An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy Read Free Book Online

attempts to mimic her mother-in-law’s efforts to clean up.
    Before he could stop himself, he said, “There’s no need to do all this, Ma, you never clean my room, so just let it be! I’ll do it later.” He wanted to bundle his mother out and slam the door on her. He wished he lived on an island far away from his family, his parents, his cousins’ sly glances waiting downstairs.
    â€œMy grown-up son, already telling me what to do, a day after his wedding!” Kananbala said with a mocking smile. She swung around to Shanti, who had now begun to smooth out the bedsheet and brush off the flowers. “Shanti Bouma, go, have your bath, the water is hot. The servant can’t heat it again and again.”
    She turned to Nirmal. “You too, have your bath, go to the downstairs bathroom. And send Manjula up. Manjula will show you where everything is, Shanti. She will bring you downstairs for breakfast when you’ve finished.”
    Kananbala stood by the door sentinel-like, watching as Shanti rummaged for the keys to her new cupboard. Then, in a confused moment when she felt she was regaining consciousness, or emerging out of deep water for a lungful of air, she saw Shanti’s growing desperation: at her new home, at the new people around her, the new man who was her husband, at her distance from her father and from everything she had known, at her failure to find the right key. In Shanti she glimpsed herself at sixteen, the morning she had woken up with Amulya next to her, bony, unknown, overnight her husband, a man she had only glimpsed through her veil the evening before at her wedding. Tenderness surged through her, transforming her scowling face. She went across to Shanti and took the keys, picking out the one that was needed. In the gentle voice she kept for children, she said, “You’ll soon know your way about, and then things won’t seem so strange any longer.”
    Shanti had been stoical throughout, even at the leave-taking from her father, her room overlooking her river. But at Kananbala’s unforeseen sympathy she felt her lips tremble, and before she could stop herself she had buried her face in her sleep-crushed sari and burst into tears.
    * * *
    Two weeks later Kananbala sat waiting as usual for Nirmal with his evening tea. The house was empty of wedding guests save for one lingering relative. Things were beginning to return to normal, but not quite, Kananbala knew. Nirmal had begun to return home earlier, even though his job was a new one; what must his students think, Kananbala wondered, seeing Nirmal slip out of college half an hour or even an hour earlier some days? Surely the boys he taught, clever fellows only a little younger than him, were making fun of their teacher who was in a hurry to be home with his new bride?
    As every evening, Nirmal came to his mother’s room first and sat chatting with her. But she could see his heart was not in the tales he was telling her about his day. He was sitting on the edge of the chair, as if settling into it would commit him to more time. He stole glances at the clock on the wall in the corner and then, half rising, said, “I’m tired, I need a bath,” before he fled to his room. From the evenings that had gone before, Kananbala could predict he would not be seen again until dinner time.
    The terrace was a darker, emptier stretch that night. Kananbala walked to its end and stood at the low parapet. From here, she could almost look into the Barnum house, where lights blazed from every window and the lawn filled and emptied and filled again with people holding glasses. Beyond the house, in the memory of the day’s light, the ruins of the fort were still discernible to those who knew it was there. She walked back across the terrace to the room which Nirmal and Shanti occupied. It had long French windows, four of them, giving onto the terrace. The venetian blinds were as tightly shut as sleeping