An Atlas of Impossible Longing (5 page)

“Made from Calcutta's green mangoes? Yes, I agree,” Amulya said.

The cousin looked a little unsettled, but only for a minute. “If you like,” he continued, “I'll go back to Calcutta and make some cautious enquiries. What do you say? I'll write to you as soon as I find out what they think. Then Nirmal can go off and see the girl. I can go with him, it is Nirmal's wedding after all!” The cousin drank a glass of water with noisy satisfaction and rose.

“But this place you live in,” Kananbala's visiting sister-in-law said later that evening, picking up a shingara and biting into the warm crust, “I don't know, but I couldn't live here – in Songarh, I mean. Yes, I know, it's clean and empty and Calcutta is dirty and crowded and noisy. But the crowds and noise keep me alive! It's so soundless here, I thought for a moment I'd gone deaf!” Kananbala's sister-in-law looked in her direction and said, “And I don't think it's doing you much good either.”

“What can I say?” Kananbala replied in a hurry, to deflect the threatened analysis of her health. “I know you can buy shingaras in shops everywhere in Calcutta now, but not here. In Shyambazaar I'd have had someone run down the lane and conjure up a feast from all the sweet shops. Here Manjula and I make them.”

“Oh well,” her sister-in-law said contentedly, “They
are
delicious, and home-made is always better, isn't it? I tell you, we can buy everything, but catch your brother agreeing to eat a shop shingara or cutlet. He can smell anything stale a mile off.”

Kananbala felt confused, simultaneously put down and complimented. She got up and shook out her sari. “Manjula,” she called out from the head of the stairs down towards the kitchen. “Bring some more shingara if you've finished frying.”

Already, it was twelve days since the visitors had come. The Songarh ruins, they had declared, did not compare with the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, nor the forest with the grand Botanical Gardens. The ridge was too tiring to walk to. At Finlays they chuckled over its provincial selection. “What would this Finlays say to Hogg Market, eh?” Amulya's cousin had asked his wife, and then said to the puzzled sales boy, “Never heard of bandel cheese? B-a-n-d-e-l cheese? No?”

Soon, they had run out of things to do and spent the holidays sequestered in Dulganj Road, exhausting even their fund of gossip about relatives. Confronted by her visitors' boredom and scorn, Kananbala had begun perversely to long for the solitude of her daily life.

The fortnight ended, and it was time for the visitors to go. Two tongas had been called for four o'clock. Amulya and Kamal were to go to the station along with a servant carrying a hamper of food for the overnight journey: dinner and breakfast had been packed, and an earthen pitcher of cool water. There was some confusion when one of the horses was discovered to be lame. A servant went in the other tonga to get a third.

As they waited, Amulya's cousin said to Kananbala, “Boudi, I will send you a picture of the girl as soon as I reach Calcutta. I'm sure you'll like her. I know your household, she'll make a perfect daughter-in-law. Shanti is her name, I'm sure … sings well, cooks well, and has lived a secluded life always. So unspoiled. Not like our Calcutta girls. And as for this rascal,” he said, chuckling at Nirmal who stood looking at the empty road, willing the tonga to appear, “he needs someone to keep him in line. I will make all the arrangements!”

Kananbala retreated upstairs after the tongas had left, and stood at the window with the remnant of her smile of farewell. As she turned away, she caught sight of herself profiled in the shining teak front of the cupboard. Her head was invisible, lost in the elaborate carvings that began halfway up its doors. Headless, the body was that of a
stranger, grotesque in the bumps that it was made up of: a large – no, hillocky – bump of a chest, an almost equally bulbous curve at the stomach, and then the falling away of thin legs beneath a cotton sari.

Kananbala turned to the mirror next to the cupboard. When had that double chin settled there? When had the chin sprouted those two hairs? When had her skin turned the colour of her husband's tobacco? She stared at the reflection, feeling herself grow breathless, her throat contract.

