An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Anuradha Roy
Picador, Rs 395A subtle and keenly observed debut, but one that too often reads like a prize story

Though it appears the “innocuous colour of darkening sepia” in a picture, a river slowly and hungrily inches its way towards a house. Anuradha Roy’s debut novel meanders through the lives of three generations at 3 Dulganj Road in the small mining town of Songarh.
In 1907, after Amulya moves his young family from Calcutta to set up a factory there, he soaks in the very silence that oppresses his wife Kananbala and locks her “within a bell jar she felt she could not prise open for air”. Next door, her English neighbours, the Barnums, have their own marital troubles. But unlike the explosive denouement of Mrs Barnum’s drama, Kananbala turns her suffocation inwards, against herself — until she loses her mind, responding with innocent obscenities to every situation and mortally embarrassing her family.

The next section traces the lives of her children — Nirmal, a widowed archaeologist whose impossible relationship with a young widow, Meera, is one of the most affecting parts in the novel. But the book’s central characters are Bakul, Nirmal’s daughter (who prefers to think of herself as a foundling), and the orphaned Mukunda who her grandfather had taken in. The unspoken oppressions of the age press in, just as later, a priest casts Mukunda out of the puja room, uncertain of his caste.
Mukunda, “awkward, lanky, easy to upset”, who lives on the family’s scraps, feels his lot lightened after Mrs Barnum takes him under her wing, unconventionally tutoring him and opening up her library, which he makes his way through with indiscriminate diligence. His other great sustenance is his friendship with Bakul — like Heathcliff and Catherine, they wander the town, they “had populated Songarh with their own secret places and people. To them it throbbed with magic and meanings which only the two of them could share”. Until they are separated and Mukunda is dispatched to Calcutta, and where he wends his middling way through life, resolutely shutting away the image of his childhood companion, until years later, his work forces him to return and confront the very people who had taken him in.

... contd.