An Atlas of Impossible Longing (8 page)

It was five years since John Marshall had written in the press about the discovery of ancient civilisations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and at that time Nirmal had cut out and kept Marshall's article from the
Statesman
. He had then collected clippings from whatever he could lay his hands on, though few newspapers came to Songarh. The particular edition of the
Illustrated London News
in which Marshall had first published the discovery in
1924
had been the hardest to find. Eventually, by asking a friend of Amulya's who knew a man in the Indian Civil Service, Nirmal had obtained a copy of the paper with its lavish pictures of all the Indus seals and the enormous mounds.

Inside the packet for Nirmal, the man from the Civil Service had also enclosed a letter that a British official had written some years earlier. The letter described hillock-like mounds all over northern India that people took to be natural formations when, in truth, they were the accretions of ancient civilisations. “When wolves still howled where Notre Dame and St Paul's now stand,” the letter went, “and the very names of Athens and Rome were unheard of, there lived and toiled on these sites the remote ancestors of the villagers who tenant
them today. It is with some feeling of reverence, then, that the Western
parvenu
should view these populous ruins and know himself to be but a creature of yesterday.”

In later years Nirmal wondered at the disproportion between the brevity of the note and the conceptual apocalypse it had caused inside him. He had read it once, looked at the pictures in the
Illustrated London News
of seals and pots and bricks glimmering against a dark background, then gone back to the note and read it again and again. It was as if he had simultaneously been robbed of all individual will – for his future had been decided for him at that moment – and charged with an energy he had never known. For the next three years he went on private expeditions, modelling his techniques on whatever he had been able to glean from reading articles here and there. He went to the Songarh ruins and looked at the hillocks behind it afresh, as if a layer of fog had been peeled away from his eyes. He began to call them mounds instead of hills and yearned for the day when he could start digging to find what they concealed. He went to the outskirts of Songarh, where there were old temples and scattered ruins, and scrabbled around with a garden khurpi and measuring tape until knots of village children gathered and chattered to each other and laughed at him.

He had recently read that with the discovery of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, the Archaeological Survey had received more funds for its work in the valley of the Indus. If they had the money, Nirmal reasoned, they might take on apprentices. He had no experience, but he did have a degree in history. But why would they employ him, a small-town college teacher, when there must be Sanskrit scholars, experts in numismatics, and scholars of other kinds struggling to be a part of the Indus Valley's three-thousand-year-old past?

“They could start me off
somewhere
, even if not at the Indus,” he reasoned. “Then by degrees … ” The thought of his probable rejection by the Survey filled him with gloom in an instant. He lit a cigarette and fiddled with the cigarette tin. He yawned and looked at Shanti's hair, a dark storm across pillows and sheet. She was almost asleep. He took a deep drag, blowing smoke out through his nose, and gave
his typewriter an irritable glance. Then he pushed it away and went towards her.

“Don't you think,” he murmured, caressing her hair, “it's possible to make a habit of almost anything?”

“What do you mean?” she said, her voice sleep-thickened.

“Here we are, you and I,” he said. “We didn't know each other a year and a half ago and now I can't write a letter for looking at you … ”

“Go back and finish your letter,” Shanti said, raising her head. “Go on, archaeologists need persistence. How will you ever dig out ruins from the earth if you don't persist?”

“I'm persistent about things I want,” Nirmal said. He felt under her sari in the region of her stomach. “Now imagine if this were the mound at Harappa, how would I go about finding a route to … ”

Shanti slapped his hand away. “If you can get used to anything, you can get used to doing without
that
!” she giggled, hiding her face in the pillow. Then she looked up, her face still half hidden, and said, “And I'm not sure it's even safe any more, with the baby coming.”

“Imagine,” Nirmal said, lying back against the headrest and taking his cigarette from the ashtray. “A year and a half ago, I wasn't even married. Now I'm going to be a father in some months. A year and a half ago, I didn't know you. A year and a half ago, my mother was normal. Now for a year and a half she hasn't left her room … and it all seems routine. I even feel happy. I forget about her, that she's imprisoned. I feel trapped if I'm stuck in the house for a day and I forget she can never go out and meet other people or see other things.”

Shanti felt fingers of annoyance twist her insides at Nirmal's sudden change of attention from her to his mother. She tried to smile and touched his hand. “Quiet, let's change the subject,” she said. “Don't you know that babies can hear in the womb? Do you want ours to grow up with unhappy thoughts? I want the baby to overhear only music and laughter. Come here to me.”

* * *

One floor below, Kananbala paced her room waiting for the Barnums. Every weekend Digby Barnum went out with his wife. Kananbala, awake most nights, had made a habit of sitting on the windowsill and watching their car leave, mysterious, full of promise, heading for destinations beyond her imagination. They would return very late and honk outside until the watchman woke and unlocked the gate to let them in.

That night, the watchman did not come to the gate despite all the honking. Barnum stumbled out of the car and his driver lunged after him from the other side. It was the first time Kananbala had seen him. She was wide-eyed with disbelief, never having seen a drunk man before.

“Bugger off!” Barnum yelled at the driver, “Bugger off, you black bastards, sleeping on the job!”

He shoved aside the driver, who stepped back, looking uncertain as his boss untangled his legs enough to reach the gate, a gate like a wall of wood, and then began to bang on it with his fists, shouting curses.

Kananbala, not understanding a word, was spellbound. Amulya stirred in his sleep and pulled his pillow over his head. Kananbala willed him to carry on sleeping, leaving her alone to spend the night as she always did, suspended in a world nobody else knew.