* * *

Their visitors had, in the manner of all visitors, made a detailed note of their appearances. “You're growing fat already, Kamal, that's quite a paunch you've got yourself, eh? The first sign of wealth and ease!” they had observed in one direction, and in another, “My goodness Amulya, the sun has blackened you so much you're invisible in the dark!” But it was their comments about his wife that had touched a raw nerve in Amulya. He had overheard their sister-in-law saying to Kananbala, “Didi, I had only heard from here and there that you're not well … but look at you! You seem a hundred rather than fifty! Of course you were always dark, never had your mother's fair colour, but look at you now! Skin like dried-up leather, and is it your scalp I can see through your hair? Songarh's water is bad, I know, I can see half my hair's fallen out in just two weeks here! Come to Calcutta with me and I'll look after you, I really will. Oil massages, cream and flour for your face, baths in rosewater … when I send you back Amulya Babu will think he has a new bride!”

Amulya remembered a time when Kananbala was petite and pretty, with curling hair that refused to be pinned down, and heavy-lidded, lustrous eyes she lined with kajal morning and night. She would race up the stairs at Shyambazaar – those were steep, old-fashioned stairs, dark and undulating – she would run up the stairs two at a time balancing bell-metal plates of food and once even a harmonium – always too impatient to wait for the servants to do their work. A time when she would step out to the terrace to watch him walk down the narrow lane
towards the house and ask as soon as he arrived, “Did you remember to get my lace?”

And now? It took no time to digest his relatives' comments. He could hear them in his head for days after they had left. He realised that over the last two months he too had noticed changes in her, and not just in her appearance. All these years – setting up the factory, building the house, planting the garden, the busy years – of course he had not forgotten about Kananbala. “How could I,” he thought, “living with her every day of my life since I was nineteen and she sixteen?” But it was true, he admitted: just as your tongue obsessively returns to a painful tooth rather than a healthy one, now that Kananbala did not seem quite herself, he seemed to be thinking about her all through the day, even at work.

He began to make notes in his diary; it would help, he thought, to understand exactly what was happening, systematise it a little. He chose a page that was for a Sunday and so would not be required for work, and made observations in his angular, jerky handwriting:

K shuffling rather than walking. Yesterday saw her holding wall when going down stairs to kitchen. Asked what matter. Said dizzy, unstable, knees weak. Seems healthy, but complaining of being ill.

Saris looking crumpled or stained, with turmeric etc. Unpleasant. Told her last night, and she said, Do I smell?

Notice lips moving even when she thinks she is alone. Talking to herself? Disturbing. Also fingers move restlessly, on furniture, her own body etc. even when she is spoken to, as if writing something all the time. Try to decipher, but impossible. Complaining less, but more silent. Does anyone else notice? How to ask?

Entries of this kind crowded the page for Sunday. The next page said:
Ordered coconut oil,
25
gallons; paid Salim; order book up to date, orphanage payment made for this month
. And so on. Wednesday had just one word scrawled across the page:
Doctor
.

Amulya called in the physician, who checked Kananbala's blood pressure and asked her about constipation and gas. He tested her knees and made her walk in a straight line across the bedroom floor. In the end he turned to Amulya and said, “Nothing wrong, sir, nothing at all. Simply in the mind. Ladies get bored in small places. Madam needs amusement!”

“Maybe you should find something to do,” Amulya remarked grimly to her as the doctor's tonga clattered away. “All this comes from having too much leisure.”

“But I work all day,” Kananbala said. “Do you know how much I have to do to keep this house going?”

“That's not enough,” Amulya said. “You should do something else. Why don't you cultivate a hobby? Sew? Knit? Draw pictures? Look at Brahmo women: they read, play the piano, talk about anything under the sun, just like men.”

“Would you let me do all that Brahmo women do? You don't even let me go alone to Calcutta. Kamal has to go with me – or even Nirmal. And they never want to.”

“You'd never be able to go on your own. I send them with you for your safety.” Amulya pushed his feet into his slippers. “Tell me,” he continued in an indulgent tone, “can you find your way
anywhere
? You may be fifty, but you'd still be a lost little girl on the roads of any big city, what with your Shyambazaar at the other end of Howrah Station. Come now, tell Manjula to bring me a cup of tea.”

He put his pipe into his pocket and walked out to the garden.

