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NEW VOICES

Of memory and desire

The prologue to Anuradha Roy’s novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, ends on an ominous note: “I see people swimming behind the submerged windows, imprisoned by the drowned rooms as if in some abandoned Atlantis”. Three generations of a Bengali family struggle to preserve their family history, but the fissures are so deep that a formidable doom remains always on the horizon.

Does the voice in the Prologue belong to Mukunda, the tribal orphan, or to Nirmal, the history professor and archeologist, or his daughter Bakul? Or is it the writer herself commenting on the serpentine course of the three characters whose lives intertwine and swiftly move towards a dark end?

Setting the tone of the novel, Roy portrays a surrealistic picture of the river and the disappearing house apparently many years before it was engulfed by the ever shifting river. There is a strong undercurrent of tumultuous history which will confront the reader as s/he moves from the account of a picture to the reality of the lives associated with the house. The striking aspect of the novel is the intricate paradox of stillness as visualised in the description of the picture and the onward movement of the river that symbolises the volatile story enacted along the border of West Bengal: “…the indecisive river wandered in such a way as to come not to the very steps of the house, but beyond them, swamping all within… and not just in its waters.”

The first section tells the story of Amulya and his wife Kananbala settling in Songarh with their children; the second is an account of their son Nirmal’s relationship with Meera, a young widow, and of Mrs. Barnum who is the eccentric neighbour; while the final section, “The Water’s Edge”, is told by Mukunda. Each section focuses on a generation. As it becomes evident, the house in the picture is located in Manoharpur somewhere in the east and belongs to Bakul’s mother, Shanti. She dies while giving birth to a baby girl, Bakul, who would later have a secretly passionate relationship with the casteless Mukunda setting off a fit of angry opposition in Nirmal’s very conservative and orthodox family that compels him to banish the servant to the obscurity of Calcutta where he would prosper with the shadow of his casteless status behind him. Years later Mukunda would return to the house to recapitulate his growing years: “There was the house once whose garden I knew, every last tree, and where the stairs had chipped away and which of the windows would not shut… left to myself despite my profession — I would let old houses remain exactly as my memory told me they always had been. Termites would write their stories across ceilings and walls, their wavering lines mapping out eventual destruction… I know all about houses and homes, I who never had one. I am Mukunda. This is my story.”

Mukunda’s story is the trajectory of his departure and arrival, of his caste-ridden adolescence and a life of freedom and success; his origins are of no consequence after his newly-found prosperity in Calcutta. As he returns to his origins, his life comes full circle and he finally melts into the landscape which becomes the objective correlative of his emotions: “I felt as if everything had gone very still. The rushes had stopped nodding, the breeze had stopped blowing through our hair, the stream had stopped flowing, the curdled clouds had stopped drifting overhead, that bird had stopped its call, the two children on the opposite bank had frozen in mid-gesture.” Landscape becomes the geography of the mind, a persona to be reckoned with.

Sitting on the banks of the river of their childhood memories, their hands caress each others under the placid waters of the river and he feels “that life had finally floated down the river and reached me”. Bakul too is set free from the suffocation of her father’s house in Songarh when she returns to her mother’s house which she decides to not sell. After all, it is the only memory she has of her dead mother.

Perceptively told, the novel covers the first half of the 20th century with the focus on the family history neatly juxtaposed with the history of India. Memory mixes with desire; longing turns into unfulfilled dreams and lost hopes. From a city of high learning, Songarh degenerates into a mining town for quick and easy profit by the colonial predators. Major national events become the backdrop to the events in the lives of the fictional characters. The three sections form the atlas of impossible longing, a longing to be one with a family one does not belong to and to return to the past with a nostalgia that is reminiscent of days of a different Songarh when the British had still not arrived. And thrown in with this colonial past is the heart-rending account of caste intolerance and male indifference to the forlorn existence of a mother.

