An Atlas of Impossible Longing (6 page)

In quieter moments, after the servants had locked up for the night and left her alone with the drowsy maid, she pulled out her jewellery box and began to put aside all the ornaments from her own trousseau that she would give the bride. She lingered over her heavy gold bangles with the snakeheads that she loved, with their solid round feel and emeralds for the snakes' eyes. Nirmal's wife must wear them. She held the bangles in her hand and tried them on one last time before setting them aside.

The night before the wedding party was to arrive, an owl's call interrupted Kananbala's half-awake dreams. She was breathless and thirsty and tangled up in the bedsheet when she awoke. It was dark outside, but she felt the urge to step out of the house and go to the forest.

As if sleepwalking, Kananbala rose from her bed and sidestepped the maid who slept on the floor. She opened her bedroom door and went down the stairs. At the front door she came upon a heavy padlock on a chain. The older manservant, Gouranga, was sprawled before it, snoring. She had forgotten how securely the front door was locked each night. She tried to think where the key was kept – the servant's waist, of course. She remembered the side door and half ran to it, but that was locked too.

The stillness of the night, punctuated by the owl's hoot, cracked open with a roar: the lion! The lion no-one else could hear! She ran up the stairs, forgetting to shuffle, and went out onto the roof.

At last she was out in the open, black night, under a nail-paring of a moon, looking into the shapeless gloom of the jungle. The lion roared again. No owl or fox answered it. She stayed there, her mind crowded out with thoughts that allowed her to think nothing, till the horizon paled and the first bird sang.

* * *

Nirmal and Shanti were given the room at one end of the top-floor terrace, the only one on that side of the roof. They spent their first night together on a bed prickly and damp with the traditional flowers, the noise and ribaldry of their visiting cousins seeping into their sleep. In the cold hour just before dawn, Nirmal found, half awake, that he and his new bride had curled up against each other for warmth. He gathered courage and kissed her on the forehead. Shanti slept on.

Soon after, a thunderous knocking made Nirmal throw Shanti's arm away and run to the door. Shanti sat up, surreptitiously wiping eyes sticky with sleep. When Nirmal opened the door, his mother rushed in.

“Come on, it's late,” she exclaimed, “Can't you see the sun high up in the sky? Your father will be back from his walk soon.”

“Ma, it is only … “ Nirmal peered at the clock on the wall, “ … five-thirty!”

“Don't argue,” Kananbala snapped. “The house is full of relatives. They will all be up soon and do you want to be caught still snoring? There is so much to be done!”

Nirmal looked in amazement at his mother, who had now begun bustling about the room, tidying up. He saw his mother picking up and beginning to fold the sari Shanti had let fall on a chair the night before. Next to it on the floor were the clothes he had worn, his silk kurta and dhoti twisted up and thrown in a corner as if he had been in a tearing hurry. His embarrassed gaze went to the bed with its crumpled sheets, the two pillows on it bunched close together, still indented where their heads had been and, all over the room, the squashed flowers that had begun to smell of rot. He could not look at Shanti who, he saw from the corner of his eye, was making futile attempts to mimic her mother-in-law's efforts to clean up.

Before he could stop himself, he said, “There's no need to do all this, Ma, you never clean my room, so just let it be! I'll do it later.” He wanted to bundle his mother out and slam the door on her. He wished he lived on an island far away from his family, his parents, his cousins' sly glances waiting downstairs.

“My grown-up son, already telling me what to do, a day after his wedding!” Kananbala said with a mocking smile. She swung around to Shanti, who had now begun to smooth out the bedsheet and brush off the flowers. “Shanti Bouma, go, have your bath, the water is hot. The servant can't heat it again and again.”

She turned to Nirmal. “You too, have your bath, go to the downstairs bathroom. And send Manjula up. Manjula will show you where everything is, Shanti. She will bring you downstairs for breakfast when you've finished.”

