An Atlas of Impossible Longing (22 page)

* * *

Late the next afternoon, Nirmal sat with Meera at the ruin somewhat distracted, not really looking at her new drawings. He knew his colleagues at the office were scenting scandal. Someone had seen him with Meera at the ruin one afternoon, and they were beginning to talk about his daily disappearance. But for the moment he pushed the thought aside. This time alone supplied the missing words to the story of his day and completed it for him.

He turned the pages, looking for drawings of the dome's left side, finding only birds and dogs.

Meera was busy with the dogs some distance away. He continued to turn the pages. She jumped, startled by his sudden, loud laughter.

“Oh no,” she said, running to him, “you've got the wrong book!”

He snatched it away from her flailing hands and continued to chuckle. “It's very good,” he said. “It's very, very good.” He was looking at a caricature of Manjula, her nostrils flaring over a bull neck and folds of skin, eyes bulbous with rage, ears hung with enormous gold studs, hands on rolling hips.

“You should be a cartoonist too,” he said, turning the page and looking at Kamal, whose paunch flowed pillow-like below his kurta, while his small hands stuck out from his body like stalks from fat brinjals.

“Please, Nirmal Babu,” Meera said, urging. “Please give me … ”

Nirmal turned the page and came upon a picture of himself. Not a cartoon. A sketch. His forehead and cheeks had been carefully shaded in. His hair was drawn in separate strands. His eyes were thoughtful. On the next page another picture of him, from a different angle, this time with a book, glasses on, long legs looped over a chair-arm in the way he knew he always sat while reading. On the page after that yet another picture of him sitting under the banyan tree at the ruin, this one unfinished. They were not sketches. They were a declaration of love.

Meera looked away, aghast.

The earth felt as if it had begun to roll under her feet. She thought she would fall. She felt dizzy and held a tree for support.

From far away she heard Nirmal's voice. “It's an earthquake, I think it's an earthquake.” He looked around, wildly shouting, “Bakul! Ma! We have to go home. Get away, get away from the building, it may fall, it's already crumbling! I must get Bakul.” He began to run down the path, away from the ruin, but was forced to stop. It was like walking on water. The beaten earth around the fountain moved like an animal shaking itself awake. It rose and fell as if the animal had become a wave in the sea. They heard a deep, distant rumble from somewhere far beneath.

* * *

Manjula and Kamal, who had run out into the garden when the house began to shake, could see Mrs Barnum across the road in a long, blue nightie, hair in curlers, shouting for her khansama. She flung open the gate and ran across the road to them. She had never come to their house since her picnic with Kananbala.

“It's an earthquake isn't it? Eh, girl?” She was smiling at Bakul, “Your first?” She reached the others, hair coming loose, nightdress falling off her shoulder. Turning to Kamal she remarked – speaking as if they were outside for a garden party – “D'you think it'll be as bad as the last one? Now
that
was an earthquake, but I was in Calcutta that day and dancing enough to shake the floor without any help from quakes.”

“If only we had a conch!” Manjula exclaimed, almost tearful. She was too terrified to take notice of Mrs Barnum's exposed shoulder and dishevelled hair.

“I know you're supposed to blow a conch to stop the earth shaking,” Mrs Barnum said. “But not even Triton blowing his wreathed horn would stop this!”

“Where's Mukunda?” Bakul exclaimed. “And what about Thakuma?” She ran towards the house for her grandmother while Mrs Barnum shouted, “I wouldn't go inside the house if I were you – it might fall on you!”

“Radha Krishna, Radha Krishna, Radha Krishna, save us, keep us from harm, Radha Krishna,” Manjula muttered.

“It's over,” Kamal said to Manjula. “Can't you see? The house is still standing, and nothing's moving any more.”

“Over?” Mrs Barnum said. “What a pity! So short!”

“Where's Meera?” Kamal said. “And Nirmal? Why didn't they come out? It's a holiday and he's at work? How very odd!”

* * *

Meera stood clinging to the banyan tree for support, heart thudding, the salty taste of nausea in her mouth. The ground beneath her was still, but she was filled with terror that it would begin to roll again. She looked around for Nirmal, saw him emerging from behind the ruin, laughing like a boy. The minute he had realised it was not a major earthquake he had forgotten all about Bakul and his mother and hurried to examine the ruin instead.

“It's so broken down already there's nothing left to break,” he shouted. “Can you believe it, not even the dome has fallen in. No damage seems to have been done at all.”

He reached her and said, out of breath, “Magnificent, don't you think it was magnificent? The plates of the earth shifting, continents changing shape, mountain ranges rising, oceans migrating. Amazing it's all hot liquid deep inside! Fire below the oceans.”

Meera looked at Nirmal and wondered if the quake had perhaps dislodged some bit of his brain.

“Millions of years, it's taken millions of years for these continents to separate from each other, drift away,” Nirmal was saying. “Then anchor themselves in the places where we find them now. Us humans? Even the ancients I study? We're as new as the butterfly, born today, gone tomorrow.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Meera said. “Do you really think it's safe now?”

“What if it weren't?” Nirmal said, his eyes sparkling. “What if it all began again and we were all to die? What would you like to do before you die?” He laughed at her bewildered face and said, “Come now, tell me.”

“Onion, garlic, fish,” Meera said, surprised by the words that came out of her mouth, the clarity of her enunciation. “I'd like to eat everything I'm forbidden. I'd like to eat
everything
once before I die.”

* * *

Mukunda sat on the floor in Mrs Barnum's bedroom. He had rushed in when the earthquake began, thinking he would find her and take
her away from the moving floor and shaking walls. The room smelled of whisky. An opened bottle had tumbled and darkened the carpet. All around him were things that had fallen out of shelves and off walls and tables: a broken picture, a cracked vase, books. Surrounded by the debris, Mukunda was reading. In his hand was a sheet of thin, translucent onion-skin paper which began, “My darling, it truly seems the Antipodes without you. I'm surrounded by strange people, my body is here and my mind with you always, beneath our banyan tree. I'm working my hands raw, will make enough one day to get you away and we'll be together again.”

