An Atlas of Impossible Longing (16 page)

“There,” Kananbala had told her, “behind that bakul tree – the tree after which you are named – can you see a window, my little grasshopper?”

The window was not visible in the picture, but Kananbala made her believe it was there.

“Your mother's there in the room behind that window you can't see. But
she
can see
you
.”

It was out of that window, Bakul knew now, that her mother had looked all those last weeks as the water rose, higher and higher, until there was no escape. She longed to push aside the tree, open the window, and enter the picture, enter that room. It would have a large bed on which her mother lay and she would lie in the bed nestling against her mother and listening to her breathe.

“Your mother had curly hair,” Kananbala had told her, lifting a strand of Bakul's hair. “Just like yours. Her hair was untidy too. Do you know what her teachers called her in her school?”

“What?”

“Pagli, that's what the teachers called your mother,” Kananbala had said, “and that's what they'll call you if you go around looking as wild as you do.”

Her mother had curly hair which spread out in a black cloud on the pillow. She smelt of Jabakusum hair oil and Pears soap and paan with scented tobacco. And her voice? What did she sound like? She would hear her telling her things, stories, things her father never did, even when he was in Songarh. Bakul had tried when she was younger, asking Nirmal about her mother and about Manoharpur, but he had always changed the subject or become more remote than usual.

It was something Mrs Barnum said to her that had in the end explained her mother's absence to Bakul, and reassured her that it was only a matter of time before she and her mother were reunited. At Mrs Barnum's, on the wall above the fireplace in the drawing room, were two clocks. The clocks showed two different times. Mrs Barnum had explained that time was different in different places in the world. Her clocks told her what time it was in Britain, and what time it was in Songarh. She liked to know what the English were up to, she said, through the day – when she was eating lunch they were stumbling out of bed, when she was at her dinner they had barely begun their tea. “Our past is their future,” she liked to say. To Bakul this meant only one thing: that in Manoharpur it was still time past, in which her mother lived waiting, waiting for it to become the future in which Bakul would come to her.

* * *

“You don't dress the same way any more. What happened?” Nirmal asked his brother. All his adult life Nirmal had seen Kamal in trousers held up by braces, shirts with ties that matched.

Kamal looked down at his white kurta and dhoti. He chuckled and said, “Gandhi and all that, you know. What with so much nationalism in the air, I thought that as a manufacturer of traditional remedies I'd better look the part.” But he had drawn the line at rough, handspun khadi. His kurtas and dhotis were the finest mulmul in summer and tussar in winter – both traditionally woven too, he reasoned. Today his dhoti had a narrow wine-red border and a matching burst of red poked out from the pocket of his kurta, which rose in a hillock over his stomach and then subsided. He would leave for the factory in a little while, he thought – it was almost eleven but, as on every other day, he did not feel up to going. It bored him, all those pills and potions in poor-looking packaging.

“And your suits?” Nirmal said. “Did you throw them into a patriotic bonfire?”

“Oh no,” Kamal said, widening his dead-fish eyes. “Are you crazy?
They're expensive suits, I might need them again. All this swadeshi high talk will evaporate soon – and then? I can't afford to look like you.”

Nirmal looked at his own bush shirt and loose trousers in puzzlement.

“For that matter, I don't think
you
can afford to look like you any more either. Your attire certainly doesn't go with your new position.”

“I still have to spend my time supervising in the trenches,” Nirmal said. “I could hardly go down on my knees in the dust wearing a pinstriped suit.”

“Strange,” Kamal said after a pause. “If the Archaeological Survey was going to look for lost civilisations in Songarh, why wait so long? After all, the ruin's been around for some centuries, hasn't it? There's a war in Europe and the way Hitler's going we'll all soon be part of your lost civilisations!”

“Well, it's only been budgeted now because I wrote a proposal to dig, and it was accepted.”

