An Atlas of Impossible Longing Read Online Free

lingering, there’s work to be done. When you need to send your family their twenty-five saris next puja, where will the money come from?”
    â€œI didn’t mean that,” Kananbala faltered, “I was just remembering when we first came here, how you used to come home and we’d sit by the window every evening with our tea.”
    â€œIt’s been about twenty years since that tea,” Amulya replied as he turned on his side. “The factory was smaller then, there was less to be done.”
    â€œIt feels so empty, Nirmal at college, Kamal at work with you all day: not that sons are company for mothers.” She sighed, “How I wish I had a daughter.”
    Muffled by his pillow Amulya said, “If you had a daughter she’d be with her husband, not holding your hand. Why don’t you talk to your daughter-in-law? Manjula has plenty to say.”
    â€œIt’s not the same.”
    She waited for a reply, then mustered up all the decisiveness she was capable of. “It was better living in Calcutta,” she said. “My family all around, the house so lively all the time.” Then she stopped, feeling the old uncertainties return with the sound of her own voice.
    Amulya smiled. “If you were in charge,” he said, “There’d be no America, and no Australia. No-one would take ships and boats to distant places, they would just sit cuddled up in their mothers’ laps all their lives. Wait and see, in a few years there’ll be people from your Calcutta crowding this place.”
    Amulya settled deeper into his blanket, breathing in the cold air of the night and uncurling his warmed-up toes.
    â€œWhy didn’t you ever ask me before we moved to this town?” Kananbala continued, almost in a whisper. “Why didn’t you ever ask me about building this house? I’d have liked being closer to my relatives. Did you never think of that?”
    Kananbala had said this many times before, and she wanted to stop, but she could not.
    â€œAre you asleep?” she whispered into the night towards Amulya, “Did you hear that owl?”
    She heard a gentle snore and then a whistling sigh.
    The night creaked and rustled. The cold air carried to her the urgent whine of a fox. Answering foxes echoed its call and their barks multiplied across the forests and fields, drawing circles of sound around the house. The foxes were the companions of her long, wideawake nights now. She recalled how, when Amulya had declared his intention to live in Songarh, everyone had stared at him in disbelief and Kananbala’s father had laughed: “Arre, all you will hear there are foxes, Amulya.” Not just foxes, she had wanted to tell her father later. In her lonely, wakeful hours she had stared out of the window as the roar of what she thought was a lion reverberated in the forest.
    The lion’s roar was a secret she could not share with anybody else. The others slept on, oblivious to the throbbing wakefulness of the jungle. Sometimes she felt she was looking at the house from the outside, with the impersonal, measuring gaze of a jackal, or closer, at the windows, swooping owl-like through the night, finding her husband sprawled on the bed in their room, Kamal and his wife Manjula entwined in each other’s arms in a corner of their double bed, and Nirmal, open-mouthed in sleep in his rooftop room, his cigarettes hidden at the back of a drawer where he thought nobody knew. It was only at Nirmal’s window that she lingered briefly but then flew away, shaking off the house with every slicing motion of her wings.
    One day she would disappear into the trees, she really would, never to be found again.
    â€œI feel alone here,” Kananbala whispered into the darkness and then, embarrassed by the sound of her voice, turned to stare out of the long window by the bed, which framed a moonlit neem tree hazy through the mesh of the mosquito net.
    * * *
    The year