An Atlas of Impossible Longing (39 page)

* * *

There was nothing for me in Songarh, but I could not bear to go back to Calcutta. I stayed on in the cheap room I had booked myself into for the next couple of days, lying in bed, alternating between a dead, stunned doze full of troubled dreams and long wakefulness. I did not want to eat or get up. I felt as if I would not be able to move my body from the bed even if I tried, as though it had a separate, stone-like weight I would not be able to heave out. I did not want to bathe or brush my teeth. I did not care that, with barely any savings, I could scarcely afford to pay for a hotel. I was cold in Songarh without winter clothing, so I lay shivering under a threadbare quilt all day, refusing to open the window to let in the sun.

I felt as if, having been loved, I had now been cast into the dustbin of the unloved; out of the cool shade into the putrefying sun, out from shelter into the wilderness. I knew well enough even in that darkness and confusion that Bakul was blameless, yet I felt as if she had abandoned me.

* * *

I am not sure how long I stayed at the hotel. It felt an eternity of misery. Eventually I dragged myself home, too tired and disoriented to make up excuses to trot out to my wife.

When I opened the staircase door and reached our terrace, the first thing I noticed was that Noorie's cage was open and she was not in it. The terrace stretched out barren and empty in the sun without her.

The next thing I saw was that our door had its big brass lock on it. When I went down the stairs to the neighbour with whom we usually left the key, she gave me a strange look and handed it over with a note. She shut the door on me without a word, which was unusual. My wife and I always made fun of her garrulity.

“I am going home,” the note said. No more. She had not bothered to seal the folded square of paper within an envelope to keep our neighbours from gossiping.

My wife could not have taken Noorie to the village with her. She must have thought that leaving the cage door open would allow the
bird to fend for herself. But how could that tame parrot have found food? She must have stayed in the cage, cowering in a corner as she used to after Suleiman Chacha left, not daring to fly out, waiting for me to arrive with green chillies and fresh water.

I fiddled with the cage and looked around for Noorie, making the chucking sounds she responded to. I squatted in a corner of the terrace, feeling the baking midday sun burn the soles of my feet. I knew it was futile. There would be no familiar flash of green. No claws would dig into my shoulder, no beak would nibble my ear and search through my hair, consoling me with squawked obscenities.

Above me, in the dirty, grey-blue Calcutta sky, rapacious kites wheeled around and cawing crows hopped along the parapet mocking each other.

* * *

I let myself into our room at last, wondering what had made my wife go away like this. She was used to my travels, and certainly to trips as long as this one. Why should she have thought this time any different?

The room looked tidy and settled, as if she had taken her time over leaving. On the table by the window, in a neat pile, were Suleiman Chacha's books, our small, old radio, and the worn exercise book in which she kept conscientious household accounts, recording every matchbox and kilo of rice that she bought.

Within the account book was the picture I had torn out of the magazine at the doctor's that day, and Bakul's wedding card.

Later, from a clerk at Aangti Babu's, I came to know that my wife had visited the office in my absence. After all, he was a distant relative of her father's, apart from being my boss. I could not ask Aangti Babu what had transpired, but I supposed she must have been worried by my disappearance and gone to ask him when I would be back. What could he have told her that made her leave like this? She had never travelled alone before. Usually she went to her parents' once a year, at Puja, and I would drop her off at her village home.

Aangti Babu probably hadn't been able to resist the opportunity to be malicious when my wife went to him for news of me. I could imagine the scene: Aangti Babu twisting the blue- and yellow-stoned rings that cut into the flesh of his fingers, pumping my wife for information in his high voice. He must have deduced from her ignorance about Songarh that I had not told her of the house I owned there.

“My child,” he will have said, “men are so terrible, they really think womenfolk don't need to know all this. Don't blame your husband, he's trying very hard to make his business work. It's a shame you're having to lead a hard life now, it will all change some day! This house of his in Songarh, which belonged, I discovered, to his old mentor and his young daughter, well, such a house is not easy to sell, is it? Sentiment! Doesn't that count for something? I met them, they are such estimable people, and such a beautiful, flower-like girl, you would have warmed to them instantly.”

I was guessing all this of course. Despite my suspicions, I could not antagonise Aangti Babu. Too many of my contracts depended on him, and I had to continue taking on his overseeing work as if nothing had happened. He said nothing either. I may have been wrong. Perhaps he had tried to cover up for me, and my wife had jumped to her own conclusions.

When she had not returned after a fortnight, I began to miss my boy more and more. I wrote her a letter enquiring about her plans. Did she want me to come and fetch them in the next few days? After that I would be busy for some weeks with a new contract. The letter went unanswered.

* * *

It was a month or so later that I went out for a walk and actually took in my surroundings. The heat was less fierce. I could sense moisture in the light breeze that touched my skin. It was a soft feeling, like a passing feather, a breeze that made me feel as if I had a soul that could unfold and stretch. I sat on a railing by the footpath, in the shelter of a dilapidated bus shed. The day had darkened to an unnatural early
twilight. The sky was low with purple-grey clouds that seemed too heavy to stay afloat. In a little while the expected deluge began and I closed my eyes in relief and gratitude as the thundering sound of rain drowned out the twittering of the late evening birds. The leaves on the roadside trees turned shiny green, and dipped and drooped with the water. For a little while, in the drumming rain, anything seemed possible.

