An Atlas of Impossible Longing: A Novel Read online

  When Amulya brought his family to Songarh, it was no longer a centre of learning, but it had acquired new importance after the discovery by the imperial geologists of ores of mica. There was even more lucrative material below the forests somewhat further away: coal. Among the patchy fields of millet and greens there grew a tiny British colony of people who supervised the coal mines and the nearer mica ores from the salubrious climate of Songarh, which was chilly enough in winter for log fires. Before long the town had a white area near the fort where the handful of miners lived, forming a compact society of their own.

  Over time, Songarh acquired a main street with a few shops. One of the earliest, Finlays, was run by an enterprising Parsi who supplied the needs of the expatriates for the exotic: coffee, fruit, fish in tins, lace and lingerie, treacle and suet, cigarettes and cheese. Indians went to the shop for fabrics and buttons, medicines and cosmetics, and returned with tins of peach halves, wondering what to do with them.

  The forest watched. It was well known that leopards wandered its unknown interior. There were stories of tigers and jackals drinking together from streams that ran through it over round, grey and brown pebbles. Cows and goats disappeared, and sometimes dogs. It was useless looking for their remains. Until the mines came, and with them the safety of numbers, nobody from the town was foolhardy enough to venture into the wilderness at the edge of their homes: green, dark, alien, stretching for miles, ending only where the coal mines began.

  The forest was still the domain of tribal people with skin as shiny and dark as wet stone and straight, wiry bodies. Flowers with frilly petals nestled in the black hair of the women. They were poor; many looked as though they were starving. Yet they kept to the forest, venturing out only occasionally, in groups. Some were forced into the town when the mines gouged out chunks of their forest. They lived in makeshift shanties, working at whatever they could find. Amulya employed many of them.

  He had heard of Songarh in Calcutta, come on a visit, walked all over the little town and its surrounding countryside, and the knowledge that he would live there came to him like a benediction. Just as some people speak to you immediately without saying a word, and you feel a kinship as real as the touch of a hand, Amulya felt a connection with Songarh. He knew that if he turned away from it then, he would never be able to stop thinking of it, that all his life would feel as though it were being spent away from its core.

  In Songarh, among people whose language he did not speak, he set up his small factory to manufacture medicines and perfumes out of wild herbs, flowers and leaves. The people of the forest knew where to find wild hibiscus flowers for fragrant and red oil, flowers of the night for perfumes, and the minute herbs for smelly green pastes that could bring stubborn, hard boils to tender explosion overnight. With a persistence he was not aware he possessed, Amulya learned the language of the Santhals, as well as Hindi, and learned enough from them of their plants to be able to expand the range of his products.

  His relatives in Calcutta regarded Amulya with amused puzzlement and some irritation. He had done nothing he needed to run from, why then the self-imposed exile from a great metropolis into the wilderness? Was there anything in the world Calcutta did not offer a man like him? Submerged just beneath the surface of their talk was the sense that his departure was a scorning of their lives, the redrawing of a pattern that had already been perfected.

  * * *

  The house Amulya built in Songarh looked out of place: a tall, many-windowed town house in the middle of scrubland and fields that were sparsely built upon at the time. He designed it with the help of an Anglo-Indian architect trained in Glasgow, whose plan seemed to provide a judicious mix of West and East. The house was to look southward, turning its face from the road. Verandahs all along the southern façade, and the north would have rows of windows. To the west there would be balconies and terraces to let in the setting sun. These balconies would overlook a courtyard next to the kitchen, on the ground floor. The south and the west would be skirted by a garden planted with trees and flowering shrubs. Where other people gave their houses grand names, Amulya gave it a number. Although there was only one other house on that road, he stuck a board into the empty plot that said 3 Dulganj Road in tall black letters. The “3” stood for him and his two sons.

  A large house, “A house for a family to grow in,” the architect had said, satisfied, when he had completed his drawings. Despite all the windows and balconies, however, it turned out to be a secretive house once translated to brick and plaster – nobody appeared at the front door of 3 Dulganj Road, Songarh, on impulse and said, “We thought we would call to see you.” The northern side that faced the road, with its rows of shuttered windows, seemed to tell visitors that it would be nicer to stand upstairs and watch them go rather than welcome them in.