Then Kananbala saw Digby Barnum's wife for the first time, a woman as elongated as a eucalyptus leaf and as pale. She was in a gown that her curves formed into something smooth and flowing, its silk gleaming in the lights of the car. Her shoes had heels that she tottered on as she hurried to her husband, saying something Kananbala could not hear.

Mrs Barnum reached her husband and tugged his sleeve to make him stop banging on the gate.

His arm shot out and hit her across the face.

Kananbala touched her own cheek as if she had been hurt.

The woman stepped back, holding her chin. The driver, frightened, cowered by the car.

“The real man, as always,” Mrs Barnum said, in a voice as clear as the sound of spoon against glass.

Barnum paid her no further attention. He returned to the closed gate. “Ramlal, you sister-fucker, open up! Can you hear me? You're sacked!”

Mrs Barnum strolled up and down the road as if none of it mattered to her. Her husband continued to shout. Amulya mumbled, “Bloody Sahibs, think they own the whole country.”

Kananbala wanted to say, “They do.” But she had almost stopped breathing so he would go back to sleep. Amulya turned on his side, and in a minute Kananbala heard his snore again.

The gate creaked open. Barnum pushed the spindly watchman aside so that he fell, and he and his wife went in. The car followed. The watchman got up, yawned and dusted himself off.

“Bastard,” the watchman spat in Hindi towards the house. “Drunkard,” he said, closing the gate again.

* * *

The windows were Kananbala's only view of the world. If she traversed the length of the room and looked through all three windows, tilting as far as she could, she could see to the end of the road's curve on both sides. Kananbala was at the windows all day, and often most of the night.

Almost at dawn, when the air still retained a memory of the cool of the night, she waited for the brinjal colour of the sky to grow lighter and brighter. When the sky turned properly blue there came the man who promised that his papayas were from Ranchi, and then the bhuttawala, fine wisps from corn sprouting like golden hair out of the basket on his head. In the early days, when they had first lived in Songarh, vendors never came that far. Now, she had heard, there was a new cluster of houses further down, with Indian people, clerks and teachers, those who would buy from carts.

Kananbala could tell the time from the calls of the vendors, the flower-seller just after dawn, the fruit-sellers in the morning, the vegetable man in between. Bread from a bakery in the market came in a tin box welded to a creaking bicycle. A bangle-seller, handcart
glinting red and gold, stood at the gate sometimes and called out for a long five minutes, seeing a woman at the window and scenting a sale.

She could not go to the gate to buy bangles, she knew.

She had not left the house since Nirmal's wedding, nor even her room very often. She knew she had said things she should not have. She could not think where the words had come from, nor could she precisely recall what they were. But from people's faces she could always tell when something wrong slipped out. They did not look so appalled any longer, but all the same they did not let her meet outsiders. The roof was out of bounds too. They were afraid she would jump, as she had once threatened to.

Amulya came back from the factory every day at noon, and sat with her as she ate her lunch, returning to work in the afternoon heat after settling her in for her nap. Each evening, after the gardener had left, he led her down the stairs and out into the garden to walk forty-three steps this way and forty-three that, for a long half-hour. She got tired and breathless, her knees felt weak, so he had often to hold her through the latter part of the walk. He would encourage her, saying, “You must do this, make yourself do this, or else your muscles will rot.”

“Why?” she would beg. “Why do I have to walk in this heat? I don't go anywhere. Why must I walk?”

“One day you will find you can't even get up from your bed,” he would say.

At times, enraged by her fatigue, she stood still and hissed at him, “You carbuncle on a cow! You stinking hyena!” He would grimace, but continue to direct her forward.

After the half-hour was over, he would sit her down on the swing and light his pipe. Then he would tell her all that had happened during the day, and about the two new houses in their immediate neighbourhood. One of the houses was indeed occupied by Indian rather than English people, he said once, a retired couple from somewhere, no children. “See, I told you it was the right decision to build here.” He had exhaled a cloud. “Just watch how this area changes now.”

She listened, sometimes responding with a comment, sometimes spitting out “son of a donkey” or “tail of a sewer rat” or “frog with
warts” – words her mind concocted unbidden. If she did that, Amulya would clench her hand to make her stop. When she felt the pressure of his hand on hers, she knew she had said something she should not have, and tried to be quiet. She wondered about the irony of his belated tenderness, but she did not question it aloud.

Manjula, observing them every day on the garden bench, said to Shanti, “Look, now the old woman's got it made. She has us to serve her night and day, and her husband's discovered romance in his old age. Oh Ma, what wouldn't I give to be her? Don't you know what they say? Ripe fruits get cotton-lined baskets.”

Shanti now thought hard of other things when Manjula spoke with her customary venom about her mother-in-law. In two months, Nirmal would take her back to Manoharpur and she would walk by her river again, waiting for her child. Until then, she would close her ears, hum the old songs, and shield her stomach with her hands as if to shut the ears of her unborn baby. Inside, just under the tight-stretched skin of her belly, she felt she could hear a minute heart gallop like a horse, an unformed mouth trying to form words to say to its mother.

* * *

Some weekends there were parties in the Barnum house, and on those evenings first the van from Finlays would come, then the electrician for the lights, and then the smells of alien food. In the evening there were fairy lights in the lawn and the indistinct, shiny forms of the Barnums' friends who came and went in cars that never let them down outside the gate, but always under the covered porch you could not see into. Kananbala waited, and watched, and waited, hoping to see someone, something.

Only Mrs Barnum was now regularly visible. She had taken to swaying out of the car when they returned from their parties and stopping at the gate for the watchman; then she would walk the length of the drive, making a detour across the lawn before she agreed to enter the house, her long silk gowns trailing in the grass, her white
shoulders gleaming in the darkness. Kananbala would watch her with eyes full of greed.