An Atlas of Impossible Longing (24 page)

“I think she's right,” they heard Kamal's voice saying, “it's been a mistake all along.”

“It's not a mistake because they're late one evening.” This was Nirmal.

“Come, come, Nirmal, all of us make errors of judgment. Don't you remember Kundu Babu? First he got his daughter married off to that man who turned out to be impotent, to top that they say he had just
one eye, then she came back to her parents and they couldn't look at anyone for the shame.”

“What has Kundu Babu got to do with this?” Nirmal sounded irritable.

“What I mean is that elders make mistakes, don't you see?” Kamal's voice sounded placatory. “If you ask me, the first error was our father's. We were not that rich anyway, what was the need to act the godfather?”

A match struck. Kamal said something more, too low to hear. A faint cigarette smell floated out towards Bakul and Mukunda. In the far distance, they could hear the lonely cry of a fox calling to its mate. They sank to the floor of the terrace, still warm with memory of the daytime sun, and leaned side by side against the wall. Sweat made their clothes stick to their backs.

“We need to be practical, Nirmal.”

“Practicality's not everything.”

There was a brief silence. Above Bakul and Mukunda, a pimpled half-moon had struggled up into a sky fragmented by the canopy of leaves that hooded the terrace. Cold, white, distant stars stabbed the trees. The fox called again, closer, this time answered by an echoing cry. In the distance, they could hear the faint tuning of Afsal Mian's tanpura.

“Think of the expense!” they heard Kamal say. “He's growing, but the money in Baba's will is not, is it? All these years he's been eating us out of house and home. I tell you, Nirmal, there are good institutions for boys like him. They'll take over and our headache will – I mean, he was Baba's responsibility, maybe in some way, but how are we –”

“I'll look after him, whatever is extra. We don't need to send him away for the money.” Nirmal sounded shorter and more abrupt than he had before. “You won't have to worry. You haven't had to worry so far.”

“My dear boy, money is not the only expense, you know,” Kamal said.

“I tell you, having to be here, managing the boy and Bakul, it's not easy, Nirmal. The girl's growing up, so is he! Just the other day I was in
a real fright when … ” This was Manjula. She lowered her voice, so Bakul and Mukunda could not tell how they had frightened her.

Then her voice again, louder. “That's all very well, Nirmal, and you might think they are children, but they aren't. Look at today. Not back yet, it's so late, we don't have any idea where they are or what they're doing! And they do this all the time. You may not worry, but I do!”

“There's nothing to worry about,” Nirmal's voice was stubborn. “They've been friends since they were four and six. I trust them. They're like brother and sister.”

“But they are
not
brother and sister, Nirmal,” Kamal said in a patient voice. “And they are both of the age when … ”

Manjula snorted. “They won't even know what they are doing before it's done. And then some terrible disaster. How will we ever show our faces?”

Someone put a glass down with a clatter. Mukunda and Bakul drew closer; she could feel Mukunda's breath on her face, warm, smelling of malted sweets. They were talking of sending Mukunda away. Their voices contained a terrifying darkness.

“Still,” Nirmal was saying, “I don't think they're up to anything. It's true they're late tonight. They just need a good scolding.”

“A scolding?” Kamal snorted. “That boy needs a hiding! Ideas above his station. But then we've spoiled him, so what do you expect?”

Manjula interrupted, “I tell you, Nirmal, you've stayed in the mountains too long, you have no idea. Is it only in darkness that people get up to trouble?”

“Mukunda is part of this house, he's Bakul's only friend, we cannot just send him away.” Nirmal's voice was implacable.

“If you don't do anything now, you will regret it at leisure, is what I say,” Kamal pronounced. “But she's your daughter.”

Bakul and Mukunda heard a chair scrape across the floor and shrank further into the dark niche of the terrace, their hands in a tight, sweaty clasp, a sick tide of fear churning their stomachs. “I'd better see what Meera's doing about the rice,” they heard Manjula say. And then the first notes of Afsal Mian's melancholic voice joined the strings of his tanpura.