  Right across the road was the only other house in the immediate vicinity. It was one of a number of bungalows the mining company had built for its administrative staff, and the name on the gate was Digby Barnum. Mr Barnum was rarely to be seen. The house had a porte-cochère, from the privacy of which every morning Barnum ascended the car that would deposit him where he worked. He left at precisely nine-thirty, looking neither right nor left as his car swept out of his gates and onto the road. Nobody in the neighbourhood had ever caught his eye.

  Amulya first saw Barnum on one of his early days in Songarh, when he was spending most of his time out in the open getting his house built, hours in the sun watching men work. On one of those days, Barnum’s car had spluttered in its smooth getaway from the portico and come to a silent standstill only a few yards from the gate. Amulya, waiting on the road for a delivery, observed a man open the door of the car at the back and emerge, muttering English curses. “Bloody hell,” Barnum said, aiming a kick at the car’s bonnet, and then, folding his hands and trying a different tack, “Please, you ruddy jalopy, just this once …” In the bright morning sun, his skin grew more vivid every minute. Strands of hair stuck to his balding head in damp stripes. His cheeks shone in the heat, and bright pink folds of flesh ringed his neck.

  Amulya turned away despite the temptation to stare.

  The driver disappeared under the bonnet while Barnum got behind the wheel to turn on the ignition. It would not start. The driver brought out a crank, stuck it into the front of the car and began to turn it as Barnum stamped down on the accelerator. The car cleared its hoarse throat a few times, but there was no roar that held.

  Barnum got out of the car again and stared worriedly at the empty road. He had given no sign of noticing Amulya’s presence. Amulya, knowing the mining office was a few miles away, on the other side of the town, allowed himself an invisible smirk.

  But now there was a sound that made Barnum look up.

  In the distance, unmistakeably, the clopping of hooves.

  Amulya stole a look at Barnum’s expectant face, relishing the predictable way it fell when the man saw where the clopping came from: not a tonga, but a ramshackle cart laden with bricks. Barnum waited as the cart emptied its bricks, the men working slowly in the heat, disguising lethargy as method. The driver had given up cranking the car and stood slouching in the shade of a bright orange bougainvillea.

  Barnum rushed into his house and out again. He did not look at Amulya but cast an irritable glance at the labourers who were taking their time, and at the stringy horse snuffling inside a nosebag. Somewhere a cow-bell tinkled, the leisure of the sound at odds with Barnum’s snarling face and tetchy movements. “Juldi karo,” he yelled at the labourers. “Hurry up, you buggers. Empty out this ruddy twopenny jam tin, juldi karo.”

  Eventually, the cart was empty and the workmen turned away. Perched on bits of half-built house they lit their beedies with sighs of exhaustion. Amulya paid the malingerers no attention for a change, fascinated by Barnum’s portly efforts to heave himself into the three-sided cart through the rear. He had to sit on the dusty floor where the bricks had been, his back to the driver, trousered legs and shiny shoes dangling from the cart, facing Amulya and the labourers but managing not to meet anyone’s eye. The cart returned slowly townward.

  A few days later, as Amulya watched a well being dug into what would be his garden, a servant from Barnum’s house came to him and shouted above the thud of the heavy hammer and the loud, chorused chant with which the labourers timed their digging, “Sahib has forbidden this!”

  “What?” Amulya said, trying to hear above the din. He shouted to the labourers, “Wait. Stop!”

  “Sahib says no noisy work in the afternoon. He comes home for his sleep and lunch. No work from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.”

  Strutting with borrowed British authority, the servant gave Amulya a conclusive look and was gone before he could react. Amulya seethed at the servant’s departing back, filled with impotent rage, knowing that he would have to obey.

  When finally they occupied their new house and Kananbala wondered aloud one day if it was rude not to call on the neighbours at least once, Amulya snapped, “No need. What an idea! Have you forgotten they’re British? To them we’re no more than uncouth junglees.”

