An Atlas of Impossible Longing (33 page)

The corridor at the head of the stairs looked the same, but the plaster on the ceiling had begun to flake. My professional self noted its sandy gaps, the exposed bricks, the patches of mould near the bathrooms, the rusted iron beams that held up the roof, the walls that needed painting, the cloudy glass panes that had cracked in places. The almost derelict interior was at odds with the garden, in which every plant and tree seemed cared for.

Nirmal Babu and I sat at the table, a smaller one than there used to be near those windows. A grizzled brown and black pi dog sat at his feet, painstakingly cleaning her paws with her tongue, and then rubbing her eyes with her paws. Next she scratched her ears and furiously nibbled the base of her tail. Then, placing her head between her front paws, she shut her eyes and heaved a loud sigh. Nirmal Babu smiled down at her and said, “You remember Meera, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“She used to feed stray dogs at the old fort. After she left I began
to feed them and I brought one of the puppies home – and here she is – twelve years old now.”

“Exactly as many years as Meera Didi and I have been away,” I said, not meaning to sound reproachful. “How is Meera Didi?” I asked him, to break the awkwardness between us. “Do you have any news?”

“Oh yes,” he said, looking uncertain. “I … see her now and then, she teaches art at a school in Darjeeling – there are beautiful walks up the hills there – you know how she liked walking – and she paints and sketches. In fact … ” He got up and walked to a corner and took down a framed landscape showing cottages and trees tumbling headlong into a valley. “This is one of hers.”

I held it and admired it. The feeling of verticality it induced, the sense of energy in the trees and hills did make it an unusual picture. Nirmal Babu took it back and returned it to its place on the wall after a smiling look at it. “Yes,” he said, “the walk down that slope is very steep, you need a stick and sturdy shoes. But it has beautiful orchids and ferns and unusual rhododendron.” Then he remembered me and said, “She asks about you, she was always fond of you.”

Was there any truth, after all, in the gossip we used to hear that last year in Songarh? Another silence began to twang the air between us.

Nirmal Babu looked towards the stairs, saying, “What is Bakul doing … cooking up a feast for you?”

I pictured Bakul in the kitchen telling the servant to make tea, trying to find things to serve me. She had never been one for cooking anything. Eventually, though, she came up the stairs, followed by a boy of about twelve who carried a tray with food, water and tea. He wore shorts that flapped below his knee, and a grey kurta drooped at his shoulders. His ears looked like handles to hold his head by. His hair, cut very close to his scalp, emphasised his outsize ears. He gave me a sidelong look, then put the tray down on the table. It was the same brass tray and I could have sworn that the china was the same I had washed sometimes.

“This is Ajay,” Bakul said. “You must forgive him for not letting you in, but we tell him to keep the doors locked. Baba and I rarely go out together, but when we do … ”

“Really, it was nothing,” I said.

Holding his cup of hot tea and lighting a cigarette seemed to settle Nirmal Babu's diffidence and he said, “What a pleasure it is to see you, Mukunda, really. I wondered all these years if you had finished college, would I ever see you again. Tell me, what do you do? Have you married? Do you have children?”

He listened patiently to my answers and when I said things that I thought were funny, mainly about my child, he smiled, but he did not laugh his rich, strange-sounding laugh that always ended in a smoker's cough. He looked changed. Those glasses had altered his face. Grey hair, not unexpectedly, though if I think about it now, he could only have been about fifty then. It was more than age. His face had darkened and his eyes were circled with shadows. He looked like a man who did not sleep very much, or well. He was fidgety in a way I did not remember from before. He had grown thinner, which made him stoop.

I felt remorseful. Why had I cut myself off from him? Why had I not come to visit? Why was it he I had blamed all those years for the way Manjula used to serve me smaller portions than everyone else, her spoon a safe five inches away from my untouchable plate? For the way Kamal made me run errands; for the rat-infested quarters I slept in; for the far end of the table reserved for me? What had I felt so embittered about? And why had he become the core of my simmering bitterness? Now, face to face, I felt nothing of the old anger – or perhaps I was looking at him with the triumphant magnanimity of the strong for the weak.

