Free An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy

day you will find you can’t even get up from your bed,” he would say.
    At times, enraged by her fatigue, she stood still and hissed at him, “You carbuncle on a cow! You stinking hyena!” He would grimace, but continue to direct her forward.
    After the half-hour was over, he would sit her down on the swing and light his pipe. Then he would tell her all that had happened during the day, and about the two new houses in their immediate neighbourhood. One of the houses was indeed occupied by Indian rather than English people, he said once, a retired couple from somewhere, no children. “See, I told you it was the right decision to build here.” He had exhaled a cloud. “Just watch how this area changes now.”
    She listened, sometimes responding with a comment, sometimes spitting out “son of a donkey” or “tail of a sewer rat” or “frog with warts” – words her mind concocted unbidden. If she did that, Amulya would clench her hand to make her stop. When she felt the pressure of his hand on hers, she knew she had said something she should not have, and tried to be quiet. She wondered about the irony of his belated tenderness, but she did not question it aloud.
    Manjula, observing them every day on the garden bench, said to Shanti, “Look, now the old woman’s got it made. She has us to serve her night and day, and her husband’s discovered romance in his old age. Oh Ma, what wouldn’t I give to be her? Don’t you know what they say? Ripe fruits get cotton-lined baskets.”
    Shanti now thought hard of other things when Manjula spoke with her customary venom about her mother-in-law. In two months, Nirmal would take her back to Manoharpur and she would walk by her river again, waiting for her child. Until then, she would close her ears, hum the old songs, and shield her stomach with her hands as if to shut the ears of her unborn baby. Inside, just under the tight-stretched skin of her belly, she felt she could hear a minute heart gallop like a horse, an unformed mouth trying to form words to say to its mother.
    * * *
    Some weekends there were parties in the Barnum house, and on those evenings first the van from Finlays would come, then the electrician for the lights, and then the smells of alien food. In the evening there were fairy lights in the lawn and the indistinct, shiny forms of the Barnums’ friends who came and went in cars that never let them down outside the gate, but always under the covered porch you could not see into. Kananbala waited, and watched, and waited, hoping to see someone, something.
    Only Mrs Barnum was now regularly visible. She had taken to swaying out of the car when they returned from their parties and stopping at the gate for the watchman; then she would walk the length of the drive, making a detour across the lawn before she agreed to enter the house, her long silk gowns trailing in the grass, her white shoulders gleaming in the darkness. Kananbala would watch her with eyes full of greed.
    Every few months Digby Barnum went away for a week or two, maybe to the mines in the interior. Those weeks, in the afternoons, Mrs Barnum would leave the house alone and return in a different, long car, driven by a young man who could have been Tibetan. On one such night Kananbala watched as Mrs Barnum leaned through the car window and talked to the strange man before she began to walk towards her house. She happened to look across and saw an Indian woman’s face drinking hers in at a window on the other side of the silent black road.
    â€œHow extraordinary,” she muttered, and yet, perhaps because she was only half English – the other half unknown – she turned again, and waved at Kananbala’s dark, immobile shadow.
    Kananbala had never in her whole life waved at anyone. She was confused about what to do. Her hand would scarcely rise. But in a rush she stuck an arm out through the bars of the window and