  Amulya was the only Indian to have built his home in that area, in the wilderness near the miners’ dwellings and fox lairs, far away from the bustle of the main market, from the drums of Ram Navami, the speeches and tom-toms of patriots, the nasal calls of the maulvi, the discordant bursts of trumpet music at wedding processions, the sparklers and explosions of Diwali. He heard these noises all day at the factory. As his daily tonga clattered him towards his home each evening, he waited for that miraculous moment when the shouting town would slide behind, replaced by dark trees and an echoing stillness broken only by calls from the forest and birdsong at dusk.

  Except now, these past few months, scars had appeared on the smo
oth surface of his contentment. He had begun to recognise that he was considered an outsider in his very own Dulganj Road, and he knew that while his yearning for isolation was cause enough for him to want to remain an outsider, for his wife it was a different story.

  * * *

  The silence that to Amulya meant repletion locked Kananbala within a bell jar she felt she could not prise open for air. She had disliked it from the start: the large house with echoing, empty rooms, the wild, enormous garden where leaves rustled and unfamiliar berries plopped onto the grass. The want of visitors, the absence of theatre shows and festivity. Instead, cow-bells tinkling, the occasional clopping of a horse’s hooves, the ghostly throb of tribal drums far away. The croaking of a hundred frogs after rain, the inscrutable sounds from the forest at night. In Calcutta, in her rambling family home crowded with siblings and aunts and uncles, there was always the possibility of a chat, the comforting sounds of nearby laughter, gossip, clanging utensils, squabbling sisters-in-law, the tong-tong of rickshaw bells, the further-away din of the bazaar, the cries of vendors, the afternoon murmurs of a decrepit goldsmith who visited them with boxes of new trinkets and a tiny silver balance to weigh them on.

  The first few months after coming to Songarh, the silence of the place – silence in which she could hear herself inhale, in which she could hear sweat trickling down her face, in which she could hear leaves fall and flowers open – the resonant quiet had startled her into an unexpected garrulity.

  She had no-one to talk to, however. There were hardly any neighbours who were not British, and had there been, Kananbala, who spoke only Bengali, would not have had a language to talk to them in. There were three Bengali servants who had come with them from Calcutta, one of them a maid who massaged Kananbala’s head every drowsy afternoon. Kananbala babbled without end to the maid, stopping only when one day she overheard the maid and the gardener sniggering about something she had said. After this she began to wait for Amulya to return home from work, and the instant she heard the gate unlatch she ran down the stairs to ask the servants to put on his tea, then rushed to the gate to start chattering: “What happened today? Did I get any letters from home? What do you think we are having for dinner? Do you know what Gouranga said to Anubha today when she was washing the clothes?”

  And so on, until one day Amulya, exasperated, snapped at her, “Leave me alone, can’t you leave me alone for a little while? Just a little while!”

  He seemed that very night to have forgotten what he had said to her as he caressed her hair and drew her to himself. But she had not. She turned her face away slightly so that he could not kiss her on the lips. She had felt something twisting, writhing and changing inside her with his “Leave me alone!” She was withdrawn the next day, not herself, thinking too hard to be able to put any of her thoughts into words. Then, in the quiet afternoon, she dug out the old keys she kept still, out of both hope and attachment, the keys to her unused Calcutta rooms, and, clutching them tight, she walked to the well, paused, drew a deep breath, and threw them into the deep, black water.

  * * *

  The years passed more quickly after that act. Their elder son Kamal had been married off, the younger one, Nirmal, had crossed the awkward threshold that stood between boy and man, and her own small frame had acquired the uneasy bulges of late middle age. She should have been as close to contentment as was possible. But now, a long twenty years after their migration to Songarh, the garrulity had begun its siege on her afresh, threatening to break down the barricades she had erected against it.

  Amulya was at the factory longer and longer. These days, he left early in the morning and did not return until after dark. He grumbled that there was too much competition now from imitators. The smallest gap in supplying the shops, and someone else would occupy it.

  “Even so,” she asked him as they lay in bed one night, “couldn’t you come home a little earlier in the evenings?”