Though a joyful read, the novel suffers on account of the lovers turning out to be rather flat, and their relationship secondary to the creation of the milieu at the beginning of the 20th century. Cultural history stands foregrounded suppressing any emotional involvement with the characters. Regardless, it is a bold first novel. Though it resonates now and again with images and gestures of earlier literary texts, it is sensitively told and poignantly set at the crossroads of modern Indian history, and if there are any literary drawbacks, they can be ignored keeping in view the exceptional quality of writing and the evocation of a turbulent past.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing; Anuradha Roy,

Picador, Rs. 395.

“It’s a dark night. You’re a one-eyed tomb robber creeping up to rob a pyramid in the desert, I’m following, I’ll catch you.” Mukunda’s gaze slid past Bakul.

“It’s not night, it’s afternoon, and why should I have one eye?” Bakul sounded suspicious.

Mukunda had not heard her. He pointed to a mango tree in the centre of the garden. It stood innocuous in the afternoon sun, sheltering a family of birds that flew in and out of it, chiding each other as he approached. “That’s the pyramid,” he said, excited, “All around there is just sand. And look, I brought something — this is all we have to eat for the days we are in the desert.” He held out two onions and a handful of dried-up peanuts.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The rest of the family, heavy with eating, floated in the half-awake realm of afternoon sleep as the two of them wandered their garden of old trees and tall grass. Tangles of wildflowers nodded under the weight of pausing butterflies.

“Peanuts?” Bakul said scornfully. “Did robbers eat peanuts in ancient times?”

“I don’t know.” Mukunda sounded troubled. “We can pretend they are whatever the robbers ate.”

“You don’t know? But I thought you knew everything!”

“I have work to do. Do you want to play or not?”

Mukunda was offended. He tossed an onion at Bakul and strode towards the well. It was a large stone-walled well that went deep. In the thirty or so years since Amulya had dug it, it had never gone dry, though in the summer months the water became a distant circle of light far below and the thick rope played out and played out until it felt as if the iron bucket would never find the bottom; and when the splash of water meeting bucket at last sounded, it came from very far away. In the monsoon, the water in the well rose every day, a little and then more, until it was so close it felt as if only the rim held the water in and anyone could reach in and bail out water, as if from a pond. The well was overhung by a creeper of white jasmine that dropped its fragrant flowers into the water all day.

It was one of Mukunda’s chores to see that the bathrooms and kitchen were always stocked with full buckets of water from the well. It was he who wheeled water out of the well several times a day, iron bucket clanging down as the wheel screeched and squeaked. Now, annoyed with Bakul, he flung in the bucket and played out the rope faster and faster so that the squeak drowned out her voice.

Neither of them heard the gate open.

Neither of them saw a man pay off a tongawallah and step in, looking around as if unsure where he was.

He was thin, his half-sleeved shirt too large, as if he had shrunk within it. His eyes cast shadows of grey underneath and his hair stood out dry and irregular. His height made him slouch a little, or perhaps it was fatigue. He looked too tired to move beyond the gate down the long, overgrown path towards the house. He stood there flanked by two large trunks and a bedroll, as if trying to decide what to do, as if he did not know the direction he needed to go. He saw the pair by the well and began walking towards them across the garden, stopping every now and then as if he had seen something that called out to him.

Bakul was shouting above the squeak of the wheel and the clang of the bucket, “Why can’t we play the crocodile game? You never want to play that.”

“That’s a boring game,” Mukunda said scathingly. “That’s for babies.”

Bakul looked at him, unsmiling, and turned away.

As she turned she came face to face with the man. She had seen him before. She knew she had. The man bent down and sat before her on his haunches. When he smiled, the grey shadows seemed to darken as his eyes almost disappeared, and a long deep line appeared on each cheek.

“Don’t you remember who I am?” he asked her almost in a whisper.

Bakul regarded him with a wordless stare. A strand of her hair was in her eyes, it tickled, but she did not remove it. A fly buzzed about her face. The man flicked it away.

“Nirmal Babu,” Mukunda said.

Nirmal had not seen his daughter for five years – since she was six – and then it had been for a few weeks, and he had not known what to say or do.

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