Atlas of Impossible Longing

by Anuradha Roy

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

“This is why we read fiction at all” raves the Washington Post : Family life meets historical romance in this critically acclaimed, “gorgeous, sweeping novel” ( Ms Magazine) about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else, marking the signal American debut of an award-winning writer who richly deserves her international acclaim. On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, lives intertwine and unravel. A widower struggles with his love for an unmarried cousin. Bakul, a motherless daughter, runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. Confined in a room at the top of the house, a matriarch goes slowly mad; her husband searches for its cause as he shapes and reshapes his garden. As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with his home, with Bakul, with all that he has lost—and he knows that he must return.

Release date: April 5, 2011

Publisher: Free Press

Print pages: 336

Sample

An Atlas of Impossible Longing

ONE

In the warm glow of fires that lit the clearing at the centre of straw-roofed mud huts, palm-leaf cups of toddy flew from hand to hand. Men in loincloths and women in saris had begun to dance barefoot, kicking up dust. Smoke curled from cooking fires and tobacco. The drums, the monotonous twanging of a stringed instrument, and loud singing obliterated the sounds of the forest.

A man with a thin, frown-creviced face topped by dark hair combed back from his high forehead sat as still as a stone image in their midst, in a chair that still had its arms but had lost its backrest. His long nose struck out, arrow-like, beneath deep-set eyes. He had smoked a pipe all evening and held one polite leaf cup of toddy that he had only pretended to sip. His kurta and dhoti were an austere white, his waistcoat a lawyerly black.

He did not appear to hear the singing. But his eyes were on the dancers: wasn’t that girl in the red sari the one who had come with baskets of wild hibiscus that she had flung carelessly into a corner of his factory floor? And that man who was dancing with his arm around her waist, wasn’t he one of the honey-collectors? It was hard to tell, with their new saris and dhotis, the flowers in their hair, the beads flying out from necks, the firelight. The man leaned forward, trying to tell which of the sweat-gleaming faces he had encountered before in his small workforce.

The brown-suited, toadlike figure sitting on a stool next to him nudged him in the ribs. “Something about these tribal girls, eh, Amulya Babu? Makes long-married men think unholy thoughts! And do you know, they’ll sleep with any number of men they like!” He emptied his cup of toddy into his mouth and licked his lips, saying, “Strong stuff! I should sell it in my shop!”

A bare-chested villager refilled the cup, saying, “Come and dance with us, Cowasjee Sahib! And Amulya Babu, you are not drinking at all! This is the first time people from outside the jungle have come as guests to our harvest festival. And because I insisted. I said, it’s Cowasjee Sahib and Amulya Babu who give us our roti and salt! We must repay them in our humble way!”

A tall, hard-muscled man stood nearby, listening, lips curling with contempt as his relative hovered over the four or five friends Cowasjee had brought with him, radiating obeisance as he refilled their cups. Beyond the pool of firelight, cooking smells, and noise, the forest darkened into shadows. Somewhere, a buffalo let out a mournful, strangled bellow. The drums gathered pace, the girls linked their arms behind each other’s waists, swaying to the rhythm, and the men began to sing:

A young girl with a waist so slender that

I can put my finger around it,

Is going down to the well for water.

With swaying hips she goes.

My life yearns with desire.

My bed is painted red.

Red are my blankets.

For these four months of rain and happiness

Stay, stay with me.

Without you I cannot eat,

Without you I cannot drink.

I’ll find no joy in anything.

So stay, stay, for the months of rain,

And for happiness with me.

One of the girls in the line of dancers separated herself from her partners. She had noticed Amulya’s preoccupied expression, wondered how a man could remain unmoved by the music, not drink their wine. She came forward with a smile, her beads and bangles jingling, her bare shoulders gleaming in the firelight, orange sari wrapped tight over her young body. The toddy made her head spin a little when she bent down to Amulya. As he tried to scramble away, she stroked his cheek and said, “Poor babuji, are you too pining for someone?” She leaned closer and whispered into his ear, “Won’t you come and dance? It wipes sorrows away.”