  “Don’t be silly, Kanan,” Amulya said, “I don’t enjoy lingering, there’s work to be done. When you need to send your family their twenty-five saris next puja, where will the money come from?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Kananbala faltered, “I was just remembering when we first came here, how you used to come home and we’d sit by the window every evening with our tea.”

  “It’s been about twenty years since that tea,” Amulya replied as he turned on his side. “The factory was smaller then, there was less to be done.”

  “It feels so empty, Nirmal at college, Kamal at work with you all day: not that sons are company for mothers.” She sighed, “How I wish I had a daughter.”

  Muffled by his pillow Amulya said, “If you had a daughter she’d be with her husband, not holding your hand. Why don’t you talk to your daughter-in-law? Manjula has plenty to say.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  She waited for a reply, then mustered up all the decisiveness she was capable of. “It was better living in Calcutta,” she said. “My family all around, the house so lively all the time.” Then she stopped, feeling the old uncertainties return with the sound of her own voice.

  Amulya smiled. “If you were in charge,” he said, “There’d be no America, and no Australia. No-one would take ships and boats to distant places, they would just sit cuddled up in their mothers’ laps all their lives. Wait and see, in a few years there’ll be people from your Calcutta crowding this place.”

  Amulya settled deeper into his blanket, breathing in the cold air of the night and uncurling his warmed-up toes.

  “Why didn’t you ever ask me before we moved to this town?” Kananbala continued, almost in a whisper. “Why didn’t you ever ask me about building this house? I’d have liked being closer to my relatives. Did you never think of that?”

  Kananbala had said this many times before, and she wanted to stop, but she could not.

  “Are you asleep?” she whispered into the night towards Amulya, “Did you hear that owl?”

  She heard a gentle snore and then a whistling sigh.

  The night creaked and rustled. The cold air carried to her the urgent whine of a fox. Answering foxes echoed its call and their barks multiplied across the forests and fields, drawing circles of sound around the house. The foxes were the companions of her long, wideawake nights now. She recalled how, when Amulya had declared his intention to live in Songarh, everyone had stared at him in disbelief and Kananbala’s father had laughed: “Arre, all you will hear there are foxes, Amulya.” Not just foxes, she had wanted to tell her father later. In her lonely, wakeful hours she had stared out of the window as the roar of what she thought was a lion reverberated in the forest.

  The lion’s roar was a secret she could not share with anybody else. The others slept on, oblivious to the throbbing wakefulness of the jungle. Sometimes she felt she was looking at the house from the outside, with the impersonal, measuring gaze of a jackal, or closer, at the windows, swooping owl-like through the night, finding her husband sprawled on the bed in their room, Kamal and his wife Manjula entwined in each other’s arms in a corner of their double bed, and Nirmal, open-mouthed in sleep in his rooftop room, his cigarettes hidden at the back of a drawer where he thought nobody knew. It was only at Nirmal’s window that she lingered briefly but then flew away, shaking off the house with every slicing motion of her wings.

  One day she would disappear into the trees, she really would, never to be found again.

  “I feel alone here,” Kananbala whispered into the darkness and then, embarrassed by the sound of her voice, turned to stare out of the long window by the bed, which framed a moonlit neem tree hazy through the mesh of the mosquito net.

  * * *

  The year was 1927, an early summer day. As usual Amulya had woken at four-thirty and left for a walk in the half-light, almost before anyone else was awake. It was how he had always been in Songarh – though he recalled wanting never to lift head from pillow in Calcutta. This was a time when the forest, the cool air, the purple sky, all of it was his alone. He watched the low ridge in the distance beyond the ruins, a shadowy hump at first, begin to reveal the dark points of trees across its spine as the sky paled behind it, preparing for the sun. Some days the ridge looked not like a ridge but like the remains of some prehistoric animal which only he could see. As the sky paled further, he turned back for his cup of steaming, straw-coloured tea and two buttered toasts. By eight-thirty he had left home in a horse-drawn tonga. He would be at work an hour before anyone else, look over the accounts, inspect his factory in solitude.