* * *

Nirmal went out to the garden for an amble. It had been a trying evening: first that long argument with his brother and sister-in-law, then having to take the lead in disciplining Bakul and Mukunda for disappearing. Kamal had been of the opinion that the boy needed six strokes of a cane. Finding the tact and patience to dissuade him had been exhausting.

Breathing in the gardenia and raat ki rani his father had planted, he took out his cigarettes. No harm competing with their fragrance, he said to himself. He wished Meera would come out to the garden. It had been so many days since they had had a real conversation, despite seeing each other at every meal.

Nirmal strolled around the house to the back. Dull, yellow light striped a square patch of the darkness and he walked closer to look, curious. It came from the room at the corner of the courtyard, Mukunda's. Through the window he saw Mukunda hunched over a book beside his candle, tracing a line, lips moving without a sound. He had stripped down to his shorts. Sweat made his skin shine in the candlelight which contoured his young, thin body with dark shadows. Nirmal noticed the taut muscles of Mukunda's upper arm as he fanned himself with an exercise book. His chest, which had also developed muscles – all that work with the water buckets, Nirmal thought – tapered down to a waist that showed a faint line of hair. His face had lost most of its childish curves. Now the cheekbones were sharper than before, the cleft in the chin deeper, the lines stronger. Only his eyes still seemed long-lashed, almost girlish.

He frowned to himself and, forehead puckered with thought, trudged back to the house. He had never looked at Mukunda so closely before. But tonight … He could hardly bring himself to admit that his fatigue that night came from arguing the whole evening not only with Kamal and Manjula, but with a part of himself as well.

He padded up the deserted stairs on his way to the roof, to his room. He thought he deserved another smoke, and an after-dinner rum. And perhaps Meera would be on the terrace.

When he reached the first floor, however, something struck him,
and he turned towards the room where Bakul slept. He peered in through the open door and saw her shadowy form sprawled across the bed like a prone Jesus, her bare legs pale in the moonlight from the verandah. She had flung her sheet aside in the heat. Her night frock was bunched up near the swell of her newly acquired hip curve. Her wildly tousled hair covered her pillow.

Nirmal crept away.

* * *

The next day Meera was sitting in Kananbala's room, head bent over a sketch, when Kalpana the maid came in and, unhampered by any perception of Meera's absorption in her work, said, “Give me the soap, and bring out the clothes to be washed. You've left nothing out in the courtyard.”

Kalpana, lanky and slouching, had a penetrating voice, a tight bun, straight thick eyebrows, and a dark moustache. She leaned a sloping shoulder on the door as she waited for Meera and said to Kananbala, “How're you, Thak'ma, thought up any juicy swear words recently? How about dung-faced donkey? Or grease-nosed sister-fucker?”

Meera breathed in deep, said nothing, and continued with the tricky bulge of the dome, erasing a line that had come out wrong.

“Arre baap.” Kalpana turned a wide-eyed look of make-believe astonishment towards Meera. “Everyone's too busy today,” she observed, “drawing things that have been around for hundreds of years. What with people spending all their time wandering here and there at ruins and temples, I suppose I don't need to wash clothes and keep house either!” She wiped her face with an ostentatious swipe of her sari and sat down on the floor, staring at Meera, whose pencil wobbled under her sarcastic gaze.

Mukunda appeared and fidgeted by the door. “Manjuladi wants you in the kitchen,” he said.

Meera scowled at him. “Tell her I can't come just now,” she said. “I'm doing something. Is it possible in this house to get any of my own work done?”

“Oooh, your own work!” Kalpana's voice was mocking. “You have a lot of your own work these days!”

Meera's forehead began to throb. She saw the maid looking her up and down, saying but not saying what everyone thought: that Meera was a glorified maid too, one with an education, a maid who was aspiring to the master, a widow who had begun to dream up an impossible future.