Mukunda's heart thudded louder than it had when the earth had begun to shake. He could see a long white feather and two more letters inside the box, but the handwriting was hurried, and even though he did not pause over words like Antipodes which he could not understand, it took him too long to read the long, looped scrawl. He knew everything would end if he were caught. He thought he heard someone, pushed the box aside and ran out, the letter ringing in his ears.

“My darling, it truly seems the Antipodes … ” A letter to Mrs Barnum, he thought, it could only have been from her lover. It must be true then that the two of them had murdered Mr Barnum and planned to run away together.

It could not be true – she was too kind to kill anyone.

What was he to do? Where was Bakul?

B
eyond the Songarh ruin, thickets of acacia and ber stretched to the hilltop on which a small, white temple shone in the afternoon sun. The temple was not old, but it had acquired a reputation for benign power.

Meera looked around, noticed bees skimming the air over mauve wildflowers that grew close to the ground, thought of Nirmal's extraordinary question after the earthquake the day before and her own ridiculous answer. What must he think? He had not questioned her further, merely looked at her as if for the first time. But she felt a spasm of shame whenever she recalled her gluttonous words.

The afternoon sun was too hot for comfort. Overhead, the sky stretched empty and high, no hint of clouds. Summer had come upon them as suddenly as it did each year, the heat an oppressive presence to get used to all over again. She stumbled over stones and clods of earth up the path to the hill, wiping her perspiring face with a corner of her sari. Her usual path, but why did it feel harder today? Under the trees, where patches of green shade alternated with bright bursts of sun, it was a little cooler and she paused. She could see empty bottles and matchboxes thrown aside here and there, two crumpled cigarette packets, not Nirmal's brand. She knew this was a favoured place for trysts and shook her head. She was not here for a tryst, there was no reason to feel guilty. She had come to draw the fort.

She reached the edge of the ruins and paused. Nirmal was already there. The dog sat beside him and the puppies tumbled over each other and around him as if they were old friends.

Nirmal tried not to stare at Meera, at the perspiration on her upper lip, her blouse translucent on her back with sweat, at the bits of hair that stuck to her cheek, the sari with which she was wiping her face.

“It's become hot, hasn't it?” she said, self-conscious all of a sudden. She looked the other way, spotted a steel tiffin-carrier beside Nirmal, and recognised it as the one she had packed for him that morning. She gave him a puzzled look. He held it out to her and she took it. She opened its clasp and saw in the top container two pieces of fried fish, and below it rice. In the third bowl she knew there was a vegetable: she did not need to look further.

She looked up at him, filled afresh with disgust at the greed that had made her say what she had to him the day before.

“Go on,” Nirmal said, “nobody's looking.”

“I can't.”

“It's very good fish,” Nirmal said gently. “Wonderfully cooked. A good way to break a long and pointless fast.” He looked away from her and began to play with the puppies while she stared at the container of fish in her hand, wondering if she felt like eating any after so many years of abstinence. What was it like, the texture of it, the smell of it, the feel of those tiny, translucent, thorn-like bones in the mouth?

She broke off a fragment with her fingers. She turned her head away from Nirmal, almost afraid that he should see her in the act. Though he seemed absorbed in the puppies, she knew he was looking at her out of a corner of his eye. In her confusion she swallowed the fragment whole, without tasting it.

She gave a nervous giggle and said, “There! I've done it! Tasted the forbidden fruit!”

A light breeze was collecting dry leaves. Parakeets chattered overhead as Nirmal looked at Meera and smiled in congratulation.

* * *

Ever since the earthquake, when he had found the letter to Mrs Barnum, she had been transformed in Mukunda's eyes. Her silences began to seem sinister. Her gin and cigarettes seemed to mark her out
as a fallen woman, as in the thrillers Mukunda had read. He would find himself looking at her long fingernails and wondering if she had had to wash blood out of them.
Could
she have killed a man? Or helped someone kill? He felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle when she came and stood behind him, caressing his shoulders as he read. He thought of her plunging a knife in through skin and bone and heart. But then, when she sat by him and explained passages from
Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare
, he did not know what to think. He would have to read the other two letters, he thought, to find out the truth. Maybe they were not letters to her – after all, she was not named in the one he had read.

Ten days after the earthquake, Mukunda got his chance. He did not know how much time he had. He had been trying to read the difficult beginning of
Lord Jim
at Mrs Barnum's dining table when she said, “Carry on, I'm going to Finlays, back soon,” and was driven off by the khansama. His hands began to tremble, his knees shook, but as soon as he saw the car departing round the corner he ran to her room.

What a lot of things Mrs Barnum had in her bedroom, he saw in panic. He had not noticed them during the earthquake. He tried to guess where the box had dropped from. In the corner he could see the vase that had fallen that day. A picture on the wall of a green-faced, drunken-looking woman, cracked right across. Two carved, teak almirahs at the far wall, both locked, so that ruled them out. The bed was a large one, with a dark-purple, velvety cover smoothed over it. The foot of the bed was draped with a tiger skin, its glassy-eyed, open-mouthed, spear-toothed head snarling straight at the pillow. On the wall beside the bed there was a high shelf piled with oddments.

It was this shelf Mukunda decided to search. He stood on a chair, pushing aside dusty old ornaments, books, a box – but this wasn't the one. He tried to be careful about replacing things in the same order. He remembered the box with the letters was greenish and made of wood. Finally, in the far corner, he saw the box he wanted. He pulled it towards himself and opened it. There was the white feather.