When Nirmal Babu left the room briefly, Bakul said, “Baba took premature retirement because he had a heart attack. He has diabetes too. But he's so stubborn. I know he eats all kinds of forbidden things when I am not there to stop him.”

“You – a guardian angel!” I said. “It's hard to imagine you watching over your father with a diet book and prescription.”

She had a sly smile as she looked up from tickling the dog behind its ear. “As hard as to imagine you married and a father.”

She stopped, seeing Nirmal Babu return. “What do you do, Mukunda?” he said. “Didn't you want to go to college? I remember
you wanted to climb mountains and cross seas, you wanted to be an explorer. Wasn't that so?”

“Yes,” I said. “What romantic notions we have as children. And look how it's turned out. I'm just a clerk at an architect's, most days chained to a desk!”

I did not elaborate. Aangti Babu was no architect and I was no longer an innocent clerk. I slid over the true nature of my work. I should have told him the reason for my trip at once, but of course I could not.

“Can I walk around the house?” I said to change the subject. “Just to see … ”

“You don't need to ask,” Nirmal Babu said. “It's always been your house. I hope you will stay here as long as you're in Songarh.”

Bakul followed a few steps behind as I walked into the middle room that led off from the wide corridor. There was only one bed there in place of the two that had been occupied by Meera and Bakul. When I looked enquiringly at Bakul, she said, “I've moved to the front room so that I can look out of the window.” The little room that led off her old one was empty but for a jumble of boxes and oddments. The narrow bed, and Kananbala's white-shrouded form curled up in it, were gone.

“She died,” Bakul said before I could ask. “Just a couple of years after you went away. One morning we found her – by her bed – on the floor. She must have called in the night but nobody …. I slept in the next room and I didn't hear anything. If I had, maybe … ” She banged the door shut and said, “Let's go outside.”

I opened my mouth to tell Bakul about Noorie, the way her cursing always reminded me of Kananbala, but then, not knowing where to begin, I did not.

Nirmal Babu was waiting for us in the garden. The custard apple and grapefruit trees would soon be full of fruit, he said proudly. Near the gate, he showed me fifteen young guava and lemon plants that he said would all grow to flower and fruit in a few years.

“Baba sits there every evening and talks to his trees,” Bakul said. “He says he has no time for beds of annuals, it's trees, vegetables, and
fragrant creepers he wants. I think he wants me to start digging too, but I'm not in the least interested.”

I smiled in recognition. It is only to gardeners that their gardens seem places of wonderment and drama. Even today I can identify no more than a few common trees; if I wanted pleasant surroundings, I would get a gardener.

Nirmal Babu lit a cigarette. “When I was young,” he said, “I wasn't interested in gardens either. My father was so disappointed that nobody in the family was interested in the garden. We just pretended we were, to make him happy.”

“But we aren't pretending, are we Mukunda?” Bakul smiled.

I looked at her, unnerved. I wondered if she sensed something, as she had always done with me, and the real reason for my return to Songarh came back to me with a heart-stopping jolt.

* * *

The stunted trees that grew out of the walls of Mrs Barnum's house had acquired a wild, strong life; it was almost impossible to tell that the house had once been yellow, so deep was the layer of black soot and fungus on the outer walls. The front door was open, letting out the same smell – old books, carpeting, caramel, and woodsmoke – that the house had always manufactured. We climbed the wooden stairs and turned into the familiar drawing room. I had not wanted to pay a visit. Mrs Barnum's “
Get out! Never come back! And look up ‘treacherous', look up ‘betrayal'!
” still rang in my ears, but I could not have explained this to Bakul. It was the only secret I had not shared with her.

Bakul whispered, “She's kept it exactly the same, I don't think you'll see anything changed. But the khansama went away to his village – he became too decrepit to work.”

