An Atlas of Impossible Longing (20 page)

Nirmal gazed at the picture for longer than he knew. Then, putting it aside, he turned to the other two. One was of Shanti: the one that had arrived with the marriage proposal. Nirmal paused, smiling at the recalcitrant look on Shanti's face. What was it like, having your picture sent to a stranger for his approval? He wondered if other men, other prospective husbands of Shanti, had seen that picture of her. Did some of them still have it lying around in their homes? Or had their eventual wives thrown it away or torn it up?

The third picture had the two of them staring at their wedding
photographer. Nirmal glanced at it and put it aside. That thin, young face, the mop of hair, was that me? He went to the wardrobe mirror and studied the shadowed face that looked back at him. The hair was combed straight back like his father's. There were deep lines on his cheeks, bracketing his nose. His face was still thin, but not thin as in the picture. Gaunt. Old. An old face. At just thirty-seven, he was an old man. And yet, not a patriarch as his father had been, not even an authoritarian like his brother.

His thoughts slid back two days. He had heard a knock on his door and prepared himself for another invasion from Manjula, but it was Meera. He was self-conscious about his dishevelment and did not want to call her into his untidy room with its rumpled bed, although he knew it was she who would have it cleaned later in the day, get the maid to make the bed and pull out filled ashtrays from under chairs and bed. He had stepped out onto the roof, shivering slightly in the early morning chill, and said, “Is anything wrong?”

“I … ”

In the soft light of the morning, her skin seemed luminous. He saw she had already bathed, and her hair loose, wet, had painted a ring of damp over her shoulders. Little specks of water hung diamond-like to it. She usually had a direct gaze, but today she would not look at him.

“Actually I came up to put the clothes out to dry … ”

Nirmal noticed a small iron bucket with wet, wrung-out clothes next to her. He waited, still wondering why she had called him out. “ … and I thought I should tell you … please don't be angry with her, she's young, and doesn't know … Bakul, she has damaged some of your books … ”

“Books? Which books?”

“The staircase cupboard, books there, I … ”

Before she could finish what she was saying, he had rushed down the stairwell to the landing. Someone had begun to move the shredded books to one side, making piles of the scraps. Nirmal had knelt on the floor, tossing the scraps this way and that until the small space of the landing was covered with torn paper, in the middle of which he sat, inchoate with rage.

He felt sheepish about it now, about Meera watching him, trying to calm him, trying to salvage whatever little seemed retrievable. That evening when he came home from work he had seen that three of the books, painstakingly stuck back together, had been left on a windowsill in his room. Nobody but Meera would have done it.

What did she think of him? he wondered. A middle-aged man, sentimental about pressed leaves? A stupid man who had tried to punish his daughter by descending to the level of the child? Sticking back those pages must have taken Meera all day. Why had she done it? And Bakul, did she hate him so much that she had lashed out the only way she thought would hurt?

He looked at the photographs in his hand again, and for the first time weighed his own culpability. That little aluminium box contained all of Bakul's memories of her mother, her most precious belongings. What had he done to add to them? Could he possibly make up for his neglect? Nirmal sat alternately smoking, looking at the pictures, and smoking again. Then, all at once, he seemed to reach a decision and got up from the bed.

I must show Shanti's house to Bakul, he thought. That's the only way I can give her some real connection with her mother. I ought to have taken her there long ago. She still has a grandfather; she must meet him.

He felt as if something had loosened inside him, given him space to breathe again. A surge of excitement made him push the box away and go out to the verandah. He would book railway tickets, it would be their first journey together. He would take Mukunda too, open up the boy's world. They would stop in Calcutta on the way, he would show them the Victoria Memorial, he would show Bakul a real tram, not a tin box.

And since he couldn't possibly manage the two children alone, he would take Meera too. He could barely wait to tell her, to see her eyes widen and her face light up.

Charged up by the thought of travel, yearning already for the familiar clacking of a train, Nirmal put his shoes on and went down the stairs. Why spend the entire holiday at home? he thought, and
began to walk rapidly towards Finlays, looking for a tonga he might hail on the way.

* * *

Meera was running her fingers through a sari that was draped over a mannequin at Finlays. The mannequin was on a pedestal by the door, two feet taller than Meera, a pasty white with apple-red lips. An orange sari with a gold border rode its buxom body. Meera looked down at her own sari, her usual off-white, this one with a narrow brown border. Some day, she fantasised, I'll again wear sunset orange, green the colour of a young mango, and rich semul red. Maybe just in secret, for myself, when nobody's looking, but I will.

Unknown to her, Nirmal was watching from outside. It had brought him to a standstill, to see her doing something so ordinary, looking at a sari, the kind of sari that a widow could never wear. Beside the outsized orange and gold mannequin, Meera looked shrunken and drab, clutching her cloth shoulder bag as people milled around looking at things, buying things. Shop assistants and customers brushed past, indifferent to her. It was clear to them, as to Nirmal, that she was not there to buy anything. He was overcome by an unexpected twist of tenderness at her awkward presence, at her solitude in that crowded shop.

He went in and said, “What a surprise!”

Meera sprang away from the mannequin as if tainted by association.

“I … um … I had to bring the children out … it's a holiday … ” she stammered. “They're just over there, in the bookshop.”

Nirmal hesitated, wondering if he should, then sidestepping his misgivings he said, “There's a tea stall outside. Will you have some?”

There were two sets of folding tin tables and chairs under an awning. Looking around, feeling self-conscious, Meera sat in one of the chairs, hoping it would not tear her sari or leave a stain, rust-brown on white. How odd it would seem to people who knew her, Meera, drinking tea in public with Bakul's father. What conclusions would they jump to?

She said, “I brought the children for a treat. They don't get out much … ”

“Didn't you want to go to the bookshop too? I remember you used to read my father's books. Surely you've finished them all in these six years.”