“Proposal accepted, eh?” Kamal said, “And by the British Burra Sahibs no less, I suppose! So why didn't you write the proposal earlier then? At least you could have lived here and looked after your daughter instead of spending half your life gadding about the wilds of India.”

Kamal got up, satisfied with his barb, and walked away from the table before Nirmal could think of a reply, a reply both for himself and for Kamal, a reply perhaps for Bakul too.

In his ten years in the Survey, which he had joined after resigning from his college job, he had avoided Songarh. Instead, imitating his disappearance immediately after Shanti's death, he had volunteered for longer-than-required postings in Rajasthan, in Madhya Pradesh, in Punjab, scrabbling the earth for past lives. Whatever leave he got from work he spent wandering around the Himalaya, walking and on mule back, in flowering meadows, in dense forests and on bare, icy slopes, collecting leaves, stones, fossils, and bird feathers. He had two trunks full of things he had collected, carefully catalogued. The trunks travelled with him and stood in his tent even when he went on his digs.

Something, however, had led him the year before to put forward that proposal about Songarh, arguing that the visible remains of the fort and the mounds behind hid perhaps an entire ancient township, and that the Archaeological Survey needed to set up at least a camp office to investigate. Nirmal had known the danger: if the proposal was accepted, he would be posted to Songarh. He would have to go home.

The proposal had been described as “brilliant” and “persuasive”. Nirmal should have been delighted, but he felt only a sense of inevitability. He had for long years wanted to dig in the earth around the ruined fort of Songarh to find his lost city, but it was not professional ardour that finally had made him write the proposal. It was something unconnected with archaeology, some powerful impulse untranslatable into words. Could he say that on one of his trips to Rajasthan, among the craggy ancient rocks of the Aravalli range where the ochre landscape flamed into the green-yellow of mustard fields against which shocks of magenta bougainvillea cascaded like bloodspills, he had at last felt free of Shanti? Could he admit to himself the sense of wholeness that, uncalled, slid into him then? At last the restfulness – of the first broken ramparts of Rajput forts, the smiling camels, the hapless cries of the peacock in the failing light – of looking and listening without wanting to gouge his heart out and fling it away.

He had submitted the proposal in the weeks after that. He had felt he was ready to face his home, and his daughter.

* * *

Nirmal walked to the fort for a private site survey of his own. He had already asked for two or three workers from the Public Works Department to help with the dig. He would have two junior archaeologists too, both historians who had never been on a dig before. Not much, but a start, Nirmal thought as he walked. He would have to start requisitioning equipment soon, whatever he could get within his budget.

The first glimpse of the fort's low, broken-down walls and the
hillocks beyond it quickened his steps as always. Posted to Bikaner and Sindh, he had not seen it the past six years. Now, once more, excitement surged through him at the thought that he was about to live out a fantasy. For years in his youth he had dreamed of this; now he would find out if the hillocks hid cities and cultures, if the dry stream-bed was the leftover of some ancient river that had changed course, forcing the people on its banks to abandon their settlement.

He walked rapidly around, then, trying to calm himself, sat by the shallow pool and lit a cigarette. It didn't seem that long, Nirmal thought, inhaling, since he had sat at that pool with Shanti, looking out at the dimming light, the broken lines of the ruin slowly erased by dusk. Yet the edges of the memories he had of that time were blurring, little details he had thought indelible had tipped over the edge into oblivion.

Annoyed at letting his thoughts stray from the work in hand, Nirmal took out a pencil and began to scribble into a notebook he had brought with him. He listed equipment, material, manpower required, he listed books and articles he needed to look up. After a while, accepting him as part of the landscape, plump grey pigeons pecked the ground around him. He saw flashes of green as parakeets swooped and chattered overhead, squabbling for food.

But now he felt distracted by an odd sound nearby, something between a squeal and a whine. He looked up, startled.

There was a woman's voice now, saying, “That's all, leave me alone.”

There was a silence, then the woman exclaimed again, “I said that's enough, will you stop?”

