An Atlas of Impossible Longing (44 page)

He looked doubtful for a moment, but the logic of the situation and of what I was saying, and the fact that I was Aangti Babu's blue-eyed boy, were sufficient. He had an agile mind and did not vacillate. “O.K., m'n, best of luck,” he said, with a quick punch on my shoulder. “I'll push off and tell the boss, but play it carefully, m'boy, miles to go before you sleep.” He waved me a goodbye and shuffled off towards the driveway. I followed to make sure he really was leaving.

I had done this kind of thing before in the course of my work, but
I had never had a personal stake in any of it. By the time Harold's leave-taking at the gate was done, I was exhausted by my arguing and trickery. My neck ached, and a spot behind my right eye throbbed with pain. I had almost forgotten that Bakul was waiting.

She had never liked to wait. As soon as she saw me approach, she said. “Have you managed to get rid of him? When did you learn to be so persuasive? Two men despatched inside an hour! Shall I call in the next buyer so you can work your charm on him too?”

“Can you be quiet for maybe a two-minute stretch?” I said.

She turned away, looking hurt. But I was too angry to stop.

“How dare you come here on your own? Yes, you can do everything, yes, you're not afraid of anything, that's how it's always been. But would it have hurt to bring your husband along? Just as a prop, even if you don't actually need him? Don't you know how dangerous all this is? Property disputes attract dealers and thugs. Why couldn't Nirmal Babu have come? Isn't selling his wife's home important enough? Staying back for a
dog
! What if Harold had hurt you?”

It emerged as a tirade. She cut me short. “Dealers and thugs like you?” she said with her crooked smile.

“You can smile, Bakul, because you don't know how rough it can get.”

“Baba!” she said. “Of course! You must have come because my father told you to. He thinks I can do nothing on my own, doesn't he? I should have known it. I guessed something like this must have happened the moment I saw you, but you came with that other fellow and you looked like you wanted to buy me out! I wasn't sure how things stood until I saw you fend off that Rathin Mullick.”

“Rathin Mullick is a lamb compared to Harold – the things Harold does – I can understand Nirmal Babu, he's never lived in the real world,” I burst out again, “but your husband … I shouldn't say anything about him of course, but all the same Bakul, how could he?”

“Why are you going on about a husband, Mukunda? Don't you know … I mean, didn't Baba tell you?”

“Tell me? Tell me what?”

She looked at my face and threw her head back and laughed. “Did
you
really
think … ?” she managed to say between bursts of laughter. “Oh, you look so … ” I knew I looked confused and angry, sweaty, dishevelled, and absurd. My impulse was to reach out and slap her face if she did not stop laughing. In the end she did.

“I have no husband, I never had one,” she said. “Didn't Baba tell you the marriage was called off? I thought he wrote to you all the time! I thought you knew.”

“Called off?” I repeated, almost in a whisper.

“Yes,” she said, her impish smile back again. “They found out – that I'm not a virgin, that I slept with a married man – and they ran for their lives! The groom ran the fastest of all. I had only to swear one cousin to secrecy and tell her I had had an affair with a married man, and that was enough! With just seven days to go before the wedding, they called it off! I turned cartwheels for joy. Baba was livid; he muttered for weeks about what an archaic lot the groom's family were, and what an escape for me. He blamed himself because the groom was some history teacher Baba had thought would be perfect for me. I don't know why I ever agreed to the wedding – sometimes, living in Songarh with no change – such loneliness, such boredom, and no hope of release – sometimes I'd think anything would be better, even marrying a stranger. He looked pleasant enough and he lived in Bombay – but as the wedding day approached I felt I couldn't, I just couldn't. It all seemed too impossible and there was no other way of getting out of it but to spread the rumour and pray that it reached him.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” I said. “Why didn't you tell me? I was there at that time: I came to Songarh! I was there knocking about in some miserable hotel room, killing myself thinking of you with another man!”

I looked at her smiling face. I was furious: how she could be so light-hearted about something that had almost wrecked our two lives? How could I have gone all the way to Songarh and not actually met her, thinking she was married? How simple it would have been if I had not run away that morning! And how could
she
have been so stupid, never telling me what had happened? All those wasted years
since that miserable spring when I lost her and my wife and my child all at once. What if Bakul and I had never met again?

* * *

We walked in silence for a while in the grounds surrounding the house. The earth had a curious, bleached, aged look from having been so long underwater. There was all kinds of rubbish – bits of wood, dead fish, a dented enamel bowl – strewn around the grounds, as if thrown up by the tide.

Bakul sat down on the back verandah's worn steps, now exposed to air and light after years of drowning. The cloud-curdled sky was grey and white above us, making the light as soft as the evening's although it was still only afternoon. A short distance across a stretch of hard, dry clay that must have been the submerged garden, I could see water.

“My father's always done this to me,” she was saying. “Don't you remember how he promised he'd bring us both here for a holiday, and then out of the blue sent you off to Calcutta instead? For years he never let me meet my grandfather, and then he brought me here just twice, once about two years after you left – that's when my grandfather hid the deed with me – and the next time when he was almost too old to know who I was. When we were here, Baba was so unfriendly, and both times we left within two nights after coming all that way.”

I tried to pay attention to what she was saying about Nirmal Babu, but could think of nothing but this: she was not married, there was no husband.
Bakul had no husband.
She had never had a husband. After years of jealousy I had nobody to be jealous of. If she still wanted me (and how could she not?) then we could … but what if she did not want me any more? She seemed to have everything on her mind but us.

