An Atlas of Impossible Longing Read Online Free PDF Page A

poetry. Against the wall he had put
Cestrum nocturnum
, said to harbour snakes, but Amulya was willing to risk poisoning for the fragrance of its white sprays of flowers.
    That evening, though, he failed to notice that the buds on the gandharaj were beginning to open and that the mango would very soon burst into flower. He could think of nothing but that tiny bastard baby swaddled in a torn, brownish sari, and of its mother, who had stopped it crying by wrapping her sari around it and putting its mouth to her breast with an ease that seemed born of weeks rather than days of practice. She had been apathetic, almost sleepy, until the time came to part with it. And then she had begun a series of gasping, high-pitched sobs that had lasted throughout the tonga ride back from the far-off orphanage into town. Now, hours later, it was still her sobs he heard, not the birdcalls of dusk. He had gazed stoically at the road as Ramcharan hissed, “Shut your weeping, you stupid woman!” while the tongawallah had spoken throughout the ride only to his horse as if oblivious, or disapproving, of his passengers and their unholy errand.
    I’ll have to look after that baby, Amulya said to himself, settling into the garden bench, taking out his pipe and hunting in his pocket for matches. There’s no other way. The fees … better remember to tell the office to pay the orphanage on time. Then he wondered if he needed to add the business of the fees to his will, stipulating that it should be paid for as long as required. He made a mental note that it had best be done. No need to tell anyone at home about the child though, not even Kamal. No need to expose them to something so unsavoury.
    From the upstairs verandah Kananbala could see the white of his cotton kurta, smudged in the fading colours of the evening. She never broke into his evening solitude in the garden, but that day, powered by some urge she could not have identified, she went towards him, barefoot on the grass. He did not see her come, and when she was before him, asking, “What are you thinking?” he looked up as if bewildered by her presence. It took him a moment to focus on her face, his eyes at first as startled as if he were looking at a stranger. Then he replied, “Oh, it’s you. What is it?” And then, as she said nothing, he returned to mapping out the financial arrangements for the orphan, sucking on his pipe as he visualised the columns of his bank book.
    Kananbala stood there a minute or two, and then turned to walk back to the house, wanting Amulya to call out to her, half expecting him to. But he did not. She looked back once at his still, angular frame, a shadow on the garden bench, lost to her. He might as well have been one of his trees, she thought, walking away. The few hundred feet separating the upstairs verandah from the garden bench became a vastness impossible to cross.
    * * *
    In October that year, they had their first house guests after a seven-year interval. Relatives were visiting from Calcutta for the puja holidays: there was Amulya’s cousin, his wife, and three children. Kananbala, unused to visitors, had spent all of September planning for their arrival. She was more anxious than eager, she discovered, but could not admit it to anyone. Amulya would have said, “You’re always complaining. You say you’re lonely, then when visitors come, you say you don’t want them.”
    So Kananbala complained to herself. More and more, she found solace in talking to herself. She found she could effortlessly become two people and have conversations that sometimes went on a whole afternoon.
    There was an additional worry. The relatives had come with a marriage proposal. Nirmal was twenty-four now, and he had just got himself a job in the district college teaching history. It did not pay very much, but it was a government college, and besides, he was the son of a reasonably wealthy man, which made him an eligible