Nirmal got up, brushing his trousers. Could there be someone in trouble? The voice had come from inside a domed room in the ruin, one of the few structures left with its ceiling unbroken. He walked into its darkness, strong with the smell of pigeon droppings and dust. For a moment inside, he could not see anything in the sudden blackness. He could hear a woman's voice in the shadows of the dome, amplified by its emptiness.

“Nirmal Babu,” the voice said, “please don't come any closer.”

“Meera?” Nirmal said. “Is that you?” His eyes got used to the lack of light and he saw that it was indeed Meera. He felt aggrieved at being told to stay away and said, “I wasn't going to … come any closer. I only heard something and thought there may be someone in trouble. I should leave you alone.” He turned to go back to the pool.

“Oh no, that's not what I meant,” she exclaimed, following him with a laugh. “Please don't misunderstand … It's just this … ”

Limping behind her was an emaciated dog, brown and black, fur eaten away in patches, swollen dugs hanging to the ground. It pushed its eager muzzle into Meera's hand, whining.

Meera still had the fragment of a roti in her hand. She dropped it to the ground for the dog and said, “She's had her puppies inside there and she can be quite ferocious about them. That's why I had to ask you to stay away.”

Nirmal looked at the dog, wondering what Meera saw in it. It looked mangy and had a strong, unpleasant smell. Politeness made him enquire: “And do you come to feed her every day?”

“Almost … but sometimes it's difficult to get away. I feel bothered the days I can't come.” She stopped and gave a sheepish smile. “It's silly, I know. They'd survive with or without me.”

“And you walk all that way to feed this dog? You must like dogs very much.”

“Not just to feed the dogs,” Meera said, “I like to walk – otherwise I feel cooped up – and also I sometimes sit here and draw. It's a break from housework.”

Nirmal noticed a cloth bag hanging from her shoulders and was curious. “What have you been drawing?” he asked her. “Would you show me?”

“Oh no,” Meera said. “There's nothing much. Just some sketches.” She clutched the bag closer and laughed self-consciously. “Lots of schoolgirls draw like me. It's only for amusement.” Then she said, to change the subject, “Were you here to survey the site? I suppose it's a site now, isn't it, not just the old Songarh ruin?”

“Well, not quite survey … ” Nirmal began to explain. Twenty
minutes later he realised they were sitting under the banyan tree, and he was still talking: about how he had wandered over the ruins as a boy; how he had found some shiny piece of metal there once and thought it an ancient weapon; how he had tried digging there with a garden khurpi after reading of Marshall and Mohenjodaro; how he had applied for a job to the Archaeological Survey, never thinking they would give him one. He stopped, embarrassed by his garrulity, and said, “I'm not used to talking. Either I can think of nothing to say or I talk non-stop. Really uncouth.”

“No, no,” she protested, “I'd have stopped you if I was bored. I'm not. But it's late. I do have to go. It's time for Bakul to come home from school. I'll leave you to your work, I've disturbed you enough.”

Before he could protest or offer to accompany her, she had got up and started on her way back. “I did bore her,” he thought. “She couldn't wait to get away.”

His eyes followed her as she walked away swiftly. He wondered if that was the first real conversation he had had with her. He sat down again by the pool and tried to return to his notes, but despite himself his thoughts returned to Meera. She had been taking care of Bakul for the past six – or was it seven? – years, but he hardly knew her. He knew she had been widowed young – even now she was probably no older than twenty-five or -six. A mutual relative by marriage had told Nirmal about her. He had then written to Meera, asking if she would live at Dulganj Road and look after Bakul. He recalled the brief postcard that came in reply, written in a hand that made the letters look like brushstrokes. Now when he thought back to that handwriting, he thought it logical that Meera should like to draw. Her handwriting was a set of beautiful lines you could look at and admire even if you didn't understand the meaning. But he had understood the meaning, and what her letter had said, beyond its words, was that she would gladly come to Songarh, to look after a house and a child in exchange for a home.