An Atlas of Impossible Longing (40 page)

I
n the early days of my marriage, I found the idea of separation and solitude frightening. There was one particularly bitter quarrel my wife and I had – I forget the cause – and in the end I had stormed out of the house saying, “I'm not coming back”. When I did, hours later, she was not at home, although it was late in the evening. I remember how a quiet pit of fear had opened inside me as I thought, This time she really has gone back to her parents.

Now that our separation was real, curiously I felt no fear, and after those first bad months I even began to feel a guilty contentment. I came back after work to the empty room on the roof. I cooked some daal and rice, and having eaten it, sat alone on the terrace feeling the city throb below me while I looked up at the stars from my little oasis, drinking rum, feeling the familiar languor spread by degrees to my fingertips. If I went to the parapet of the terrace I could see the trams moving like lit caterpillars, pinging the wires above, and the squares of yellow lamplight in the houses around me. Three floors down was the road, where I could see the busy shadows of anonymous pigmy people on errands I did not need to know about.

My solitude was absolute. I spoke to labourers and contractors and building owners during the day, but apart from professional talk I had no dealings with anyone at all. My neighbours side-stepped me, thinking me an evil man who had not only driven his wife away, but who also drank. This did not bother me. On the rare days I was overwhelmed by my solitude, I went to a crowded Muslim restaurant in Dharmatolla and ate rezala and roti, soaking in the clamour along with the grease.

Everything seemed to have become much simpler. I had the space to think or to daydream. I bought books again, after years, and began to read. On impulse, when I was walking past a market one day and saw some music shops, I went in and bought a bamboo flute with a rich, resonant timbre. I managed, after several attempts, to play the Sibelius melody on it. My terrace was immediately transformed into Mrs Barnum's garden and I felt as if Bakul were listening to me from some dark corner.

When winter came and the mosquitoes disappeared in the cold, I put my cot out on the terrace and lay there as I drank, looking up at the black, sooty, half-lit dome of the sky. One such night I saw a shooting star and returned in my mind to the flaming trail of light Bakul and I had seen in the sky years ago. What if it had been a spaceship? What if its space people had touched her and me with their magic that evening, with their rays or vibrations? Changing us forever?

Perhaps I should go and surprise Bakul in her marital home in Bombay. But what would I say to her face to face? What if she looked cold and distant, as she sometimes did, and asked why I had come?

If she did, I would make an excuse, say work had brought me to Bombay.

She would make polite conversation and might even give me tea. We would talk about Bombay, the potato prices, her husband's job, then say goodbye. Her baby (she must have had one) would begin to wail. She would say she had work to do. Her husband would appear and ask her who I was.

I would go to Bombay on the train the next week. I would make an excuse, say work had brought me there, and Bakul, eyes dancing, would say, Lies! You came to see me! Admit it! I would pull her to me and it would feel as if there had been no years and no other people in between.

I would go to Bombay, and as I stood somewhere on the street trying to puzzle out where her house was, Bakul would tap me on the shoulder. I would start to say I've come to work and she would interrupt, I knew you'd come looking for me one day.

I smiled to myself in the dark and took out the sliver of mica that
stayed with me in my wallet these days as a Songarh keepsake. I lit a match and watched the mica flicker in its flame, then lit my cigarette with it.

Downstairs, the forlorn son of the drunken man called out “Baba? Baba! Where are you?” as on every other night. His voice faded and then returned, faded and then returned again. And then stopped.

* * *

Two years passed this way. I was beginning to find more and more independent work. Aangti Babu, all said and done, had taught me the trade, and now I was a tough businessman. I could intimidate people into abandoning their houses. I could bribe government officials with ease. I could bully labourers into carrying more headloads than contracted. I could hold back payment from shrivelled-up, starving workmen if they missed a day. I developed a nose for buying and selling property and an ear for gossip about old mansions that had begun falling apart. I was making more money than I knew what to do with. I sent a generous monthly amount to my wife. Each month, along with the money, I wrote a brief letter: what work I was doing, the weather. For some time I had thought our separation would be temporary, and she would return, forgetting our last bad year. I had never intended driving her away, never imagined I would lose my son, and that she would be embittered enough to change his name. My letters were never answered. She had always been a diffident and reluctant writer, her alphabet round, childish, pressed hard into the paper. The thought also crossed my mind that perhaps my father-in-law, seeing I had ignored his ultimatum, was withholding both letters and money from my wife and she knew nothing of them. If that were so, my betrayal must to her have seemed too terrible for forgiveness.

* * *

I did not want to work with Aangti Babu, but I had no choice, for our work had become closely intertwined over the years. He, for his
part, did not pass up any opportunity to taunt me. One day, as I left his room, he said, “So the house in Songarh did not, after all, come at a bargain price, did it?” Then he chuckled in that nasal way he had. “When will you put it to use, Mukunda? Are you a businessman? Or Mahatma Gandhi?” His eyes seemed smaller in a face that had become obese and pouchy. The years of betel chewing had stained his teeth and lips beyond redemption. He drew breath with a wheeze these days.

I thought it best not to answer him. The Songarh exchange was some years in the past now, and I had tolerated this jibe many times. Instead, I left him with a short, “I'll be back next week, have to travel.” I stepped into the reception – Aangti Babu had prospered and made himself a reception area – and started collecting some papers from my former table that occupied one corner of it. The room's single, brown-upholstered sofa was occupied by a grey-haired woman who sat with her head in her hands. She had not been there when I had gone into Aangti Babu's room an hour before. She did not look up when I rustled my papers or chatted to the tea boy. When her head jerked downward in a sleepy nod, I realised she had dozed off. Despite being asleep, she kept a vigilant hand on a chipped purple trunk beside her. It was painted with red roses and green leaves, a pattern that I felt I had seen before – but then such things were common enough. I wondered what she was doing there; one hardly ever saw women in Aangti Babu's office. I stopped whatever noise I was making so that I would not wake her, and left the building.