That he should have remembered how he had come upon her once raiding Amulya's old glass-fronted book cupboards made Meera smile into her tea.

“Well, I'm reading some of them for the third or fourth time. I don't buy too many new ones.” She looked away.

“Were Baba's books good enough to re-read? What did he have? I've hardly looked really. I remember he read a lot of … botany.”

“Oh, you'd be surprised,” Meera giggled. “Many solemn books. But also romances! Really.
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
– those English novels. One called
The Satin Roses of Cairo
. They all have his name on them.” She stopped, thinking she was being improper. “I wonder where the children are,” she said. “I should go to the bookshop and fetch them.” She started to gather her things.

“Do you want a cream bun?” he said on impulse. “Did you know Finlays makes very good cream buns? Well, at least as good as any you can get in Songarh.”

She put her bag down but kept her hand on it as if she would rise any minute.

“Cream buns?” she said. “At our age?”

But she ate one, wiping the spilling cream surreptitiously with a white handkerchief embroidered with pink roses. She wondered if the hanky was clean. Nirmal noted it was the only bit of colour in her wardrobe and watched it touch her lips.

By the end of the cream rolls, the lemony sunlight of the March afternoon had melted without warning into dusk. Meera wondered what she would say at home about the time she had been gone. Who would make the tea before Kamal came home? What would Manjula say about this long absence? And what would they say when they saw all of them return
together
?

What was it about darkness, Meera thought, that altered things? Always those injunctions from parents, from husband, from relatives,
Come back before dark
! What exactly, she had wondered, would happen
in the dark that could not happen in the day? But sunset and rising panic had been with her since she could remember. Someone brushed past her. Meera suppressed a shriek. It was a figure hooded in a nocolour shawl.

“Tonga, Mataji?” the man enquired in a reedy voice.

At last they were in a tonga. It had two long hard seats back to back, facing opposite directions but united by a common backrest. Meera listened to the quiet creak of the wheels, the brisk clopping of hooves, the happy ringing of the bells. The sharp smell of the horse, its particular mix of dung, sweat, and open air, drifted back to her in the breeze and she breathed it in, relaxed by the rocking carriage. She sat with Bakul at the back, listening to Mukunda chattering with Nirmal in front about horses and whips. They reached the swell of the slope that would turn into the homeward road. The thin, shrouded tongawallah whipped his horse, veins snaking down his wrists, riverlike. The horse glistened with sweat despite the chill in the evening air. The tonga hurtled, gathering speed as the slope charged steeper and steeper down before rising again. Meera took a deep breath of the rushing air and tried to tuck her hair into its pins.

Divided from her only by a sheet of thin, hard wood sat Nirmal. If she leaned her head just a fraction, she would be able to rest it on his shoulder.

She shut her eyes for a moment and held tight to the armrest.

E
ver since that tea with Meera, Nirmal found he was unable to focus on the paperwork before him by the time the tea boy came in at four each day with his steaming brown cups. What kind of theodolite? How many? Tents or no tents? Were there enough labourers available locally? He had requisition forms to fill out, letters to write, but his mind kept returning to the ruin, or if he was honest with himself, to his knowledge that Meera was perhaps at the ruin at that moment, alone, feeding the dogs, making her drawings.

On the fourth afternoon he gave up the struggle and left the office early, saying he was going for a site survey. He walked right round the ruin, but found no evidence of Meera. He walked into the dome but heard only mewling sounds and a low snarl. Thinking she had gone further afield he wandered towards the dry stream-bed, but he did not find her there either. Disconsolate, and now edgily aware from his feeling of disappointment that his trip had had no professional basis at all, he began to walk back towards the entrance to the fort.

This time there she was, walking rapidly towards the dome as if she were late, shredding rotis as she went. Her cloth bag swung and bounced off her hip with each quick step she took.

He stopped and crept back behind a broken-down wall, sweat beading his forehead. What was he thinking? Why had he come? It was ridiculous. She was a distant relative, a widow; if she sniffed a trace of longing in him she would be offended and shut him out. If anyone in his family or neighbourhood got to know, there would be turmoil; Meera would certainly be ostracised, and perhaps he would be too.

He peeped around his wall, realising the absurdity of his situation: how could he leave without her seeing him? If he did not walk out now, he would have to skulk around for as long as she decided to stay there drawing. He could see she had settled down, leaning against the banyan tree. The dog sat next to her, alternately scratching its ears and sniffing its rear.

He took a deep breath and tried to emerge as if taken by surprise. She saw him and put down her sketchbook.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have realised this has become a workplace now – I really shouldn't idle here.”

Her words triggered an idea in Nirmal's head and he blurted it out before he had even thought it through.

“You're not idling, actually. What you're doing could be work!”

“What do you mean?” By now he was next to her, bending down to the dog in an effort at friendship, to which the dog was responding with the most imperceptible of tail wags.

“I mean that we need site sketches before we start, detailed ones. Do you think you could do them for me?”

“Wouldn't you need a professional?” Meera said. “I only sketch, I'm not a draughtsman.”

Nirmal sat beside her and said, “If you'd agree to show me some of your drawings I'd know.”

With some trepidation, she opened her sketchbook and began to turn the pages. There were drawings of trees and flowers, a few of the dog. The lines were sharp and fluid. She had also drawn the ruin from various angles. Nirmal saw that the drawings were more atmospheric than accurate. How, for instance, did the dome look
exactly
? How large was it in relation to the pillars? Meera had smudged away some lines, softening the drawings in the style of charcoal sketches, hidden away architectural details behind pastelly trees and clouds. He wondered how to tell her she needed to change her style for the drawings he required. Of course he would also get a professional to draw it, and photographs would be taken every day.