Kananbala stood by the door sentinel-like, watching as Shanti rummaged for the keys to her new cupboard. Then, in a confused moment when she felt she was regaining consciousness, or emerging out of deep water for a lungful of air, she saw Shanti's growing desperation: at her new home, at the new people around her, the new man who was her husband, at her distance from her father and from everything she had known, at her failure to find the right key. In Shanti she glimpsed herself at sixteen, the morning she had woken up with Amulya next to her, bony, unknown, overnight her husband, a man she had only glimpsed through her veil the evening before at her wedding. Tenderness surged through her, transforming her scowling face. She went across to Shanti and took the keys, picking out the one that was needed. In the gentle voice she kept for children, she said, “You'll soon know your way about, and then things won't seem so strange any longer.”

Shanti had been stoical throughout, even at the leave-taking from her father, her room overlooking her river. But at Kananbala's unforeseen sympathy she felt her lips tremble, and before she could stop herself she had buried her face in her sleep-crushed sari and burst into tears.

* * *

Two weeks later Kananbala sat waiting as usual for Nirmal with his evening tea. The house was empty of wedding guests save for one lingering relative. Things were beginning to return to normal, but not
quite, Kananbala knew. Nirmal had begun to return home earlier, even though his job was a new one; what must his students think, Kananbala wondered, seeing Nirmal slip out of college half an hour or even an hour earlier some days? Surely the boys he taught, clever fellows only a little younger than him, were making fun of their teacher who was in a hurry to be home with his new bride?

As every evening, Nirmal came to his mother's room first and sat chatting with her. But she could see his heart was not in the tales he was telling her about his day. He was sitting on the edge of the chair, as if settling into it would commit him to more time. He stole glances at the clock on the wall in the corner and then, half rising, said, “I'm tired, I need a bath,” before he fled to his room. From the evenings that had gone before, Kananbala could predict he would not be seen again until dinner time.

The terrace was a darker, emptier stretch that night. Kananbala walked to its end and stood at the low parapet. From here, she could almost look into the Barnum house, where lights blazed from every window and the lawn filled and emptied and filled again with people holding glasses. Beyond the house, in the memory of the day's light, the ruins of the fort were still discernible to those who knew it was there. She walked back across the terrace to the room which Nirmal and Shanti occupied. It had long French windows, four of them, giving onto the terrace. The venetian blinds were as tightly shut as sleeping eyes.

Kananbala pushed open the door. Nobody in the house knocked; besides, it was only seven-thirty, no time for locked doors.

Nirmal was on the bed, his head half in Shanti's lap. She was singing something, her fingers in Nirmal's hair, her face close to his. Her sari had slipped off her shoulder.

They looked up as Kananbala entered and, startled, moved quickly away from each other as if to say that they had not been touching at all. Shanti stopped singing mid-syllable. Wide-eyed, she sprang off the bed and then turned away flustered, busying herself with something near the dressing table.

“Ma,” Nirmal said after pause, “we were about to come down.”

“No need for you to come,” Kananbala replied. “But Shanti, it is time you started helping us with dinner.”

Kananbala woke the next morning, heavy-limbed, yet hollowed out by the dark space within her. She could scarcely lever herself from her bed, exhausted by her night-time battles. The ceiling had pressed upon her, iron rafters and all, and then the serpentine posts of the bed, fleshy and pliable, had tried to choke her. She had been jolted awake, gasping for breath, her heart pounding. Looking across the bed she realised it was not the depth of night, for Amulya's space was empty: he had left for his walk and so it must be dawn.

She thought of the relative who had stayed on after the wedding, a cousin they called Chotu-da. They were finding it difficult to get rid of him, although he was a doctor and everyone expected him to be a busy man. He was rotund and garrulous, waiting for mealtimes and sleeping in between. Kananbala decided to put aside her distaste for him and tell him some of her symptoms.

Chotu-da pressed a stethoscope to her chest, admiring afresh the soft, enveloping bulk of her bosom.