Minutes after I had stepped out of the door into the elbowing, sweaty rush of the street, I heard someone calling and then a hand clutched my elbow. I turned with a protest ready on my lips to see a thin, elderly man in glasses. His clothes looked worn and the bag on his shoulder was an ordinary cloth jhola. His bald head gleamed with sweat. I thought he was a party worker of some kind, and said, “Dada, I am in a hurry.” I did not want to stand there being told the benefits of being a leftist or a Congressman, not then, though such conversations often amused me.

“Don't you recognise me, Mukunda?” the man said with a smile.

The puzzle of his face melted into place. He had shaved off his beard and that made him look completely different, but now I knew.

“Suleiman Chacha!”

Even as I said the words, I wanted to turn and run, run as far away as possible from him, and from the little woman in the waiting room with the purple trunk.

“Shall we sit and have some tea somewhere?” Chacha said. “Your Chachi is so tired.”

* * *

We did not want to talk in Aangti Babu's office, so we picked our way through the squalor of Bowbazar's street market in search of a suitable place. It was at its busiest: vegetables, fish, flowers, rickety chairs, birds in cages, trinkets and toys, all spilling at our feet, vendors shouting each other hoarse about the perfection of their wares. We kept losing sight of Chachi, then finding her again. I banged their trunk against people's knees in the crowd and pretended not to hear the curses that followed. Finally we found with relief one of those little restaurants that line the streets all over Calcutta, the ones with wooden benches and greenish glasses with bubbles in them. Three such glasses stood on the greasy table before us, steaming with tea. Chacha and Chachi were eating dhakai parathas, but I felt nauseous looking at food. Did they know what I had done? Did they know I had bartered away the house they trusted me with? That it was being demolished even as we sipped our tea? The thought was insistent, but I could not bring myself to raise the subject.

I barely heard the things Suleiman Chacha said about East Pakistan and how difficult life had been there at first, and how much he had missed Calcutta. “I remembered strange things, bhai,” he was saying. “You know, the ships' horns at night in the docks, hooting in that spectral way. I had never really noticed them when I lived here and my ears ached for them there. And the school, the children. I had thought I was tired of their stupidity and the bullying of the older boys, but I began to wonder, did Monohar eventually clear his exams? Did Sudip
ever learn to spell Nizamuddin? Did Aslam migrate to East Pakistan or did he stay on in Calcutta? And that bookseller I went to on College Street, did he recover from his eczema? Nothing there seemed right, although if you come to think of it, Rajshahi is not that far … it's home, isn't it? It may be a hovel, but if it's your home then you can't stop longing for it.”

We asked for more tea. I wondered when they would bring the topic up, or should I?

At last he said, “We went to our old house, of course.” And after a bite of paratha he continued, “We went there straight from the station. Your Chachi was all agog, even though I kept warning her nine years had passed and things change.”

Chachi said, “You look a grown man now, I would not have known you in the street.”

I stared at my glass of tea. Chachi reached across the table and touched my cheek saying, “Look at you, so thin, your cheeks have gone in. And your clothes! Aren't you married? Doesn't anyone look after you? We wondered sometimes.”

“You never wrote to me,” I said. “Why did you not write?”

Suleiman Chacha smiled in the gentle way I remembered. “Arre bhai, Mukunda,” he said. “You have no idea what was going on. Often your Chachi and I did not know where we were going to sleep that night, or where the next meal would come from. I tried so hard to get a job, but they didn't want schoolteachers there, especially of history.” He laughed. “I've become an assistant in a watch shop. Still working with time, you see, a historian of sorts!” He laughed again.

“What about your family?” I said, trying not to sound as if I resented him for returning, though at the time that was how I felt.

“What could we have expected,” he said in a resigned voice. “Everyone told us to occupy any empty house whose owners had fled. But that didn't seem right. What if their owners returned, just as we thought we'd come home to Calcutta? We never thought we would stay there for good, so we kept living in rented rooms here and there. The family house turned out to be too crowded to give us space.”

“Family house!” Chachi said with scorn and glared at her tea as she
adjusted her sari in the righteous manner women do sometimes. “What family? What house? They looked at us as if we were usurpers … even when we visited.”

Chacha said, “We went looking for our house – and there is just rubble. The space looked so big, I hadn't thought the old house was so large.” His eyes were too apologetic to meet my own. Although the crime was mine, it was as if he were the criminal and my sins had become his.

Chachi said, “The shopkeepers next door did not know about you, but they told us to contact this Aangti Babu. It's lucky you happened to come just now, we were about to give up.”

“I waited a long time,” I said. “But my letters got no replies … ”

“We had to move around a lot. I could get only little bits of work at first … ”

“ … then there was a financial crisis,” I said, scrabbling around for something convincing to tell him, “and I had a real problem finding the money for the bills and taxes, and then there was a chance I would lose the house to a landgrabber … ”

“We've lost too much to worry about losing a house,” Chacha said. “My brother, uncle and nephew were all killed in the riots, and I found out only a year later. I hunted for them for such a long time there. I heard they had been disembowelled, and then … ”

Chachi glowered at him and said, “Why go over all this now?” She was casting furtive looks around her, in case anyone had heard him.

“I didn't expect the old house to be there, only your Chachi did. She kept saying … ”

“ … All I had thought was that the house would have Mukunda's children playing about in it.” She threw Chacha an angry glance. “Women my age want to be grandmothers to someone! That's all I said, nothing about the house. I know these years have been hard for everyone.” She, like him, seemed desperate to make excuses for my wrongdoing.