Amulya looked up beyond her childish face, framed by curling hair which smelled of a strong, sweet oil, at the flamboyant purple flower pinned into her bun. It had a ring of lighter petals within the purple ones, and a pincushion of stamens. Passiflora, of course. Yes, certainly Passiflora. But what species?

Despite the haze of alcohol that made her eyes slide from thing to thing, the girl noticed that the man’s gaze was not on her face, but on the flower. She unpinned it and held it out to him. A deep dimple pierced her cheek. The drums rolled again, a fresh song started, and she tripped back to her friends with a laugh, looking once over her shoulder.

“Hey, Amulya Babu, the girl likes you!” Cowasjee cried, slapping Amulya’s thigh. “You can turn down food and drink, but how can you turn down a lusting woman? Go on, dance with her! That’s the done thing in these parts!”

Amulya stood up from his chair and moved away from Cowasjee’s hand. “I have to leave now,” he said, his tone peremptory. In his left hand he clutched the purple flower. With the other he felt about for his umbrella.

Amulya understood he was an anomaly. When still new in the town adjoining the jungle, he had tried to make himself part of local society by going to a few parties. Songarh’s local rich, they too had hopes of him, as a metropolitan dandy perhaps, laden with tales and gossip from the big city, conversant with its fashions, bright with repartee, a tonic for their jaded, small-town appetites. He had had many eager invitations.

After the first few parties, at which he refused offers of whisky and pink gins, and then waited, not talking very much, for dinner to be served and the evening to end, he had realised that perhaps his being there was not serving any purpose. Was he really becoming a bona fide local by attending these parties when his presence emanated obligation?

Today – these festivities at the village whose people were his workforce – he had thought it would be different. He had, for a change, wanted to come. He had only ever seen tribal people at work – what were they like at play, what were their homes like? The opportunity had seemed too good to miss; but Cowasjee, in whom the bare-shouldered village girls seemed to unleash more than his usual loutishness, had ensured that this evening was like all the others.

Amulya looked around for someone to thank, but everywhere people sat on their haunches drinking, or they danced, enclosed in worlds of private rapture. The drums had speeded up, the twanging could scarcely keep pace. Where was his umbrella? And his office bag? Was his tonga waiting for him as instructed? Was anyone sober enough to light his way to the tonga?

“Oh sit, sit, Amulya Babu,” Cowasjee said, tugging Amulya’s sleeve. “You can’t go without eating, they’ll be sure their food was too humble for you, they’ll feel insulted. The night is young and we have stories to swap! Have you heard this one?” Cowasjee cackled in anticipation of his punchline.

Amulya sat again, annoyed and reluctant, barely able to summon up a strained smile to the yodelled laughs that accompanied the ensuing discussion about why a woman’s two holes smelled different despite being geographically proximate. “Just like the difference between Darjeeling tea and Assam!” one of Cowasjee’s friends shrieked. “Both in the hills of eastern India, but their aromas worlds apart!” The third said, “You bugger! More like the difference between the stink of a sewage nullah and a water drain!” They nudged each other and pointed at the girls dancing by the fire. “She’s for you,” giggled one. “How ’bout taking her home and confirming the Assam–Darjeeling hypothesis?”

The tall, muscular villager stepped out from the shadows, one fist clenched around a long bamboo pole. In two rapid strides, he and his weapon were towering over them. Cowasjee shrank back on his stool. The obsequious middleman noticed the threat and scurried out from a corner. He said something over his shoulder to the drummer, then to a woman tending a cooking pot. The drums fell suddenly quiet. Confused, the dancers stopped mid-stride. The woman called out, “We will eat now, before the chickens run out from the rice!”

