An Atlas of Impossible Longing Read Online Free Page A

was 1927, an early summer day. As usual Amulya had woken at four-thirty and left for a walk in the half-light, almost before anyone else was awake. It was how he had always been in Songarh – though he recalled wanting never to lift head from pillow in Calcutta. This was a time when the forest, the cool air, the purple sky, all of it was his alone. He watched the low ridge in the distance beyond the ruins, a shadowy hump at first, begin to reveal the dark points of trees across its spine as the sky paled behind it, preparing for the sun. Some days the ridge looked not like a ridge but like the remains of some prehistoric animal which only he could see. As the sky paled further, he turned back for his cup of steaming, straw-coloured tea and two buttered toasts. By eight-thirty he had left home in a horse-drawn tonga. He would be at work an hour before anyone else, look over the accounts, inspect his factory in solitude.
    That morning, however, he had barely stepped off the tonga when a man sprang from nowhere and flung himself headlong into the dust, clutching one of Amulya’s ankles as if it were the edge of a precipice. Trying to drag his foot away, feeling one black sock lose its grip around his calf, Amulya looked down at the back of the man’s head. Until the man raised himself from Amulya’s polished, black-leather pumps there was no way of telling who it was.
    â€œLet go, arre baba, kindly let go,” Amulya snapped, “What’s the matter? Can’t you get up from there!”
    â€œYou’re my father and my mother, Sa’ab, you are everything I have in this world! I have nobody else!”
    Amulya thought he recognised the man at last from his voice, although it was tear-cracked and distraught: just a few days before, as he had entered the bottling room in the factory he had heard the same voice say, laughing, “The old bastard hasn’t come poking his nose here today. Think he’s dead?”
    The man who had spoken was scratching himself under his dhoti.
    â€œThese shrivelled-up, thin ones go on for ever,” his companion had said.
    â€œThen we’ll live a hundred years, won’t we?” the first man had chuckled.
    He had stopped as Amulya entered. Amulya had not smiled. He found it difficult to attain any kind of easy familiarity with his workers. Impossible to say, “Arre Ramcharan, and how is your son? Is your wife still away in her village? Sure you’re not chasing any pretty girls now her back’s turned?”
    Amulya tugged his foot out of Ramcharan’s grasp. “What is the matter, Ramcharan?” he said, his voice curt. “Stop all this weeping and wailing.” He fitted his brass keys one by one into the three Aligarh padlocks on the factory door, entered, hung his umbrella on its customary hook, and then, turning towards Ramcharan, noticed for the first time that they were not alone.
    There was a woman standing a little away from the door, her dark skin set off by the grubby yellow of her old sari, her sun-paled hair straggling out of its bun. She was slender and young, little more than a teenager, with a smile that seemed to lose its way when Amulya looked in her direction. He recognised her. He could never have forgotten the face of the girl who, at that harvest dance in her village two years before, had given him the purple passion flower from her hair. But where was the vivaciousness he remembered, the glow of her dimpled face, the teasing laughter? This woman had a famished look, the kind stray, starving bitches feeding pups often had. She held a small bundle in her arms, so languidly Amulya thought it might fall any minute. When it moved he realised it was a baby.
    â€œMy son got her pregnant, Sa’ab, she says, and she arrived this morning with the baby … it can’t be true … my son is married, he’s a good boy, he has children of his own, but the coward wouldn’t even come out of our house