perhaps his father would agree to his going earlier, and his head of department at the college would let him. Anything was permitted a father-to-be. He began to plot the best way of putting it across to his father.

The first drops of a small rain fell on his face. He looked up at the sky, letting it rain on his face and dampen the cigarette between his fingers.

T
he rain pattering down on Songarh had still not arrived in faraway Manoharpur. The air lay over the town thick and still. The heat coloured the mangoes in hues of fire, cooking hard, green, young fruit into plump yellow-reds that scented the heavy air. There had never been such a year for mangoes. They were hanging in twos and threes, weighing down the trees, such multitudes that their custodians could not be bothered to guard them, and boys perched on branches eating them and aiming the hard centres at unwary passers-by.

Shanti was looking speculatively at the garden and the river. Tossing aside sage opinion about her condition, she walked, with the precision of someone unsure, down to the edge of the water. How close the river seemed, she thought, this river of her childhood. Every year it seemed to come a little closer and, with a fatalism for which she ridiculed herself, Shanti felt her destiny tied to that wide liquid ribbon. The steps on which she remembered idling with her friends had disappeared under water. If she peered from the verandah into the brown-grey water, she thought she saw her three friends floating immaterially below, trussed in mossy ferns. Staring down she saw her own face a few feet below the water's surface, hair trailing like smoke, skin furry with slime, snakes slithering in and out of her dead ears. She ran to the puja room as quickly as she could with her distended stomach and prayed for the image to be cleaned away from her memory, for the baby to be born, for Nirmal to be there in time for the baby's birth.

Downstairs, in one of the mansion's wide verandahs, sat Bikash
Babu, Shanti's father, with Ashwin Mullick, the other man of property in the village. Potol Babu, schoolteacher, the third member of that afternoon's club – only by virtue of being educated, upper caste, and from Calcutta – wished some old acquaintance could chance upon them so that they would know at home in Baghbazar what elevated company he kept.

Bikash Babu felt a little defensive before Ashwin Mullick. The money in his own family, the money that had built the pillars and the Roman arch, the money that had built the stately ghat, down the years there was less and less of it. Ashwin Mullick, on the other hand, had been the topic of some ridicule when he began his coconut oil enterprise: oil was the right business for that greasy man, people said. But now, it was undeniable, he had reason to be smug. Not only was he giving his friends loans, waving away interest with a patronising shrug, his house was on high ground and he watched the progress of the river with amused complacence. Bikash Babu's house, arcadian, picturesque in its seclusion as it faced the river alone, surrounded by fields of tender green rice-stalks, was the most vulnerable.

“What a pity about those mango trees of yours,” Ashwin Mullick was saying. “Wasn't it an experiment you were interested in?”

“Well,” Bikash Babu said, “I just wanted to grow the U.P. Dusseri in my little Bengali garden. The trees looked healthy enough until the river drowned the far end of the garden.”

Potol Babu sighed. “What a sad irony,” he intoned in English, “that the water that is our Saviour is so easily turned into Destroyer. Truly, like Lord Shiva … ”

“What happened to that project you had, Bikash,” Ashwin Mullick interrupted, “of building a dam, or was it a dyke?” He sucked his pipe. The tobacco was fragrant, imported.

“Can anyone hope to stop the mighty Ganga?” Potol Babu attempted in a mournful tone. “I do believe that … ”

“That engineer came, from Braithwaite & Sons,” Bikash Babu replied. “He said … ”

“Did they send a Sahib or a local?” Ashwin Mullick enquired, knowing the answer.

“They sent Dr Mitra, a very bright engineer,” Bikash Babu said quickly, aware that Braithwaite had not given the problem its due, had not seen fit to send its Scottish Chief Engineer. Bikash Babu's sense of being ridiculed was still fresh. People had turned up to look at the engineer after word got around that Bikash Babu had hired an English firm for his problem. But the man looked much like them. He was short and bulged in both directions. His bald head gleamed in the hot sun. He was not even in a suit, just a dhoti like everyone else.

“He got his degree in Scotland,” Bikash Babu told his sceptical listeners. “They think very highly of him. He was here for several days and examined the problem – oh, he was at the riverbank at all sorts of odd hours, with complicated instruments. He thought such a massive river changing course cannot be stopped. But he said that at its current rate of movement, the river –”

“These engineers,” Ashwin Mullick sniggered. “Do they know geology as well these days?”

“ – will not endanger the house for the next two generations.”

“A fine house it is,” Potol Babu said, noticing Bikash Babu's face grow darker. “A fine house that future generations will see and admire. That Burma teak central staircase, those great Roman columns, the Belgian mirrors, that billiards room! There is no equal in Manoharpur – except Ashwin Babu's wonderful home, of course.”