“This terrible Rathin Mullick was right,” Bakul was saying, meanwhile. “I don't know this house except from stories and pictures. When my grandfather was ill, I didn't get to know about it. When he died, we didn't know until ten days later! And now at last I'm here at the house, and there are strangers tramping all over it, measuring it
up, assessing it, deal-making. I had wondered on the way here what I would do when I came. I was thinking perhaps I'd sell it. That's the most practical thing. What am I to do with this ramshackle old mansion far away from anywhere? But … ” she laughed, “I must have something of my grandfather in me. I couldn't have sold it, I think, even if it was still flooded and as hollow as a coconut shell with termites. Oh, of course I showed it to Harold and all that – I couldn't very well not when I had agreed to meet him, but the thought of him – or anyone remotely like him – taking it over! Makes my flesh crawl.”

When she spoke again after a pause, her eyes flashed. “Every room in this house makes me think of my mother. This is all I have of her. My father can't make me sell it, he can't!”

“Nirmal Babu … you know how he is, lost in his fossils and potsherds and stupas,” I said. “He probably hasn't even realised you're attached to this house. He's just trying, for once, to be practical. He wanted you to have money to survive.” I laughed in an effort to lighten the atmosphere, “And look how he blundered.”

“You can laugh,” she said, hardly able to keep the tremor out of her voice. “He's adorable, isn't he, so absentminded, so lost in his world of continents and kings. But he never had much space in his mind for me. He's always been concerned, but did he ever consider how I would feel if … ” She stopped speaking for a while, then took a deep breath and said, “I'm just going on and on. Tell me about yourself. How is your son? Why have you given up your job?”

“What did you do with the house deed?” I asked her. “Have you got it safe?”

“I posted it, Mukunda, that's what I did the moment I knew I wouldn't sell the house. Just trusted the Indian Post and Telegraph with my life's wealth and posted it off to Baba! Three nights ago. I went straight to the place where the deed was hidden, found it, packed it securely and sent it as a registered letter to Songarh. You don't have to worry about saving me from your Aangti Babu. This house is mine now.”

* * *

The relief of it made me garrulous. I sat on those steps and told Bakul about my wife and son, how I had not seen them after that brief glimpse when I went to my wife's village some months after she had left. I told her how I longed to see my son, still dreamed about him as I had seen him last, as a toddler, but my father-in-law was implacable and my wife never replied to my letters, and my son would not know me until it was too late.

I told her about the trips I had made to my wife's village over the years, hoping each time to be let into the house, and each time being turned away from their door. I had a child and yet I didn't have a child. How right that senile old astrologer had been!

I told her about Suleiman Chacha and Chachi coming back from East Pakistan. About the man in the train who had seen a spaceship.

In the end my throat felt dry. After years of living so much alone, I felt as if my voice was ringing in my ears. I stopped.

* * *

We walked across the clay to the placid water. It was no longer the wide river I had seen when I had come to Manoharpur with Aangti Babu. This was a flat, tranquil stream. How could it have flooded the house, caused Bakul's mother to die? It barely even disturbed the silt that disappeared into it, a smooth, silky, greyish black.

Bakul took off her slippers and walked into the wet mud. I followed, the cool mud oozing between my toes. She sat on her haunches by the stream, the edges of her sari growing damp.

It was quiet but for the call of a distant, monotonous bird. Bakul's chin rested on her knee, her hair shielding her face. She seemed sunk in thought. A long-legged insect made of straight lines trembled on the surface of the water. I touched it with my fingertip and it sprang away. I wondered what Bakul was thinking. Were we too late? Had her feelings changed? Had I said too much about my wife and child? Why did she seem so far away, trailing an idle hand in the water and looking out to the other bank as if she had forgotten I was there?

When at length a red flower came floating down the water towards
me, I guided it to Bakul, hoping she would notice. She stopped hiding behind her hair and turned, and for the first time that afternoon she smiled at me in the old way. Her hand reached out for mine and our fingers found each other's beneath the water and intertwined.

The flower, the ruined house behind us, the two wispy-haired children staring at us from a mud-flat across the river, everything receded. I could see and hear nothing with her hand in mine. I caressed each of her fingers until they slipped out of my grasp one by one. I heard the sound of water as she used her freed hand to push it back and forth. Far in the distance, a flat, dark country boat punted into view.

At last Bakul said, “Mukunda?”

I did not answer.

“How was I to know what to do? You were still married,” she said, pulling at my arm. “What did you expect: that I'd write to you and say, Leave your wife, leave your child – come and live with me now, I can't go on this way, everything seems wrong, each day of my life seems only half lived without you … Is that what I was supposed to tell you?”

Somewhere far away a steamer hooted. Perhaps the real, wide river met the sea somewhere out of sight, but within our hearing.

I thought I had replied when all I was doing was staring at her and repeating her words in my head.

I felt as if everything had gone very still. The rushes had stopped nodding, the breeze had stopped blowing through our hair, the stream had stopped flowing, the curdled clouds had stopped drifting overhead, that bird had stopped its call, the two children on the opposite bank had frozen in mid-gesture.

The steamer hooted again, a little closer now, melancholy, hollow.

I noticed irrelevant things: that her sari was the green of a tender banana leaf, that its border had flecks of lemon in it, that she had tiny, fish-shaped gold studs in her ears, that the same thin gold chain still rode over her collarbone and disappeared into her white blouse. I traced the chain with the tip of my finger.

Our clothes were getting soaked in the grey river-bed, our feet were sinking in the mud, Bakul's hair had come loose, one of her gold
studs had slipped off, the number of staring children on the opposite bank had gone up from two to seven, and they were leaping up and down, laughing and pointing and shouting things we could not hear. I took in none of this.