She pushed her chair back so hard as she stood up that it fell. Her sketchbook and pencil dropped to the floor unregarded. Mukunda looked at her face and edged away. Meera went up to Kalpana, who stood in a hurry.

“If you can't speak with some decency,” Meera said, “don't speak to me at all. Do you understand?”

Before the maid could reply, a quaver came from Kananbala's direction: “And who is it you're fucking these days, Meera?” she was saying. “Who is it you're fucking? Who – is – it – you're – fucking?”

Meera whirled towards Kananbala, horrified. Kananbala's eyes were invisible behind glasses on which the morning sun shone. Her smile was sweet and denture-less. She repeated the words in a sing-song, absent-minded tone, rattling one of Mrs Barnum's tins to keep time. Kalpana guffawed. Meera rushed out of the room, tears stinging her eyes. She could not,
could not
, continue living in Songarh. She must leave. Anywhere would be better than here. She would go to her brother and beg for shelter, she would look for a job in a city, anything but this nightmare.

She ran to the middle room and sat on the edge of her bed, shoulders tingling again with that familiar pain. Her life had boiled over when she wasn't looking. What did I expect, she thought, remembering one of Manjula's sayings, that I'd sprinkle cold water onto hot oil and not get burned by the sputter?

She became aware after a while that her breath was a noisy wheeze. Where's my trunk? she panicked. Where's the trunk in which I brought my clothes when I came here? The thought began to grow and cloud her mind. She got up and looked under the bed. She tried the attic in the long room. She could not make out its familiar mustard colour
among the shapes huddled there. Frantic, she rushed up the staircase to the loft, but it wasn't there either. As she came down the stairs, she encountered Kamal going into his rooms. He smiled at her with the new smile he had manufactured just for her.

Meera ran down the stairs, hand sliding on the banisters. Nirmal was coming up and paused at the landing to let her pass. “Where are you rushing to?” he said, sounding eager, but she did not pause.

She stopped by the door to slip her feet into her chappals and let herself out. There was a heaviness in the air, the stillness that comes before a downpour. She began to walk with rapid steps. As her distance from the house grew, she stopped and looked up at the louring sky.

There was a sudden sharp slap on her face, of wind. It gathered force and buffeted her sari. The tall trees at the edges of the fields bent double, surprised by the squall. Dust gathered into ochre clouds and rushed towards her. She covered her face with the corner of her sari and screwed up her eyes. Above her, the tin-coloured sky cracked and warped with lightning. The gulmohars glowed an intense orange, gathering the half-light. She felt the first drops of rain on her arms and the sweet, brown smell of water meeting dry earth. It came down faster. She removed her aanchal from her face and looked up at the sky, holding her face up to the rain, shutting her eyes against what was already a torrent. Under the trees sheltered a few straggly clumps of people who looked at her in amazement.

Something unlocked deep inside her as the rain fell on her face, and into the earth next to her, muddied her sari and gritted her slippers with dirt. In some other place, where nobody knew her, she would start all over again. She would leave as soon as she could. She would get away to a big city where nobody knew her. She would make room for herself.

Already the rain was tapering off, leaving only the damp earth smell which wiped out all memory of the smouldering days that had gone before.

* * *

It had been only about six months since Nirmal's return to Songarh, and the serenity he had thought was his to keep had scattered over the past fortnight, leaving in its place a profound disquiet. Smoking his fourteenth cigarette of the day, he rested his elbows on the parapet of his roof, listening to Mrs Barnum's piano which even from this distance was violent and lonely and sad. The crashing notes were reassuring, a sound from long ago, unchanged since his childhood. He wished he was a fossil responding to geological time, creaking, calcifying, hardening, going deeper and deeper into a rock-face or river-bed, metamorphosing over thousands of years from flesh and blood and marrow into stone; better to be a fossil than human, on the cusp of some painful new development almost every day.