Watching her skip up the stairs, I began to feel trapped in a quicksand of sadness. The more I struggled to be light-hearted and happy, the worse I felt. There was still nothing Bakul and I seemed to need to explain to each other. If she glanced in my direction, I felt I knew what she was thinking. I could tell without looking which of her
teeth was crooked from when she had fallen and hit it against a stone. I knew at the end of the day her calves would probably ache as they used to before, when she would say, “Mukunda, please, please, press my legs for a bit and I'll do your English homework before tuitions tomorrow.”

How could I have forgotten all of this and never come back to see her? I did not allow myself to think how different our lives might have been if I had.

Mrs Barnum looked up from a book as we came in and said, “Ah, Bakul, on time as usual.” Then she noticed me and took her reading glasses off and screwed her eyes up in my direction. I wanted to run out and away. It was a lifetime ago, but I could still see her hand stroking her tiger skin, then lighting a cigarette, looking at me up on a chair, riffling through her letters.

After a minute she said, “It's the boy, isn't it? The boy I drew? Mukunda! Why haven't you come for so long? Did you go away somewhere?”

“Oh, Mrs Barnum,” Bakul said, “I told you, he went off to study in Calcutta. Then he forgot all about us and never wrote or came,” she said.

I walked across the room and knelt by Mrs Barnum's side. She looked at me as if I could never do any wrong. She caressed my face and traced my cheekbones with her fingers. “Oh, those bones,” she said mischievously. “If I were younger, my boy!” She pointed to a space behind her head, and there it was: her sketch of me at thirteen, hanging on the wall in a wooden frame.

She beamed. “This is like old times! We must celebrate! What was it you children liked to eat? Sandwiches and lemon sherbet? We must have some!” She reached out for her bell on the side table and rang it loud and long. Then she turned to me and said, “Young man, sit down, don't make me crane my neck so!”

I sat, feeling as if the part of me that had rotted that long-ago afternoon in her bedroom, when she had found me searching through her letters, had just been amputated – leaving me miraculously healthy once more.

I saw Bakul slipping out of the room. Mrs Barnum tapped me on my arm and leaned forward. “Now tell me, how do I look?” she asked me and pursed her lips, which were shakily painted with a dark-pink lipstick. Her papery cheeks had two circles of rouge the colour of the lipstick, and thin, greasy hair twined about her ears. She seemed tiny where once she had been tall.

“Beautiful,” I said fervently. “You haven't changed a bit.”

She leaned towards me and whispered with an impish smile, “Don't you want to raid my bedroom, search it for clues, turn it inside out?”

She had not forgotten, and she had not forgiven. I should never have come. I almost got up to leave.

She laughed out loud, ending in a wheezy cough, slapping her thin, chiffon-covered thigh, saying something I could not understand for her coughing. “Your face!” I thought she was saying. “Your face, child!” Then she leaned closer to me, her lips flaky, her breath like old river mud, and I thought she said, but it was not clear through all her coughing and laughing, “Here's a secret for you: I did kill him. Slid a kukri into his stomach and turned it round a few times, good riddance.” She spat some phlegm into a handkerchief and leaned her lips towards me again, but by then Bakul had returned to the room carrying a tray with glasses and a plate of sandwiches. Mrs Barnum shifted and lit herself a cigarette as if she had confessed nothing at all. To Bakul she said, “You've been too long! And who's that with you? Is it … ”

For behind Bakul there was someone else.

A man. A young man. A man with a lazy, elegant slouch and a mop of hair over his high forehead. He held the curtain aside for Bakul's tray, his height reducing hers to a child's, and came into the room as if it belonged to him. He was in a dark suit and blue-grey tie loosened as if he could no longer stand to be constrained. A French beard, combed and waxed, stuck out at a strange right angle, making his otherwise handsome face look faintly comical. Touching Mrs Barnum on the shoulder as he passed her, he flopped into an armchair and said, “What a day! I need all the sandwiches I can get! And some swawbewwies and cweam wouldn't be too bad either.” He spoke English like an Englishman, but with a lisp.