* * *

A month after the relatives had left, there arrived an envelope thicker and stiffer than usual. Inside were two sheets of blue notepaper closely scrawled upon, and a photograph. Amulya handed Kananbala the picture and began to read the letter. As she looked for her spectacles, which she had still not got used to, he exclaimed, “What a coincidence, the girl's father used to be my uncle's lawyer before he retired! He helped him win that Pukurbari case.”

Kananbala brought the picture of Nirmal's prospective bride into the wavering yellow circle of lamplight she was sitting next to. She reached out and raised the wick a little and put on her glasses.

Amulya said, “Apparently that house they have in Manoharpur by the river is like a palace, and this girl Shanti is the only child. There is no mother, and no other brothers and sisters. It's good when a girl doesn't have too many relatives.” And, after a short pause and the satisfaction which comes with finding the right word, “
Uncomplicated
.”

Kananbala examined the photograph in the light of the lamp. It was an oval face that could have been a little less bony. The girl's hair was pulled back in a plait that returned in a snaky curve over her shoulder to the front of a simple, narrow-bordered sari. Not the latest fashion in either hairstyle or clothes – though, Kananbala thought, I hardly know what the latest fashions are. There was nothing remarkable about the face except its thoughtful expression and the eyes which seemed a strange, light colour, she could not tell what. The irises unusually large, filling up the eyes; the lashes overlong. The gaze was slightly unsettling because of the straight, thick brows that pressed down on the eyes. Kananbala wondered if the picture had been touched up in a studio.

Nirmal was almost eight years younger than his elder brother, an autumn flower, more precious to Kananbala for being late. She still caught herself examining his every feature in as much loving detail as she had when he was a baby. Where Kamal had turned out rather nondescript, ill-humoured, dyspeptic, and already showing signs of jowls, the sharp lines of Nirmal's face, his quick movements, his air of irresponsibility and a sudden, noisy laugh which made his eyes dance, convinced Kananbala she was not being biased when she felt he had grown into a handsome man. She knew mothers were not supposed to have favourites, but it was Nirmal who came straight up to her room first from school, then college, and now from work, to tell her stories of all that had happened during the day. He would do nothing without consulting her first, and their dependence on each other was absolute, this she believed.

She looked again at the picture in her hand, the picture of the
woman to whom Nirmal would belong. She felt too tired to think about it all.

“Let's see the picture,” Amulya said, reaching out. “What do you say? I think Nirmal should be sent off to see the girl. I have a good feeling about this match.”

Just as you did about Songarh, Kananbala said to herself.

* * *

Nirmal married Shanti in March
1928
. The wedding was in Manoharpur. The bride's father, it was said, had roused himself from years of isolation to invite all his forgotten relatives and the neighbouring villagers. He lit up the riverbank with a hundred and one oil lamps. From a week before, shehnai players sat in bamboo machans at the entrance to the house, playing their pipes. Bikash Babu disliked the shehnai's wail, but was determined to fulfil every conventional expectation the groom's family might have. The groom's party – Amulya, Nirmal, Kamal, and Manjula – left Songarh on the overnight train to Calcutta. They were to join up with other relatives there and then take the train to Manoharpur in a merry, festive group.

Her prospective daughter-in-law's magnificent house, its wooden staircase, its mirrors and chandeliers, its riverside setting and splendid garden were to remain a story for Kananbala. Though some women disregarded such superstitions, she knew as a good mother that her presence at his wedding would only bring Nirmal bad luck. So, heeding tradition, she stayed back, alone in Songarh with the household's two servants and three temporary cooks, resigned to custom but anxious and feverish, preparing for the wedding party to return. For the two weeks they were away, she did nothing but order the servants around, have food cooked, and ready the house with an energy she had to dredge up from her past. She rose early and went to bed exhausted every night. The rossogullas had to be creamy enough to dissolve on the tongue, the salty snacks crunchy enough to be heard in the next room. There had to be great quantities of everything. The Oriya cooks hired from Calcutta were instructed to cook the best lobster
they had ever made. The fish was to be brought from Calcutta on the overnight train, packed in ice. She made lists of things she needed to remember.