The stringed instrument played on, its performer too rapt to pause. The man with the bamboo pole stepped aside, not taking his expressionless eyes off Cowasjee.

* * *

Far away, Kananbala heard the faint sound of drums, like a pulse in the night. Another night of waiting. At nine-thirty the neighbour’s car. Slamming doors. Shouts to the watchman. Ten. The whir of the clock gathering its energies for the long spell of gongs to come. The creaking of trees. A single crow, confused by moonlight. The wind banging a door. Ten-thirty. The owls calling, one to the other, the foxes further away. Then the faint clop of hooves. Closer, the clop of hooves together now with the sound of wheels on tarmac, whip on hide. A tongawallah cursing. Amulya saying, “That’s it, no further.” His voice too loud.

Kananbala dropped her age-softened copy of the Ramayana and went to the window. She could see her husband hunching to release himself from the shelter of the tonga, too tall for its low bonnet. She turned away and returned to the bed, picking up her Ramayana again. When Amulya entered the room and looked around for his slippers, she did not tell him she had put them under the table. When he asked her, “Have you eaten?” she pretended to be immersed in her book. When he said, “Are the children asleep?” she replied, “Of course. It’s so late.”

“They only served dinner at ten. They wouldn’t let me leave without eating, what do you expect me to do?”

“Nothing,” Kananbala said, “I know …” Something caught her eye and she stopped.

“What is that?”

“What? That? Oh, it’s a flower.”

Amulya’s voice was muffled beneath the kurta he was pulling off over his head. She could see his vest, striped with ribs, his stomach arcing in. She looked again at the flower, dark purple, wilted. He had placed it under the lamp near the bed. In the light of the lamp she could see one long, black strand of hair stuck to the gummy edge of its stem.

“I know it’s a flower,” she said. “Why have you brought it home?”

“Just wanted to identify it … “ he said, leaving the room.

She had often asked him before: were there women at the parties he went to? The host’s wife? Her friends or relatives? Why could she, Kananbala, never be taken? He always laughed with condescension or said, exasperated, “I have never met women at these parties, neither do I aspire to.” And what of today, the festival at the tribal village – could she not have been taken? If she were a tribal woman herself, she would have needed no man’s permission.

Amulya returned to their room with a large, hard-covered book. He sat near the lamp and opened it, then put on his black-framed spectacles. He picked up the flower in one hand, turned the pages of the book with the other, looking once at the pages and once at the flower, saying under his breath, “Passiflora of course, but incarnata? I’ve never seen this vine in Songarh.”

Kananbala turned away, lay back against her pillow and shut her eyes. She could hear pages rustling, Amulya murmuring under his breath. She wished with a sudden flaming urge that she could stamp on his spectacles and smash them.

Amulya laid the flower against an illustration in the book and whispered, “Incarnata, yes, it is incarnata. Roxburgh has to be right.”

* * *

In about 1907 , when Amulya moved from Calcutta to Songarh, he could still see the town had been hacked out, maybe a hundred years before, from forest and stone. The town perched on a rocky plateau, at the edge of which he could see, even from the house, a dark strip of forest and the irregular, bluish shadows of the hills beyond. In the distance were broken-down walls of medieval stone – the ruined fort, the garh from which the town took its name. A few walls and one domed watchtower, enough to fuel Amulya’s fantasies, could still be discerned in the ruins. In front there was a shallow pool with inlaid stone patterns around its edges. Beyond the fort lay an ancient, dried stream-bed that separated it from the forest and hilly mounds. It was said that an entire city would some day be found buried around the fort. Some claimed Songarh had been one of the centres of Buddhist learning in the ancient past and that the Buddha himself had rested there, under a tree, on one of his journeys. On his first visit to the fort, Amulya saw that there was indeed an ancient, spreading banyan tree with its own jungle of stone-coloured aerial roots. The tree had a knot on its main trunk that in a certain light looked like the face of a meditating man.

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 smooth 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 compan