An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy Page B

witness.”
    â€œOut of the question,” Amulya said.

THREE
    A month passed, and half of another. The Barnum murder began to fade from memory. In the absence of reliable witnesses, the investigation lost its top priority status and files went from desk to desk, losing a page here, getting dog-eared and tea-ringed there. It was a messy affair into which the mining company did not press for much poking about. Digby Barnum’s short temper and foul mouth had not earned him many friends at his workplace, and besides, other cans of worms lay buried that might inadvertently be unearthed. The man reputed to be Mrs Barnum’s lover left town. The police lost his trail in Calcutta – from where he had fled to Sydney, people said. The house opposite 3 Dulganj Road seemed to have stepped away from the town. There were no parties, and Mrs Barnum hardly ever left the house. People stopped talking about the killing.
    Life resumed. Amulya signed a lucrative deal with a leading Lucknow shop. Nirmal went to Manoharpur and left Shanti with her father for the birth of their child. The first child would be born, as tradition demanded, in her childhood home, even though Nirmal disapproved of the tradition, saying Manoharpur was no place to have a baby; it didn’t have a hospital nearer than the next town, which was far away.
    Kananbala, oblivious of the coming baby, wondered if Mrs Barnum knew what she had told the police. Perhaps she had got her into trouble. Maybe their versions did not match. For a while Kananbala’s curses dried up with anxiety. When Amulya walked her in the evenings, he found her distracted and inattentive. If he stopped speaking and merely smoked his pipe, she did not seem to notice.
    * * *
    That year, the monsoon was tardy coming to Songarh and the heat incandescent. Yet, though the afternoon light was still blinding, the evenings, with a whiff of a breeze that seemed to come from somewhere else, brought hope of rain and yearnings for impossible things.
    At 3 Dulganj Road the air seemed especially charged as the house waited for its first baby – ever. Manjula had never conceived. After three years of being married, she had come to regard her childlessness as evidence that she had, unknown to herself, displeased God. She had sought to make amends. She had made Kamal take her across the country, tying strings around trees in Sufi shrines and brass bells in devi temples in the hills; she had fasted and prayed, and collected blessings from all kinds of godmen. But nothing had worked.
    Now that there would be a baby, something made Manjula sigh and take longer over things; something, she found, made her absentminded, made her stop on the terrace between chores and gaze up for longer than she knew at clouds inching into the sky. And then she would tell herself, old cloth will be needed to cut up into small sheets. A pillow would have to be made, filled with black mustard seeds to mould the baby’s soft skull into a perfect shape. She would retire for her afternoon snooze exhausted, thinking she must hunt out old saris to stitch into kanthas. Can one woman manage a household this size? she would mumble. A fine grandmother my ma-in-law will make, lifting not a little finger for the baby.
    * * *
    Nirmal squinted at the mirror as he shaved, wondering if he looked different, more fatherly. Perhaps it would seem real once he saw the child. Would it be a boy? It wouldn’t matter, boy or girl. But if it was a boy! He would take him travelling, they would climb mountains together, rummage in ruins. Nirmal began to feel a tiny pulse of excitement somewhere inside him at the thought. He combed his hair back from the high forehead he had got from his father and went to the terrace for his second cigarette of the morning. Peering into the horizon, he noticed there were grey clouds over the ruins and the ridge, and the rest of the sky, though blue, seemed to have darkened a little with clouds scattered