An Atlas of Impossible Longing Read Online Free Page B

to throw her out … what am I to do, Sa’ab? If I return her to the forest those jungle people will slaughter us for this with their sickles … they’ll excommunicate her for going with an outsider … she says we must take care of the baby … but what are we to do, Sa’ab, we are poor people, we already have eight mouths to feed and one salary, and what will our relatives say!”
    Ramcharan’s voice rose and rose until Amulya said, “Quiet! Be quiet!”
    Ramcharan sat on his haunches in a corner of the room and, burying his face in his knees, began to moan, “They’ll kill us … they’ll kill us all if we send the baby back.”
    Amulya flipped through the order book and his diary. Decided there was no help for it, he would have to write off the day. He scribbled instructions for his accountant and then, with the woman and Ramcharan squeezed alongside the tongawallah in the front, he sat at the back watching the road give way to fields and then scrubland as they clattered to the Christian orphanage mission beyond the edge of Songarh.
    That evening he returned home well after dusk and washed off his day-long deposit of sweat, pouring mug after mug over his thin, nutcoloured body, sighing with relief. He walked out of the bathroom in a soft, unstarched dhoti and kurta, feeling something within him unfurl at last. He knew his daughter-in-law would have left him a large cup of tea and some food. Amulya ate alone, gazing down the room that ended in a full-length, stained-glass window in the east, a window he had positioned thus; he sat at a round table with brass lion paws at the ends of its legs, a table he had bought at an auction. As he chewed, the knot inside him seemed to loosen, and the anxiety of the day’s events began to recede.
    After he had drained his cup, he wandered into the garden. Now, where there had been weeds and bathua, there grew a soft carpet of doob grass. The kitchen garden was dark with the enormous, olive-coloured warts of jackfruit clinging to the sides of the tall trees. Green coconut clustered far above and sometimes the afternoon quiet exploded with the noise of their falling. The saplings had seemed tiny when they were planted, impossible to imagine those twigs with four or five leaves storing the power to soar thirty feet. Their branches now jostled for space, and the sky was barely visible through the canopy the leaves had created high above.
    In the shadow of these trees was a low swing-seat, and it was here that Amulya came that evening, as on all others, after he had walked all around his garden. Usually he inspected each tree in turn, noting every new bud, every yellowing sapling that had given up the attempt, every cutting that had begun to hold up its head. He would look at them tenderly, wanting to stroke and pat them as if they were pet animals. He had created a garden where there had been wilderness. He had cleared weeds, planted fruit trees, flowering shrubs, and creepers. He had not been indiscriminate, however. He had disdained the flamboyance of pink kachnar, the rich orange of tecoma. Instead, he had planted his garden with flowers that would gleam white in the darkness and scent the night-time air. His only concession to colour was low bushes of the yesterday-today-tomorrow, the
Franciscea hopeana
he had found with great difficulty, which turned from purple to almost white over three days, perfuming the air around it. The rest of the garden had pure whites: a spreading
Magnolia grandiflora
, its petals creamy against shining green leaves, the snowy blooms of
Jasminum pubescens
tumbling over the well area, and a
Jasminum sambac
to provide scent and flowers for Kananbala’s gods. A few gardenias. Two shefalikas, which he thought of as
Nyctanthes arbortristis
, that let fall showers of their small, scented flowers – orange-stemmed, but that brief appearance of colour beneath white petals was pardonable as a kind of