The last few weeks had been the darkest time of my life: when I sat alone on that rooftop, day after scorching day, absorbing for the first time that Bakul was no longer mine. She was in a strange city, in a new home I could not visualise. In bed with a man whom perhaps she loved. When I managed to push this thought away, another would come to prey on me: I worried about Goutam's skin allergy and what care he would get in my wife's village. I longed for his milky, baby smell and piping voice. He must miss me so much, I thought, he must ask for me every day. When I pushed this thought away, yet another came to prey on me: Noorie, starving, being torn to pieces by other birds or cats as she tried to find me, find food.

I felt incapable of paying attention to anything else. The room on the terrace grew unloved and dusty, I threw off my clothes into a heap on the floor and wore them unwashed the next day. I must have smelled bad – there was no-one to complain save the milkman who came daily because I did not dare tell him there was no longer a baby who needed the milk.

When two months had passed without answers to my several letters, I went to my wife's town to try to persuade her to return. It was a pretty place, grown from village into town by virtue of a few large houses. One of these relatively large houses belonged in part to my father-in-law, Barababu. I had not told my wife I was coming. I had not known until I got on the train that I really would go. I was, to tell the truth, a little apprehensive about her mother, her loud-voiced, belligerent aunts, and her father.

I decided to walk from the station to her house, although it was a fair distance. It would give me time to settle my thoughts. Besides, I liked the walk through the emerald-lit, mango-fringed road. Parts of
it were bordered by ancient terracotta temples set in groves of tall, old trees. The other side, halfway down the road, had a deep pukur as large as a small lake, filled with moss-green water in which you could, if you sat still, see the shadowy forms of fish gliding about.

My father-in-law lived in a jointly owned family home, a sprawling set of rooms connected higgledy-piggledy with verandahs, courtyards and walkways. In the early days I had often lost my way in it. As I approached the green door set in the lemon-coloured walls of the house I sent out a prayer to the gods in the temples I had just passed. The door opened into the first courtyard, a big one bordered by a wide, cool, shaded verandah on all sides, where the family's Durga puja was organised every year. I had seen it thronging with laughter, noise, incense smoke and people, but it was empty and quiet now, on a mid-summer morning.

My wife's family occupied rooms in the next courtyard, up a short flight of stairs. As I ascended the stairs, I came face to face with my wife's elder aunt. She shrank as if I were an assassin. I smiled and began to bend to touch her feet, but she hurried past saying as if to herself, “Oh Ma, the water tap must be open and flowing, I must rush.”

When I reached the set of rooms belonging to my parents-in-law, I paused outside, removing my slippers. Through the insect-mesh of the door I could see my father-in-law reading the newspaper at their round marble table. I could not see my wife or son. I coughed and knocked on the door. He looked up. He saw me and did not smile, saying instead, “You've come?”

I walked in and sat down beside him.

“How are you?” I tried.

“Are you really concerned about my health?” he said.

“I wrote many times, to say I would come and pick them up, but got no answer,” I said, deciding to set aside the pleasantries.

“What do you expect?” he said, heated. “My daughter finds out she has to live in penury because you are supporting another family, and you keep pictures of strange women in your cupboard, and then you expect her to come back? Which self-respecting woman would?”

“I am not supporting any other family,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “I don't know what you have heard, but that's not true.”

“Isn't it true you have bought a large property in another town?”

“Yes, but … ”

“Did you tell your own wife about it?”

“No,” I said. “But … ”

“And isn't it true that this house belongs to some old family you know, with a father and daughter?”

“You don't understand … ” I began.

“Enough!” he thundered. “I understand everything! You locked up all your money in this house; you did not sell it, who knows why? Everyone says it is because you want to support this other family. And meanwhile, what about my daughter? She has to move from her own house, sell half the things we gave her for her wedding, and live in discomfort in rented rooms. What more do I need to understand?”

“Can I speak to her?” I said, my voice as loud as his by this time.

“Do you think she wants to speak to you?”

“Let her decide that.”

“Come back once you sell that house,” he said in clipped tones. “That is the only thing she asks. Meanwhile, there is no need to speak to her.”

“My son,” I said. “Where is my son?”

“Come back for him when you're fit to be a father,” he said, and took up his newspaper as if I were no longer in the room.

I got up angrily from my chair and went to the door. As I bent down to put on my shoes I saw my wife standing at the side door of the room. She had been listening to our conversation. I started towards her, but she drew back, almost as if she were frightened. She opened her mouth to say something, but then a shadowy form passed the opened door beyond her and she seemed to jump. Quickly, she turned away, retreating into the other room.

I retraced my steps to the front courtyard. This time it was not empty. My son was playing on the verandah. With him was another little boy. They were about the same age, almost three. My son had a pebble in his little fist. He carefully laid it down and then got up and
walked to the edge of the verandah, picked up another pebble from a pile and laid it next to the first.

I stared, mesmerised by the intricacies of the game which occupied him. I forgot the existence of the other boy and the servant woman who was sitting by them. My son looked up at me once and then went back to his game. I couldn't tell if he was sulking or did not recognise me. When one of his pebbles rolled off the side of the verandah, I stooped and picked it up. He laid out his tiny palm, pink and creased, the palm I had loved to hold to my nose, blow on, tickle.

“Golu,” I said, wheedling, “Goutam, look who's here! Your Baba!” I smiled, holding out my arms.

“His name is Akshay,” the servant woman smiled. “Call him Akshay and he'll come.”

I placed the pebble in his palm and closed his fist. He looked at his fist with a frown and tottered back to his game.

I strode out of the courtyard, feeling loops and loops of barbed wire tightening around my heart.

I sat for a long time that day by the side of the town's pond, staring at the date palm and banana trees that shadowed the water at its edges, the steps which disappeared into the water, the two shiny brown boys who were splashing in and out at the other end. When it was time for the evening train, I got up, shook out my clothes, and walked away.