“Only palpitations, normal at your age,” he pronounced, at the end of what Kananbala thought was an unusually long examination of her lungs and heart, “And maybe a touch of gas. Tell Amulya to get you fruit salts. Or maybe something from his famous factory – he has a cure for everything, doesn't he?” Chotu-da laughed. His round, jocund face gleamed with sweat, his eyes bulged behind thick glasses. He wondered why he was hungry so soon after breakfast.

“Perhaps,” he enquired in a careless tone, “Manjula could make me some sherbet, and … such fresh air, in these parts. One never feels this way in Calcutta.”

“Even the rice tastes better, doesn't it, Chotu-da? One just can't help oneself!” said Kananbala in a flash of her old impertinent self, the one she thought had dried up for good.

The doctor gave her a wary glance, but then thought he had heard wrong: the woman was looking as harmlessly preoccupied as she always did. He rose to go. He thought he would wait in the verandah for the sherbet, hoping it would come with a little something.

“I ought to leave,” he said to Kananbala. “My practice must be suffering. But you have not been letting me go! And this child!” He chuckled at his young son, who was hunched outside at the table glowering over a book. “He's got so fond of you!”

He showed his topaz ring to the boy and said with the growl that usually accompanied this ritual of his, “See that's the eye of a tiger I hunted and killed in the forest last night. The other eye is still in the tiger's head. Both the eyes can still see, and they find naughty boys!” The boy, now nine and lost to make-believe, looked at his father with disdain.

* * *

The upper dining room had along its length large windows that washed it in the still-cool morning light. It was the morning after Chotu-da had left. Kananbala had finished bathing and changed into a fresh sari. She began the walk towards the stairs, holding the walls and chairs along the way and then the banisters for support. She climbed down the thirteen stairs of the first flight and the fifteen of the next. The walls seemed to tilt too close to her. On the landing, she paused and panted, staring unseeing out of the window that lit the stairs and framed the tree over the small terrace on the first floor. She could hear Shanti singing in the kitchen. The girl was petite and soft-spoken, but when she sang it was a low, rich voice that emerged, as if from a much larger body. She was singing of holidays, and clouds in the sky.

Kananbala dragged herself towards the kitchen, then paused outside in the corridor to get her breath back. She could hear Manjula, who sat chopping vegetables, saying, “Ah, I used to sing that too, long ago when I still had a voice. Sing another one. At least now there's some entertainment in this dull old house. You'll know in a while how stifling this little hole of a Hindustani town can be. How I miss all my relatives, I hardly see them once in three years.”

Shanti's quiet voice said, “I'm used to small places. Whenever I went to Calcutta I always felt like running back to my village by the river.”

“Oh, just wait and see. You're happy now, all newly married, Nirmal rushing home to come to you, sitting with you, talking and doing God knows what else, hm … ?”

“Oh, no!” Shanti seemed to giggle.

“But wait until you've been married a few years, then this place will show you its true colours.”

No-one spoke for a while. Kananbala heard the grinding stone going across its slab, a soft sound, as if something wet was being crushed. It must be the mustard for the fish, she thought. She wondered, trancelike, if the fish had been cut. Her mind rehearsed the daily ritual. Gouranga would come early in the morning with the fish he had bought – in Songarh it was usually carp – and he would show it to Manjula for approval. Manjula would stand away from it, protecting her fresh, post-bath sari from fishy impurities. Her lips would curl in an impatient sneer, and she would say, “Rui again! And Gouranga, couldn't you find any smaller? Or more dead? Eh? Tell me: did they starve these fish before they sold them to you? Did they suck out the blood first? Oh, for some live fish that swim in a bucket for a while and show real blood when they're cut!”

Kananbala swayed, sickened by her memory of the daily fish-cutting ritual. She held the door to steady herself. She had delegated that work to her daughter-in-law as soon as she had one. She had always been nauseated by the raw, fishy smell, by the sliminess of cut fish. She had never been able to make herself wash or cook it, though she ate it – all parts but the head – with tolerance if not relish.